Making the Web the ‘Third Ecosystem’

By , 12 April 2013 at 11:18
Making the Web the ‘Third Ecosystem’
Initiatives

Making the Web the ‘Third Ecosystem’

By , 12 April 2013 at 11:18

By:Eduardo Fullea Carrera, Telefónica I+D

12 April 2013: Different market players have lately been engaged in a quest to become the third meaningful smartphone ecosystem (getting a significant share of the cake now captured mainly by iOS and Android) – from platforms already in the market like Blackberry 10 or Windows Phone to more incipient bets like Tizen or Firefox OS.

Considering the aforementioned two platforms heavily rely on web technologies (HTML5), it is expected that folks will wonder which of the two will prevail. Nevertheless, rather than view it as a sheer competition to become “the web-based OS”, this can also be seen as a “co-opetition” to make the web a relevant third ecosystem.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeV8R5jkG8c[/youtube]

To make it happen the challenge is two-fold.

Firstly, developers need to be able to write web applications that can compete with native apps in terms of capabilities and efficiency. On the other hand, platforms need to be as interoperable as possible so that web applications can run in different environments, following the “write once run everywhere” paradigm, and developers can reach a good share of the market by means of HTML5-powered applications.

Standardization of web technologies at W3C is the fundamental key to address these challenges. W3C has been working already for some time in defining standard APIs to access some device features that had been exclusively available to native applications so far (e.g. geo-location, battery status or device vibration).

However W3C has recently gone a step further by kicking off a new standardization track (W3C System Applications) to allow the development of applications that require a stronger integration with the underlying operating system, for instance a dialer application, which needs to make use of the telephony stack in the device.

On 9 April, the first face-to-face meeting of said W3C System Applications working group was hosted in Distrito T, reinforcing Telefónica Digital’s commitment to the development of open web standards in addition to its well-known support to Firefox OS. In fact Telefónica Digital is heavily committed to this initiative, taking the lead in the specification of three deliverables that are crucial to build a phone fully based on web technologies, namely APIs to access messaging and telephony capabilities, as well as to manage user’s contacts.

Also worth highlighting is the specification of an execution environment for web applications and the related security framework, which is being led by Mozilla, with Samsung’s collaboration. Taking into account the sensitive nature of some of the capabilities that are being exposed, e.g. telephony or messaging, it is particularly important to define a proper security framework that ensures that just fully trusted applications can make use of them, whilst other applications can have access to a wider set of non-sensitive capabilities.

All these standards are collaboratively defined by companies participating, with a strong Royalty-Free commitment, and an outstanding and well balanced contribution of those engaged in Tizen (Samsung, Intel) and in Firefox OS (Mozilla, Telefónica Digital).

In this first meeting, all participating companies demonstrated a great willingness to reach a consensus around the best technical solutions, with the common aim to build high quality specifications. As a result a first public working draft of the different specifications of the group is to be published in the coming weeks, incorporating the decisions taken during the meeting.

There is still much work ahead until these standards are widely supported in the market. However, the scope of the work being accomplished and specially the level of implication and commitment of numerous companies with different backgrounds makes us think that the web is a serious candidate to became the third ecosystem in the smartphone arena.

previous article

Great ‘from the trenches’ examples at MongoDB days London

Great ‘from the trenches’ examples at MongoDB days London
next article

[Guest Post] 10 tips to leverage social media for early sales and exposure (part 1)

[Guest Post] 10 tips to leverage social media for early sales and exposure (part 1)