ReadWriteMobile

Since Research In Motion made BlackBerry synonymous with smartphones in the early aughts, the company has taken a pounding for mis-steps, delays, intentional blindness, equivocations and most tellingly, mediocre products.

Those brickbats have often been well-deserved, but RIM should also have earned some respect, if not love, for the important role it played in smartphone development and popularization - not to mention a string of iconic-at-the-time devices that significantly advanced the state of the art.

Easy, instant push notifications are a phenomenon of modern mobile technology. They deliver news, app updates, requests and prompts to users to complete an action. Mobile developers, marketers and advertisers all see push notifications as a key way to reach an audience at the most personal level: straight into their pockets.

This level of personal interaction is precisely what makes consumers not entirely trust push notifications. It is a mixed bag: They love notifications when they are useful, hate them when they become a vehicle of spam. For developers, this is a fine line. There is a fundamental disconnect between technologists and consumers when it comes to push notifications. Many developers think push is a wonderful, useful tool. Most consumers would prefer to be left alone. Developers: what do you think consumers think of push notifications? That is the subject of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

You are almost there. The finish line is so close you can taste the champagne toast that comes with victory and a job well done. But ... but, it is just not working. There is a bug in the app and the development team cannot figure out where it is and how it has tossed a wrench in the entire process. Progress has come to a complete stop and the finish line, once so close, might as well be a thousand miles away.

Mobile app testing is not easy. Whenever I talk to a developer, testing inevitably is one of the phases of creation that is both exciting and excruciating - exciting because a product is finally near completion, excruciating because... well, if you have ever tried to dig unknown bugs out of software, you understand. To do testing right, it is a multi-layered approach that takes time, resources and patience. There are several ways to go about app testing and not all situations make sense for every developer.

When you control the pipes, you control the ecosystem. At the very least, you can impose your will on a good portion of the environment. This is what the mobile industry has come down to in the United States. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have as much or more say about the devices that eventually reach consumers hands than the platform providers or manufacturers.

Why do Android device updates take so long? Ask the carriers. Why are there half a dozen different skins for Android smartphones? Ask the carriers. Why do high-end smartphones cost what they do? Ask the carriers. Why did Nokia have to wait to enter the U.S. market with its new Lumia line? Ask the carriers. Why are there a ton of different versions of the Samsung Galaxy? Ask ... you get the picture.

"The landscape has clearly changed," U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle told a hearing into AT&T's proposed acquisition of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom, according to this morning's Wall Street Journal. When the deal was proposed in March, it appeared to be rolling like a juggernaut, and the Justice Dept. sought expedited proceedings to address the urgency. Today, federal attorneys are seeking to slow down the case, after AT&T withdrew its petition for approval of the deal from the Federal Communications Commission, while immediately afterward AT&T said it would continue to pursue the merger.

As of Friday evening, the deal was, as one veteran telecom industry attorney told Reuters, "pretty close to dead." If that's the case, does T-Mobile soldier on? Or is it, to coin a phrase, pretty close to dead? ReadWriteWeb has convened the Panel of Esteemed Grown-ups to discuss no less than the fate of the U.S. wireless industry (left to right):

Ross Rubin, Executive Director and Principal Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence

Mark Beccue, Senior Analyst for Consumer Mobility, ABI Research

Jan Dawson, Chief Telecoms Analyst, Ovum

Carmi Levy, contributing analyst, CTV News Channel

The barrier for entry for creating software for computing devices has never been lower. This has a lot to do with the mobile revolution. According to a report from VisionMobile, the time to market for applications has decreased from 82 days through traditional channels to 36 days with the advent of the app store. Developers have more reasons to publish to apps stores now than ever before, with curation, distribution, billing and monetization, discovery and feedback opportunities from users higher than ever.

There are several kinds of mobile developers. There are independent software vendors, contractors, hobbyists, moonlighting engineers, entrepreneurs, in-house and B2B/B2C focused developers. The strength a given mobile platform has much to do with how many quality developers it can attract to it.

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing from feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then have grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to now the precipice of HTML5. Facebook's creed, or really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once and run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got to the point it is at now and how it is going to iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

Mozilla is again releasing a new version of Firefox for Android as the company's mobile development cycle is starting to look a lot like that of its desktop browser. The new Firefox for Android brings developers more tools to integrate Web experiences through the browser with a select group of APIs and standards that should align well with the trends of HTML5 and mobile development.

Firefox for Android uses Gecko version 6 for rendering and has instituted several new HTML5 standards, such as offline storage and native JSON. Most importantly though it that Mozilla has instituted the WebSockets API for Firefox for Android, which should make solving communication issues and event handling for developers much easier.

On Monday, The Boston Globe released its new premium content mobile initiative dubbed BostonGlobe.com. That is not to be confused with Boston.com, its free flagship website. This unto itself is not all that interesting. Yet, the HTML5 development community is heaping praise on BostonGlobe.com primarily for how the sites renders across varying screen sizes, an innovation called responsive design.

Responsive design allows the Globe's content to be refitted to any screen size available automatically. It is a win in the fight against mobile device fragmentation and screen sizes and the future of how content is displayed on mobile devices. Below is an in-depth discussion with the creators of the Globe's responsive design and the challenges they faced along the way.

Over a year ago, we posted a round-up of DIY mobile development tools entitled "13 Tools for Building Your Own iPhone App," which has been one of our long-standing top posts of all time. Clearly, there's interest in this area.

But focusing on just "DIY" tools for just the iPhone platform is an outdated way of looking at mobile development, if we do say so ourselves. Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Symbian and other platforms are now important considerations too, as is the mobile Web itself. Plus, there is a wide range of services supporting mobile development all the way from DIY kits up to developer-friendly, cross-platform SDKs.

This week, we've rounded up over 30 services which aid in mobile app development. And now we want to know which ones you would have used, too.