Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Windows Marketplace for Mobile is accepting applications.  This is a great opportunity for mobile developers.  Combined with BlackBerry AppWorld, Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store there are now marketplaces available to facilitate distribution to users of every major smartphone.  This is a great opportunity for developers.  There is now a place to highlight the availability of their app, that doesn’t rely on consumers finding out about you and your app directly.   Just create a great app in a category of a consumer needs and they’ll find it.

It does beg the question however: is there sufficient consumer demand on any of these one platforms (with the possible exception of iPhone) to justify writing an app for just that one platform.    This is where we are seeing the most demand for the Rhodes framework: the need to create a great app that spans all smartphones that user’s may choose to carry.   With Rhodes you can do this: write your app once and Rhodes allows you to instantly build native apps for each of those device operating systems and their associated “app store”.   While there are a couple of other approaches to doing both iPhone and Android apps, we are not aware of any way besides Rhodes to write a single set of code and build native apps for all major smartphones: iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian.