The Mobile World’s Walls are Crumbling by Jon Fingas, Engadget.com (11 Nov. 2015)

Summary
To spite stiff competition just over a year ago, most major mobile companies are opening up to the idea of collaborating with each other.

Commentary I think this change in attitude will definitely have noticeable benefits in the near future. For one thing, one of the biggest issues in the current mobile industry this day-and-age is the lack of standardization which, in turn, adds an unnecessary barrier for the end-user. To put it another way, if a business client owns an Android device, then I cannot take advantage of the group features that my iPhone’s iMessage application has. Similarly, if a friend uses Apple Music and wishes to share his playlist with me, we would have to resort to third-party applications, if any are available, in order to convert it to something that Google Music can understand. On top of that, this also promotes the adoption of cross-platform frameworks. As of now, if you wanted to develop an application for all three major phone platforms (Android, iOS & Windows Phone), you would have to choose between (a.) using a third-party such as PhoneGap or Appcelerator, which will inevitably cause performance issues on account of adding a secondary code engine and interpreter on top of the phone OS’s native framework, and (b.) translating it across all platforms, which involves having a good understanding of every OS environment and unique UI, thus, requiring more time and company resources to produce. This could be done in a similar fashion to how Microsoft currently treats it’s Metro-style apps, whose development kit is arguably a slightly more dynamic use of HTML5; a markup script that is platform-independent and compatible with all major browsers.