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hardware manufactures. As aforementioned, hardware capabilities are practically
the same between different manufacturers; therefore, over the last 4 years the
differences have been in the software capabilities.
Modern mobile operating systems are offering a system architecture similar to
generic operating systems in computers. Even some mobile operating systems, such
as iPhone OS or Android, are common adaptations of the same operating systems as
Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.
This situation necessitates the development of a platform to deploy mobile
phone applications. Due to the limitations of such platforms (low speed develop-
ment due the hardware/software emulation), social networks have focused their
efforts on offering their services through generic services.
According to hardware requirements, mobile operating systems attempt to inte-
grate all hardware capabilities with low-battery consumption. In addition, the
current trend is to offer a mobile operating system with a documented API so that
all the hardware and software capabilities can be used more easily. The problemwith
this is that software manufactures need to duplicate their efforts to offer the same
software solution in different mobile operating systems due to the incompatibility
between software.
Hence, this practice is avoided in social networks. It is quite common that the
only way to deploy mobile phone applications using social networks services is by
using public APIs through standards protocols as HTTP and using generic data
encoding formats as XML or JSON. Thanks to this, social network providers do not
have to worry about the mobile platform, but only the content's format.
11.4.2.2 Software Development Mechanisms
As we mentioned in the last point, software deployment has encountered several
barriers in the mobile phone industry. Although hardware platforms are not too
different, the software used in there is implemented in very different ways. This
is causing several headaches in the software industry. Every mobile phone manu-
facturer is releasing different ways to develop applications in his platform. For
this reason, mobile phone deployments are still an expensive area for software
manufacturers.
The usual way is to publish a software development kit (SDK) to create the
application under the specific mobile platform. But, depending on the platform
chosen, limitations are different. For instance, Apple is providing an SDK with high
visual capabilities, but with a limited hardware interaction. On the other hand,
Android OS through their API is providing practically the same capabilities as
native operating system applications; other alternatives such as Bada and Maemo
are offering a more complete interaction than normal deployments, catching the
attention of the software industry due to the ease of deploying cross-platform
applications without much effort.
We consider that one of the causes of this limited interaction with social net-
works and mobile phones to date is the difficulties of manipulating and integrating
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