By Karl-Johan Dahlström
15th June 2010. 11:49

Thoughts from Nordic Mobile Developers Summit 2010

Last Thursday I attended the first Nordic Mobile Developers Summit in Stockholm arranged by the Swedish magazine mobile.se. I gave a presentation with the highly innovative title “Android for Developers” where I gave some tips and insights into successful Android application development. It was a very well received session that I will mostly likely repeat in updated forms at later events. All the slides from the event can be found online.

The sessions covered the major mobile platforms with representatives from both the device manufacturers and independent mobile application development companies. The common message from the device manufacturers was around the marketplaces for their platforms. While some platforms provide a very low entry barrier for application developers (i.e., Android Market) most of the marketplaces had a surprisingly high threshold for publishing applications.

Despite the name of the event, there was surprisingly little hard facts around actual application development. Most of the sessions concerned the business perspective of mobile applications. As for my own session, I tried to give some concrete tips’n'tricks for Android application development, what is most important to think about and what tools to use.

One of the more interesting presentation came from Johan Lindfors from Microsoft that demonstrated the development tools for Windows Phone 7. It is obvious that Microsoft knows how to make tools for developers. This is something that I believe could inspire for better tools in the Android community as well.

The second half of the event started with shorter presentations from various companies doing mobile application development, like Spotify and Bambuser. There were some quite interesting case studies, and it seems like Android is the easiest platform to develop for, from all aspects.

The event was summed up with a Q&A panel with many interesting (and challenging) questions. The interest for mobile application development is very high and it is obvious that developers want to have a much larer choice of tools and programming languages for their applications than what is available today.