There will be no Silverlight bullet in mobile development

Ever since Microsoft announced Silverlight is going to be the framework for developing applications on the Windows Phone platform. I was very excited, I thought Microsoft have finally came to there senses and are going to take the mobile world by storm. Soon we will have an Android implementation and RIM will sure hope on the wagon and one of the biggest issues in mobile development, lack of cross platform client is about to become history at least for big chunk of the smartphones market and that’s a step in the right direction. This will also attract a lot of developers to develop Windows Phone applications and everybody win, But since then there was no movement in that direction.

Jason Zander with the Sela experts (Photograph by: Ido Flatow)

This afternoon I was present in Jason Zander’s meeting with the Sela experts and I got to ask a question in I had in mind for a long time: Are Microsoft going to invest in Silverlight on other mobile OSs, and the answer was a polite no.  He did say that HTML 5 is going to be the cross platform environment for mobile applications as well. I run it by Alex Golesh and explains the financial side of it: while developing a Silverlight support for other OSs will cost Microsoft many millions, developing HTML 5 support is done individually by every platform.

I still think there is a huge market need for a a runtime like Silverlight, a place that is being filled today by Java and that’s a shame. In the near future we will see some Mono implementations on other mobile OSs, but probably, much like their older sibling they will not be able to keep up with the original.

I hope Microsoft will come around since they can change the developer story for for the mobile world and that would be grate for us. Until then, we will always have HTML 5.

Have a nice one.

Yaniv Rodenski