The Killer Java Application?

In What does No Java on the iPhone Mean? (and the follow up More on Java and the Mac) James Duncan Davidson looks at why Apple haven’t added Java support to the iPhone. In particular he claims there’s no killer application made with Java. In the strictest sense, that’s probably true, but there is a killer category of applications which are almost exclusively made with Java – games for mobile phones.

It’s this popularity of Java in the mobile phone world that makes the lack of Java on the iPhone seem so odd to me. I can understand Apple wanting to have complete control over the iPhone interface, and I’ll concede that most of the existing games for mobile phones probably wouldn’t translate very well to the keypadless iPhone, but it will be interesting to see if Apple can satisfy the great desire for cool little mobile games that today’s teenagers, a key market segment for the iPhone, without leveraging the existing knowledge mobile games developers have in Java. If the iPhone takes off it won’t be a problem, similar to how there are a huge range of iPod specific accessories, there will be – if and when Apple make it possible – a huge range of iPhone specific games and add-ons.

I’ll be watching with a fair bit of interest to see how much this lack of games impacts the iPhone’s adoption rate. Certainly the people who are looking at it now won’t care too much – they’re all Apple fans and miscellaneous geeks. When it goes to market and we start hearing the reviews from teenagers who care about such things.

The other part that may be interesting is what happens to the ring tone market as more and more phones use standard MP3s for the ring tone and make it easy to load them onto the phone. The iPhone should nail this and Nokia and Sony-Ericsson are pushing their MP3 player capabilities. Nokia’s even going so far as to note how easy it is to get music onto the phone in their Australian marketing.

Interesting times ahead…