Astraware CEO Tomlinson on making the most of platforms such as Nook, webOS and Kindle Fire

Astraware is a developer that's not afraid to put its money on the underdogs, finding niche opportunities with less obviously lucrative platforms.

But every technology eventually becomes legacy, which is why it's finally stopped supporting Symbian S60, BlackBerry and Palm OS.

Yet with webOS circling the drain and BlackBerry OS looking increasingly shaky, we wondered what the future held for such markets, and hence dropping Astraware CEO Howard Tomlinson a line to get his take on the situation.

Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian S60 were no longer active platforms, and BlackBerry had the problem that the device range kept increasing and we'd have to put in more development to support every model.

We found for some time that it was costing more than we could realistically make back (as it meant maintaining development in Java), so we had to finally admit it wouldn't make sense to continue.

In the case of Palm OS, we probably kept that for a year longer than we ought to have. Palm OS has been discontinued for so long that the last few sales were really a year ago, but since it was the platform that we really founded the company on, there was the extra emotional attachment there.

One of our first big games, Zap!2000, has actually had a lifespan of 11 years, which is pretty remarkable for any game, never mind a mobile one.

We try to give most niche platforms a chance, and give them a year or two with some of our stronger titles, to see how they perform.

Only indirectly by virtue of a couple of existing Java titles. We're not expecting to take on native development for these devices.

We've made a small but steady revenue from webOS, so it makes sense to maintain it.

We figured that the recent purchases of the HP TouchPad in their big sale would mean that there might be a target audience for a few more tablet sized games for a while.

At the moment it doesn't look like there's a secure long term future from the HP side, but you never know what might happen.

Because it's native C++ development, we're able to support webOS relatively easily alongside development for Android and iOS, so it isn't an expensive choice for us.

We did make a number of games for bada but it hasn't done as well as we'd hoped. Perhaps our style of games haven't been right for it, or maybe the market hasn't worked as well as Samsung expected.

There are certainly opportunities for bada, so it makes sense for us to keep it as an active platform.

Early thoughts on BBX are that as long as we can develop for it in C++ (I understand it will be open for native development, so that's a reasonable inference) then we ought to be able to support it.

BlackBerry has had a seemingly rough time recently, and BBX might be its way of turning things round.

If it does put the effort out to make it easy to support and with a good store system, then it could well be a good platform to add.

I think that's because it plays to our strengths - and vice versa.

The demographic of Nook customers are more literate (and likely somewhat older) than average smartphone users, which means that they appreciate the style of games (classic IP, well produced, attention to detail) that we've built up our skills on over the years.

I hope so; the market will be much larger, but our relative share smaller as it attracts so many more developers.

There's also the risk that the store will get swamped with cheap and free apps, which makes it hard for anyone to make a sustainable business.

It's also not a heavily curated store, so aside from passing compatibility, pretty much anything goes.

Right now, we're making sure that plenty of our own games are available on the Kindle Fire, we have a couple of titles to bring across to the HP TouchPad, and making our latest Astraware Word Games pack for iOS and the wider Android world.

After that, we've got a couple of 3D (but decidedly non-hardcore) titles in the works for next year.

We're still supporting a fairly wide selection of platforms, and I dare say one or two more to add over the next 12 months.