Twitter Mobile WebApp and Browser OAuth Scorecard

It’s been three months since the “OAuthcalypse” when Twitter started requiring that third party apps use OAuth to access the Twitter APIs. OAuth is generally a good thing, as it means you no longer have to share your Twitter credentials with every app that wants to access Twitter on your behalf, greatly reducing the risk that a rouge app might start spamming or posting malicious tweets in your name. Apps can still misuse  your Twitter account but if one does  … Continue reading

Sprint Building a Mobile Webapp Marketplace

At the Sprint Developer Conference today, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse (image above) introduced what the operator is calling the “Browser-VAS” ecosystem. It’s supposed to let developers create and monetize browser based apps. Browser-VAS is built around Openwave‘s Integra cloud service.  Hopefully, the service will have a more user friendly name when it launches in the first half of 2011. The apps appear in a toolbar that users can optionally add to the browser. They can then “install” free and paid … Continue reading

Watch Out For This Openwave Redirection Bug

Back in the bad old days of WML,  redirection bugs with mobile browsers and WAP gateways were pretty common. Mobile web developers were urged to avoid using redirection.  If you think that’s no longer the case, think again.  I found what I believe is a nasty redirection bug with Sprint/Nextel’s iDen network. In spite of being really old technology and having a data rate of only 19.2 kbit/s, iDen is interesting to mobile web developers, at least in the U.S., … Continue reading

No More Openwave SDKs?

I was trying to help a mobile web developer track down a problem that was keeping his pages from displaying properly on phones with Openwave browsers, which are still widely used on feature phones from U.S. operators.  I was going to suggest that he grab the Client SDK, which is really just a browser simulator, off the Openwave developer site. When I went there, I couldn’t find it, just an message that Openwave had sold their browser business to Purple … Continue reading

Marriott Mobile Recommends Opera Mini

In the past, I’ve been pretty critical of mobile web hotel booking sites. Horrible usability, errors caused by invalid markup or excessively large pages and the inability to easily complete a booking have pretty much stymied every attempt I’ve made to book a room using the mobile web. Finding and booking a room for the night using your phone should be a no brainer. Actually it’s pretty easy if you just call the 800 number of one of the big … Continue reading

Opting Out of Transcoding

Remember the furor that erupted on the web and the wmlprogramming Yahoo group over transcoders? Specifically, the ones that Vodafone UK and other carriers implemented with the goal of making non-mobile web pages more usable on mobile handsets? The issue was that these services had the (hopefully unintended) consequence of degrading or completely breaking numerous mobile web sites and services. Ring tone and game downloads no longer worked, some mobile web sites didn’t load or displayed malformed content. Sites that … Continue reading