ecosystems,” Sprigg wrote. “The purpose behind BREW was to link users to technology by creating an ecosystem of partners who all stood to benefit. But with the emergence of other smartphone operating systems, the need for us to drive our own OS ran counter to that philosophy.”
Qualcomm boasts that BREW (and its successor operating system, BREW MP) have been installed on a billion mobile devices, generating billions in revenue for BREW applications developers. Nevertheless, the BREW ecosystem has been shrinking for years—as smartphones have expanded into lower-cost segments of the market and displaced feature phones.
According to Sprigg, BREW was conceived by none other than Qualcomm scion Paul Jacobs, who headed Qualcomm’s CDMA Technologies business before he was named CEO in 2005. It may be relevant that Jacobs stepped down as CEO earlier this year, and his successor, Steve Mollenkopf, is now setting the strategy for application development and how best to expand the Qualcomm ecosystem.
With BREW, Qualcomm set out to provide a standard technology platform that would encourage third-party programmers to develop mobile apps based on Qualcomm technology—and help sustain and expand the Qualcomm ecosystem. But the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007 changed everything. As Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android became increasingly popular, BREW’s fate became tied to lower-priced feature phones. Independent programmers lost interest in creating new mobile apps for BREW.
Fredric Raab, for example, taught BREW programming for years through extension classes offered by UC San Diego. But Raab taught his last BREW class in the fall of 2008.
“In 2009, we never met the minimum enrollment and canceled the class,” Raab wrote in an e-mail. The annual BREW conference also went on hiatus in 2009—returning in 2010 as Uplinq. Qualcomm said at the time it was working to re-energize the BREW ecosystem. At that time, BREW lagged in popularity behind even Palm/WebOS and Symbian, and at each ensuing Uplinq, Raab said, “I found the conference becoming less technical and relevant to my needs. Although I’ve been attending the conferences since the beginning, I will not be making the trip North.”
A senior systems engineer, Raab said he now works mostly with Qualcomm on their 2Net wireless technology platform for digital health applications—an emerging market (and technology ecosystem) the company has been targeting for years.
“Qualcomm has moved pretty much into any other OS space they can,” said Ryan Kastner, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. “They still do a lot of Android work, and they’re doing a lot of development work with Microsoft for the Windows phone.”
According to Kastner, Qualcomm also has been looking at opportunities in other emerging markets, including the “Internet of Things,” automotive “info-tainment” systems, home automation, and robotics, where Qualcomm anticipates strong future demand for powerful, energy-efficient processors like its Snapdragon chips. Most of these emerging technologies are concentrated in Silicon Valley, and Qualcomm has a growing presence in both Santa Clara and San Jose, CA, where the company has a research center.
So it makes sense for Qualcomm to move its annual software developer’s conference to San Francisco. It makes so much sense, in fact, the only question left is whether Qualcomm will ever hold its annual Uplinq conference in San Diego again.
