And the struggle to take iPhone developers to Android.
Ideaworks Labs has unveiled its Airplay 4.0 SDK, promising an effective and affordable tool for making native games and apps for an array of smartphones.
The debut follows the announcement earlier this month that Ideaworks3D was splitting into two companies: Ideaworks Labs and Ideaworks Game Studio. Labs is now focusing on the Airplay SDK.
Its main aim is to persuade more developers and publishers to look beyond iPhone to other smartphone platforms when releasing games and apps. CTO Tim Closs explains the rationale:
"Nobody's really in the smartphone business any more," he says.
"Even EA who would have traditionally pushed out a Symbian build are now more reticent to do that, having been burnt by N-Gage. They're still in the Java and Brew business, but most publishers are focused on iPhone plus digital handheld platforms. They're not doing native content for Android, Windows Mobile or Symbian."
It's fair to say that Android is one of the big selling points of Airplay 4.0: it's ability to speedily port iPhone games to Google's smartphone OS. Or, more accurately, its ability to let developers target both platforms simultaneously.
"It's a key challenge for us: to engage with the App Store development community and start to pull some of those people onto other platforms," says Closs.
"It's scary how the Steve Jobs reality distortion field has extended to the development community. There really are a lot of developers out there who think iPhone is the only piece of hardware with a touchscreen, accelerometer and OpenGL ES. The gap in understanding is enormous."
However, Closs says there is an increasing number of iPhone developers looking to target Android too, thanks to the current buzz around Google's OS and a swathe of new handsets. 'Take your native iPhone app or game to Android' is a solid sales pitch for Airplay - the ability to also then squirt out versions for Symbian, Windows Mobile and Brew is a bonus.
Airplay 4.0 is good news for Google too, as Android games haven't been particularly impressive thus far - most are barely tarted-up ports of Java games. Closs says that until the release of Android 1.5 this summer, there was no way to compile native code in Android apps - hence all the Java ports. Even now, Google's Native Development Kit isn't ideal.
"It's quite fiddly for developers," says Closs. "It's a bit of a turn-off. We've hijacked that mechanism in Airplay but kept it all hidden from the developer."
Airplay 4.0 isn't just about Android though: it also has a new business model. There are now three tiers: Indie, Pro and Premium. All get the same tools, but different levels of customer support.
The entry-level indie category is the big departure: Airplay is now free to use for any developer with annual revenues of less than $50,000 making iPhone games, with a $99 per seat annual charge to deploy to other platforms.
"We don't want any hurdle in the way for people on iPhone, says Closs. "We had quite a lot of argument internally about it, as some people think we're giving it away. I don't think we're losing anything by that choice though."
The final new sales focus for Airplay is the fact that it can handle apps as well as games, in an effort to tap into a wider development community.
This will make Airplay more useful for existing customers - Closs points out that even EA has dipped its toe into app development recently with it's Tee Shot Live golf-tracking app.
Meanwhile, Ideaworks Labs is already mulling future improvements, such as adding more companies to its middleware partners programme - with social community platforms like OpenFeint and analytics tools like Pinch Media possible candidates.
"We're also going to try to get partnerships with some of the app stores, starting with the third-party ones like Handango and Handmark," says Closs.
"We're solving a problem for them by making it easier for people to get content in their channels, so we're hoping for endorsements from them to their developer communities. The next step after that would be to get things going with the first-party app stores like Windows Marketplace for Mobile."
More information about the Airplay 4.0 SDK can be found on the official website.
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