[seanalex]

Surprisingly, this is the only Google service I did not want to go away. My wife and I use it frequently every work day. She is an animal control officer here in Houston, and Latitude is the way we keep in touch with where we are. The job is dangerous enough that I like to know her current location frequently just to make sure she is alright. She's on a windows 7 OS phone, I'm on an android... so a lot current-day applications are out of the question. Maybe it's time I code my own location services for us that would be more accurate, frequent, and private.

[freehunter]

Competition in the market is a great thing and I welcome more competitors, but you're exactly right. The entire mobile market is completely fragmented. Whether you use iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, or any of the other competitors, you've likely experienced an app you'd love to install but it doesn't exist for your platform. Linux users are used to struggling with a developer to try to get a port when programs were made for Windows only. Now we're at the stage where many great programs are only written for half the market. At least on Linux you can use Wine for many things, or run a VM at worst.

When we made the move to mobile devices, we took a major step backwards in the maturity of technology. Some days I miss the simplicity of only having to pick between Windows Mobile and Palm OS when choosing a mobile audience.

[gioele]

> Whether you use iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, or any of the other competitors, you've likely experienced an app you'd love to install but it doesn't exist for your platform. Linux users are used to struggling with a developer to try to get a port when programs were made for Windows only.

Try being a Linux user on a PowerPC box.

I hope developers, most of which have become mobile developers by now, have now understood that open protocols are much more important than application availability.

[Pxtl]

Other way around, more likely. Everybody's abandoning open protocols - Google has functionally dropped RSS and their instant messaging protocol, for example. The modern approach is to avoid the protocol and offer a massive cloud-based service, first-party apps, and maybe an API for a little while when you're in the growth state (kill the API when your apps have every feature you want them to have).

[gioele]

I said "developers", not "businesses".

It may makes commercial sense for businesess to act like doubt (I seriously doubt that holds in the long run), but the more they do that, the more private developers understand the importance of open protocols.

[joshmlewis]

Use Glympse, it's awesome and is compatible with a few different devices.

[seanalex]

Great, thanks for the suggestion. I'll set us up on it tonight and see how it works.