What is it that any of these stores offer that the browser doesn't? Could we (as an industry) focus on fixing those things, so that we can have an open standard to develop apps across all devices, but at the same time take full advantage of whatever the hardware offers? Which version of HTML is going to support the multiple cameras that are (or soon will be) present on most of the high-end phones sold?<p>Making software for full-featured mobile devices that degrades gracefully for those with less features is a hard problem, but a very real one for phone developers. The iPhone isn't going to be the extensively polished de facto monopoly Apple dreamed it would be. Developers <i>do</i> want to write cross-platform applications (and no, Adobe doesn't have the right talent to write a solid "higher order platform").
Am I the only one annoyed by small surveys like this presenting their results as if they have 1% accuracy?<p>Assuming that there are about 2000 ovi store developers and with the given sample size of 104 respondents, the 90% confidence error bars on the result are already +/-8%. And that's assuming the sample was properly random, which was not the case.
The difference with Nokia and others is that with Nokia you don't have to use the crappy Ovi store if you don't want to. N900 has relatively huge <i>open-source</i> community distributing their software via so called extras repository, which allows easy distribution of software, without any filtering (it basically has two levels, -devel and -testing. To get into testing you need certain number of upvotes from community.)
"Nokia doesn’t seem to be doing a great job of communicating with developers."
The problem is that they offer only e-mail support and they're flooded because they lowered the store fees to 1 EUR and allow apps made with an RSS -> app creator into the store.
This is one of those decisions that can look good on paper, but in practice ends up having negative effects.<p>I haven't developed for Apple, but I do believe that the App Store is the best store bar none right now.