Future of MEAP
I am curious to hear what people think will happen to mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) in the coming years. How will the emergence of web-based applications and HTML5 affect MEAPs? How will the feature set of MEAPs change, and what tools might be added/dropped? What sort of moves could be made within the MEAP area (e.g. application suite vendor acquisitions of MEAP players or carrier partnerships with MEAP players)?
5 Answers
Gartner predicts that by the end of 2012, 95 percent of organizations will choose a MEAP or packaged mobile application as their primary mobile development platform.
Big issue with MEAP is that you seem to be stuck once you start with one. Much of the code that is produced is proprietary and if you want to move from one MEAP platform to another, that code is not portable, so you have to recode.
The MEAP market is still young and I hate to bind the corporate to a tool that perhaps not keeping up with technology changes. Migrating to a better tools seems a large challenge.
A recent report from Insider Research, Mobile Outlook 2012 <http://sapinsider.wispubs.com/Article/Mobile-Outlook-2012/6385>, presents a distribution of development tools enterprises are using for building mobile applications: iOS 52%, Android 41%, Blackberry 38%, .NET 23%, Java ME 20%, Adobe Air 13%, and 5% Phone Gap. Only 9% using Sybase, and 6% Appcelerator.
This indicates that MEAP adaptation is still very low compared to native development. This will be interesting to see how these figures change by the end of 2012.
