[jmbrook]

Small nit pick, but I would be worried about a mobile development place that thinks it has only been around 8 years, not heard of J2ME, Symbian and Windows CE etc?

I do agree with the idea of hiring decent engineers and just training them, my only concern would be that without having had the mobile experience they might not know that they don't like it - it can be quite painful getting code to work nicely on a large collection of different hardware.

[potatolicious]

That is a pretty small nitpick you've got there ;)

It's a bit like saying "don't they know human flight existed before the Wright Bros." or "don't they know cars predate the Model T?"

Of course, but the iPhone (and subsequently Android) presented a gigantic turning point in mobile development, to such a degree that mobile development can largely be categorized into "pre-iPhone" and "post-iPhone".

Pre-iPhone mobile development was a vanishing small industry compared to today and used technologies that are largely completely not around today (see: J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE).

So yeah, maybe they could've said "mobile development in the modern context centered around multitouch-centric interfaces using soft keyboards has only been around 8 years", but that's kind of a mouthful, and unless we're trying to write an accurate history of mobile software, not particularly relevant to anything.

[jmbrook]

I would agree with the pre/post iPhone shift - but the likes of EA/Glu and other major games companies shifted an awful lot of apps pre iPhone.

The big shift is that touch became the only game in town (along with all the associated dev wrinkles). Also the demise of all content aggregators meant we could just upload our apps to a store and keep 70% (prior to this we got ~20% i.e. operator took 60-70%, aggregator took 30% and we got 50/50 on that).

[mesozoic]

True but those who worked with those systems still have relevant mobile knowledge. Optimizing for various screen resolutions, working with many implementations by OEM providers that have slight differences (Android), etc.

[jmbrook]

I think a more accurate example is it like saying: "don't they know cars predate the Tesla" and given it is electric all prior cars don't matter.

Just showing my age really :^)