Have you ever had an idea of making an application for a connected device? For example, something like being able to start to heat up the living room in your apartment when you’re on your way home? Or a sudden urge to monitor a continuous data stream with the humidity and temperature from your attic and basement, with alerts? What about a garage door opener on your phone, that works securely from anywhere in the world?
I’m Alex Jonsson, co-founder of Evothings and entrepreneurial technogeek with over two decades of serious tinkering in mobile technology and digital media, who alongside the Evothings team would like to share our take on how applications and services for the Internet of Things can be developed easier and more efficiently. We hope to inspire, by sharing some of our collected experience in the space, and involvement in everything from serious hobby projects to strategy prototyping efforts for major industry players. If you would like us to cover any subject in particular, please let us know and we’ll be happy to address subjects of interest – anywhere from theory and models, to hands-on code and practical implementations of mobile for connected devices.
Rebels with a cause
We have a big, hairy audacious idea at Evothings; we believe it should be a lot easier for everyone to hook up their mobile phones and tablets to connected devices than it is today. We’re neither convinced that taking everyone back to school on the innards of Objective-C and Android Java always is the answer, even as we love and respect native developers and aim to keep up with all the bespoke developing trends. What we think the industry needs at this stage, and it’s not more closed silos and custom software connecting a specific hardware device to a single handheld device – we need is rolling out more services in practice, broader experimentation, prototyping together with customers for the creation of new services and simpler testing in real time. More things need also to happen in-house rather than by third party consultants in order for companies to control their destiny and ultimately to understand the needs and wants of the users in this industry, and how to make that happen. We’re need to see a future internet of both people and things in harmony – and we already know that mobile will play a major part of it.
This blog series, is a small contribution of what we think needs to be done to get there. We strive to inspire, taking on big picture strategies, create industry outlook with crude analytics, hands-on tips of the trade, and lots of how-tos for connecting phones with connectable devices. But more important is the tools we craft, the growing set of examples, templates and libraries and APIs to access all the things out there in the Evothings Studio. Being able to access device and low level network features from common, widely-accessible languages like HTML5/JavaScript is another important factor to get to results faster, sometimes actually several, even five times faster with a single code base and without the requirement of platform-specific coding skills. The long-term goal is to open up mobile for IoT to new groups of developers – if you can craft web pages, you sure also can hook up your micro-controller with your mobile device with the skills you already have.
Too many applications out there already?
Here some might say, that there are probably already too many applications, formats and protocols out there for users to maintain a healthy relation between the phone and all the other stuff. We’ve only got started connecting our homes, rides, gadgets and workplaces in a multitude of ways. Sadly enough, if you’re a small business or perhaps an industry player, it gets even worse when you’re on the vendor’s side of things; provisioning, many custom SKUs for a single application, language versions and bespoke versions to meet different system roles and access levels. All this adds up to companies actively looking into alternatives for native development, prototyping and testing of IoT applications across modern smartphones, and in many cases can prove to be time well spent.
When it comes to mobile devices, it’s pretty much a two-horse race of between iOS and Android rather than the 10+ competing operating system flavors which developers needed to take into account a decade ago. On the other hand, already covering all variations, implementations of subsystems, APIs and low-level methods are more than enough for a smaller team. So, the questions is how making even more applications improve on life for your customers – and in turn their customers?
It’s about tearing down the silos, or more diplomatically; find horizontal approaches where propretary solutions are abstracted towards what you actually want to accomplish. It’s about establishing generic code bases common to more than one system, and about ironing out oddities and quirks bespoke to each given operating environment. The system providers who keep to themselves will eventually lose ground, even as they’re actually solving practical problems for their customers in the short term, as interoperability and standard will be increasingly important and silos increasingly expensive to maintain and develop further. And the sooner we find ways to effectively promote format neutrality for data and security from sensors to users, the more reason also to look for common protocols and tools that work across the plethora of handhelds and other single-codebase examples.
Healthy steps for the evolution of IoT applications
We would like to take this opportunity to stick our heads out a bit. We don’t think it’s more research, more analytics, additional planning, hiring consultants or talk that will create the first services and applications for your customers, it’s more walk. It’s making simple application experiments, and adding a mobile channel to one of your existing offerings. On a Friday afternoon, you can quickly modify connect your Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Philips Hue lamp, Texas Instruments Sensor tags, iBeacons, garage door opener, fitness hardware and see what new ideas come up. Being able to quickly iterate between builds, seeing the result directly on devices is a key element to get the speed in prototyping many developers are looking for.
To jumpstart your efforts, Evothings offer a growing list of ready-to-use templates that you can modify and use as you like, each crafted to investigate aspects of mobile for Internet of Things — we hope you’ll get inspired and create wonderful applications and value for anyone using them. And when you do, please let us know and we’ll do our best to promote your work in our network. Last but not least, if you like this post, feel free to share — it means a lot!