MoSync Driving A New Cross-Platform App Store Ecosystem
MoSync, a Swedish developer of cross-platform mobile app development tools (previously Mobile Sorcery; see our previous coverage), has big plans for creating a whole ecosystem boosting open cross-platform App Stores. MoSync's new CEO Dusyant Patel, and Co-Founder Tomas Uppgård opened up MoSync's plans for ArcticStartup.
The global revenue from mobile applications, consisting of both paid downloads and mobile advertising, is estimated to increase to $17.5 billion by 2012 from $4.1 billion in 2009. The estimate is based on an independent study by Chetan Sharma Consulting (well, as independent it can be, being commissioned by GetJar). While massive amounts of players in the ICT industry are rushing to their own app store of some kind, developers are faced with an ever increasing burden and business challenges.
Easier Mobile Development with Mobile Sorcery's MoSync
Mobile Sorcery, a Swedish startup founded in 2004, provides cross-platform mobile development tools. The company's product is called MoSync, which allows developers to write single source code and then launch their applications on a wide range of mobile devices with different platforms, like Symbian, J2ME and Windows Mobile. Mobile Sorcery has gotten SEK 1.5M (around EUR 150k or USD 211k) funding from Swedish early stage VC STING Capital last year.
The key business benefits of MoSynch are reducing porting costs and time to market. For developers MoSync offers access to many existing C/C++ libraries even when targeting J2ME and other platforms and existing device profiles of hundreds of handsets. There are some clear feature weaknesses at the moment, though, which seem to be on the list for MoSync's next release: touchscreen support and SMS sending support.
It's a tough market out there. The existing players in the mobile industry have already porting frameworks and tools in use, and there are quite a many similar competitors as well. Less established companies or those entering the market currently might find Mobile Sorcery's offering quite interesting, though, as it can enable you to focus on building the actual product or service instead of worrying about the device fragmentation. MoSynch is available at no cost for non-commercial use, commercial users will have to contact the company for getting a license.
