Operators, the consumer, and the difficulty in working in the "Mobile Web"

A couple of years ago, as a relative newbie to the mobile 'space' in terms of doing business there, I banged my head off a wall. Literally. My company (Scoopt.com) had secured a deal with a major handset manufacturer to embed what amounted to an advert for Scoopt in up to 10m phones across 50 languages in a worldwide distribution deal. It was a link on the phone's Web app page, one click from the OS menu, one of 4 or 5 links under a Google mobile search box. Pretty cool.

However, a point that I almost missed at the let's-do-a-deal meeting, but which came back to haunt me, was that the handset guys couldn't control what the operator guys would do with this page. Which in practice meant that Vodafone overwrote it with a link to its own sucky Vodafone Live site, thereby rendering my deal fubar. Other operators did likewise. Head met wall (and VCs got their coats).

What struck me then as it strikes me now is that mobile in general, and mobile web in particular, is resolutely screwed while network operators maintain control. By control I mean control of what phones they sell, what goes on and in them, what punters pay, and how the internet looks on a handset.

The equation is all wrong. Operators are just ISPs these days. I don't care who connects my calls; I just want fast data, and I want, nay, demand zero interference from a network. I most certainly do not want them dictating what's on my handset (maybe allow them a sticker on the case for old times' sake).

Actually, it's not just the operators. I have a Nokia N95. It's brilliant and shit in equal measure, as is well documented. My main gripe is that it won't play Flash videos when I'm browsing the web on 3G or Wi-Fi. A few minutes of Googling told me that it should, but only if I had version ABC and firmware update XYZ. A bit more research and I learned that my model, on the O2 network, wasn't going to accept the update because the code or serial or product or some other bloody code was wrong (or 'not yet supported', which comes to the same thing). Buy hey, I could hack the handset via some obtuse app and change the number, so I did just that. Great, now I could get the firmware update from Nokia because it thought my phone was on some other network or planet or something. Clever me. Not so great, videos still don't play and I lost 8% of my data when trying to restore from a backup. Inevitably, I also my O2 connection settings so suddenly I couldn't browse the web at all from my phone. I'm geek enough to figure out how to fix that. Most folk aren't.

Actually, that problem probably was down to the operator. So there you have it - it's all their fault. When will Google launch a mobile network?

Another minor example, Sat night, when I was going to a party, I pointed my desktop webcam at my dog and streamed it on a Ustream.tv channel. Figured I could keep an eye on her on my N95 while I was out. It's *precisely* the kind thing I want to be able to do.

So could I? No, of course not. Despite the firmware update and the supposed Flash Lite support, it just didn't work. Like so much of my/the mobile experience.

It's just awful. Seriously. You geeks and entrepreneurs and big brains who work in this space know how to deal with these hassles, and how to work around them. And yes, things are getting better. Slowly. Maybe. But never take your eye of the typical end-user experience. Web on mobile really, truly sucks.
Gah. Web 2.0 on mobile? Sack the operators first.

Kyle Macrae
Scunnered.com

Posted by Alfie