Is Smart Cloud App Synching the Next Mobile Holy Grail?

by Sam Dean - Mar. 10, 2009Comments (0)

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of open source mobile solutions company Funambol, has a post up called "The next sync: app sync." In it, he discusses sync features working out in the cloud, so that your status in any given application is carried across all your devices. As people increasingly work with hosted applications, more sophisticated mobile synching is indeed going to be required. Mozilla, Funambol and other players are at work on this idea, as are proprietary players. The results may be promising.

In Capobianco's post, the cloud synching example he provides is a person watching a movie on a mobile device on a train going home, and pausing it when he arrives at his destination station. Then, after putting the kids to bed, he resumes the movie exactly where he left off on a TV at home.

Capobianco also notes that this type of cross-device synching already works in the Kindle on iPhone application. "If you have a Kindle and you are reading a book, once you open your iPhone Kindle app, the book opens at the page you were reading on the Kindle," he writes. "And vice versa."

Mozilla, too, is focused on this kind of cross-device, cross-application synching. JKOnTheRun notes that Mozilla's Weave project and its promising Fennec mobile browser are getting app synchronization features (see the screen below). If you walk through Mozilla's screenshots showing a Weave and Fennec installation posted here you'll note at the bottom that Weave automatically synchronizes applications, bookmarks and more with Fennec, in what Mozilla calls "Environment Synchronization." In essence, this is exactly what Capobianco is talking about.

The combination of Weave and Fennec is currently mostly being used by owners of Nokia's n810 tablets, but these applications could have a big impact on widespread mobile application usage. That's especially true if they sync apps in the cloud, allowing us to resume our work where we left off no matter what device we're on. For now, I find the Foxmarks Firefox extension to be the best way to get close to this functionality, and JKOnTheRun agrees. Foxmarks does good cross-browser bookmark and password synchronization. Hopefully, Mozilla, Funambol and other open source players will do a good job with full-fledged cloud app synching.