How do we reconcile small ME developers and big mobile carriers?

Day one of the Mobile & Embedded Developer Days conference has come and gone in a flurry of presentations, poster talks, conversations and tacos, the latter being from a well-attended offsite social event that concluded the long day. The nature of the conference has been an interesting mix: it's still mostly based on eyes-forward presentations from acknowledged experts, but it has a loose, informal, and even personal feel. It's a nice mix, avoiding the stuffiness that you sometimes get at JavaOne, and the mob rule that an unconference can devolve into. The size helps too: enough people to stay interesting, but not so many that everyone else becomes anonymous. Roger and Terrance might be on to something really good here.

Don't feel like you're missing out, though. The conference's live broadcast is available on UStream.tv. With a Flash-capable browser, you can watch today's sessions live.

Sean O'Sullivan presenting "Past, Present, and Future of JSR 82 (Java Bluetooth APIs)" on Wednesday at ME Developer Days

You can also participate in a real-time chat with other on-site and off-site attendees, and many of the sessions are taking questions from off-site participants during their Q&A time. You can follow along with the talks by downloading their slides from the sessions list.

One of the major themes that has come up in sessions and Q&A is the long-acknowledged but little discussed disconnect between the developer's view of the mobile world and the carriers'. You may be able to develop a nifty application with the various APIs available to mobile Java developers, but then what? There are somewhere between 800 and 1,000 phones you may want to run it on, and getting your app signed to use some of those APIs may be limited by the handset manufacturer and/or the carrier, and how they manage access to their platform.

A panel at the end of the day yesterday addressed this conflict, positing a hypothetical developer of a "cool app" in front of a panel, whom he asked how he could get his application out to the public. If this were just a developer conference, the only point of view might well be grousing about carrier policies, but with marketing people from some of the carriers there, we got the full picture. And while as a developer you might not want to hear the answer, it's important to understand the real story: mobile and desktop are two different things, and the romanticized notion of the indie developer with the great app that everyone wants may just not be realistic in today's mobile world. Testing on hundreds of devices and joining carrier programs (to get your app signed or even pre-installed) takes serious money, and the "cold, hard truth" feedback from some of the panelists was to ask: "do you want to go big time, or are you just playing around?" If you want to make it big, then maybe you need to think about finding a publisher, someone who will open doors with carriers. Or maybe you need to develop your app in the context of a company that can provide the resources to pay for testing your app on hundreds of phones.

Having said all that, the mobile world is being profoundly challenged by disruptive new entrants, such as the iPhone and the Open Handset Alliance, so things may change. And if developers want change, the panel said that they need to organize around a simple message: many developers vaguely grumbling about similar issues won't accomplish as much as a small, highly-motivated group with very specific desires and a plan to get them.