Ideaworks Labs Licenses Airplay SDK

LONDON -- Currently it is prohibitively expensive for independent developers to create and port mobile applications across a wide range of handsets. Developers therefore target only a few devices, seriously limiting their opportunity for revenue. Today, most choose Apple's iPhone as it has a high market share, a solid SDK and an attractive business model, provided the developer can ensure that their product does not get lost in the daunting catalogue size. However the market for mobile applications is much bigger than just the iPhone. What developers need is a cost-effective way of creating applications for the wide array of operating systems (OSes) and devices.

To solve this problem, Ideaworks Labs is now licensing its cross-platform Airplay SDK, enabling indie developers to deploy applications across hundreds of smartphones and featurephones at an affordable licensing cost. Airplay SDK 4.0 allows them to compile their application once to native CPU instructions, then deploy with a single click to all iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and BREW devices. Airplay takes care of the vagaries of the various underlying OSes so that developers need not be steeped in detail; it also deals with handset differences such as screen size and input type, again simplifying the task for the developer.

Indie developers can now multiply their addressable market by over 10 times, from 50m Apple devices to the installed base of over half a billion smartphones and featurephones globally, as Airplay SDK slashes the costs of porting and testing almost to zero. By reducing such costs, more budget can be poured into development of better user experiences and sharper marketing, again increasing the developer’s revenue opportunity.

“Airplay SDK has been a bit of an industry secret for some time”, explains Alex Caccia, CEO Ideaworks Labs, “as we’ve licensed it to some of the largest mobile games publishers worldwide. With the addition of native support for Android, a sophisticated UI framework, GPS, HTTP and more, Airplay SDK 4.0 is now an extremely powerful development solution for all types of rich mobile applications. We’re hugely excited to be able to offer Airplay SDK 4.0 at an affordable price to all developers, and look forward to seeing great applications from the iPhone and other app stores making more money for their creators by migrating to Android, Symbian, BREW and other platforms.”

Ideaworks Labs