Ask HN: What problems need to be solved for mobile?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4207446

by syberslidder • 14 years ago

7 4 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Greetings,

Lets face it, mobile is the way forward and I feel as a developer that is the way to go. Instead of App development, I am considering offering some kind of service to mobile developers and users. People say build solutions not ideas, can you guys think of current problems with mobile? :)

jnorthrop• 14 years ago

Privacy. The combination of a distracted user and a small screen make communicating privacy choices really difficult on mobile platforms (phones and tablets). In addition with the ability for apps to do things like potentially log communications (voice and text) and geographic location developers need to careful about the collection and protection of the personal information they are collecting.

Privacy laws are pretty lax in the US but in Europe, Canada and much of Asia the story is different.

A service that can handle "privacy" would be very valuable and would probable get support from regulatory agencies around the world.

Mankhool• 14 years ago

I second this and want to expand upon the issue of "privacy" to include the ability to send and receive payments with complete anonymity.

philippb• 14 years ago

Take every service that is on the web and give it a try on mobile. Close to all of them don't work for mobile.

Most products are build for the web and then ported to mobile. I believe to be successful on mobile you have to think mobile first. Example: Web forms and surveys. There are services like Wufoo that build a great web product, but on mobile it sucks. We have a mobile app and close to all our users use this as their only computer. There is no service for great forms that we just can use.

This is the case for many other products.

These are my thought beside the typical mobile apps. Think of existing services, but think mobile first!

kgutteridge• 14 years ago

Problems for developers as I see it

Distribution

Data Sharing

Privacy

Offloading to the GPU

Encryption

UI/UX when delivering across differing platforms natively

Localisation, especially when you involve bi directional languages

Ask HN: What problems need to be solved for mobile?

Related Stories