There’s lots of activity in the mobile application development world these days, including software that enables cheap or free calling from your cellphone or mobile device. Setting aside the expense of developing these applications, a major roadblock to such initiatives is the restrictive policies of wireless carriers, particularly those in North America, with regard to the installation of mobile applications on the phones they sell you.
Hartti Suomela has some great material on his Nokia blog that deals with the difficulties of working with carrier security policies, but the bottom line seems to be that these policies address legitimate security concerns, but also serve as a bottleneck to delivering functionality to wireless subscribers. Some argue that carriers are grossly subsidizing that phone you purchase, and in return exercising their right to protect their networks from abuse and cannibalization of subscription revenues. Fair enough, except that the margins accrued over the term of a typical wireless contract would seem to more than compensate for the device subsidy.
At Lypp we’re interested in side-stepping this conundrum altogether and leveraging what already exists on your phone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device, and so on to enable our mobile group calling service. To begin with that means leveraging Instant Messaging, and subsequently SMS and email. Not exactly a revolutionary methodology, but we believe we can use these relatively open and ubiquitous applications to deliver revolutionary functionality to the end user.
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