This week a story bounced around in the lower levels of the Java Web press about a new mobile development “solution” from RealNetworks. Tellingly, very few of the stories had any details not found in the RealNetworks press release, which describes the EMERGE “development platform” as a tool that will port your mobile game to all the cool mobile platforms, including Java ME and, of course, the iPhone and Android. If you’re like me, your first thought reading this is probably “Wait, the people who make the crappy streaming music player that nobody likes is involved in mobile development somehow?” Well, it turns out that RealNetworks apparently bought Mr. Goodliving, a Finnish mobile development company, in 2005, for some reason.Anyway, the technical details on this are pretty slim — for instance, there’s talk of “automatic” porting, which ought to make anyone kind of anxious, and no indication of what language you need to start with, though the fact that you can port existing games means that there may be more than one allowed initial language. But once more interesting to me is another service that EMERGE offers beyond code: marketing. In this vaguely informative Gamezebo article on the subject, what really seems to animate RealNetworks’ Charles Harper is the difficulty mobile developers have getting their apps on phones, both through the iTunes marketplace and just out to phones in general. EMERGE, he claims, can help developers get through that and make money.While I’m in no position to judge his claims, the fact that this is a central component of the EMERGE offering to developers highlights a crucial failing of Java ME. Sun built the platform and assumed that developers would be able to sell their mobile apps as easily as they could sell desktop and server apps. The fragmented nature of the mobile market, in which carriers always stand between developers and customers, was completely unanticipated. I have no idea how EMERGE will do, but at least RealNetworks recognizes that there are economic aspects to mobile development, not just technical ones. Software Development