Mobile Phone Development

Android Popularity

Simon Judge — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:25:13 +0000

IDC has new Worldwide statistics that show for Q1 2013 Android and iOS represented 92.3% of all smartphone OS Shipments. Android had a 75% market share, iOS 17.3%, Windows Phone 3.2% and BlackBerry 2.9%.

From my perspective, as predominantly an Android developer, I can see Android has ‘grown up’. Companies are no longer going iOS first usually because their clients are insisting on both iOS and Android versions of apps. The amount of Android development has increased and diversified. My next project is indicative of this being based on the Google Android TV platform.

Android development has matured. I am using more and more Apache licenced libraries where, only a few years ago, I had to write my own code. Almost any Android complex development problem I have can be answered using StackOverflow. Clients are better understanding the need to use Android UI idioms and dissuading them from iOS idioms is less of a hard sell.

However, the popularity attracts malware that feeds on Android’s slow and, for some companies, non-existent OS update processes (meet X-ray). Google is tightening up the OS but only for new versions. For example, on later versions of Android third party apps can’t read the developer output (logcat) and only trusted desktop machines can connect via Android Debug Bridge (ADB). This is also making things slightly more difficult for developers. In these examples, I am finding it harder to do automated testing (robotium + spoon) via ADB from arbitrary desktop machines and I can no longer ask clients to send me ADB output captured from 3rd party apps such as catlog.

I also find it difficult to understand why so many people root their phones - so much so there’s a large market for some apps that only work on rooted phones. The built in Android security is the first line of defence and people rooting their phones really should think more about what they are doing.

This has some interesting implications for BYOD. An employee with a rooted device can have all the information on their device shadow copied off just by someone having contact with the phone for a very short time. I will be speaking about this and other issues at Make IT Mobile at the end of the month.

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Mobile in Store

Simon Judge — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:50:13 +0000

Google has some new free research, conducted by M/A/R/C Research and the Google Shopper Marketing Agency Council, into the use of mobile when people shop in-store. The research covers topics such as pre-shopping, shopping categories, time spent in store, consumer needs, self help and how mobile sites are preferred over apps…

The report shows that retailers should be responding to the showrooming challenge and that mobile can be used to get customers to the store and keep them there. For more ways to do this you might like to read my previous post on a report that goes into ways of implementing a mobile retail strategy.

Slow Download Times

Simon Judge — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:42:35 +0000

Mobiquity has a recent infographic on the connected traveller showing the findings of an independent study of 1000 people using smartphones and tablets to plan and book travel with 19 top travel brands. While it’s all about travel, the learnings are probably just as applicable to other industries.

The main factors that cause poor mobile experiences are…

The tablet is the preferred device for booking future travel. One in four people book on their tablet after reseaching on their tablet. 35% of travellers who have an unsatisfactory experience are less likely to book again.

Slow load time is the top reason for an unsatisfactory experience. So what can developers do about this? Here are some thoughts on some of my past projects that are more pertinent to apps rather than mobile sites…

Bundle up as much as is sensible/possible into the initial install rather than relying on http for static images that will never or are unlikely to change.
Mobile isn’t that good at fetching lots of small downloads (images). If there are a lot of them think about bundling them up into one larger zip. The bonus is that the server will also be less loaded and hence serve information quicker. In fact, I have seen some projects re-implement the server side to aggregate up data just so that the server is less loaded.
Perform lazy self-loading of images. Show textual information before the corresponding images have been downloaded that will show as ‘loading…’ until they self-load.
Make sure you are not duplicating downloaded data. I have worked on too many projects that download the same data again and again just because the server side API designer has been lazy.
Think about using push rather than pull. Asking the user to wait while there’s going to be a very long download causes a poor mobile experience. If you really know you can’t do something quickly then tell the user you will inform them when the information is ready - and then push it via a notification.

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Nokia Asha 501

Simon Judge — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:48:27 +0000

Nokia has revealed more about the new Asha platform. There’s a new phone and OS platform aimed at the low end, developing markets evidenced by the Nokia’s product announcement in Delhi.

What’s in it for developers? Well, it’s "a new software platform, which fully leverages Nokia’s investments in Smarterphone, which it acquired in 2012". Apps are developed in Java, similar to Series 40 apps development. The ‘new platform’ aspect means there are no apps other than those Nokia convinced (almost certainly paid) to be initially produced. The lack of initial apps might be an opportunity for developers. The larger questions are a) will there will be large market for these phones and b) whether developing markets offer app related revenue opportunities (are the users or companies willing to pay for apps or services).

As of writing this there’s no mention of the new Asha platform on the Nokia developer site which doesn’t communicate the right message for those who might be interested in developing for the platform.

Will this new Asha platform go mass-market? The Asha 501 is a ‘pretty’ phone that has few apps. The current competition is the Samsung Galaxy Y that has the highest smartphone market share (about 18% in India). The Galaxy Y is much uglier but has hundreds of thousands of apps (and 3G for that matter). The outcome might be be related to whether the developing world ends up preferring pretty phones or those that "get the job done".

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Android Anti-Virus Software Prone to Transformation Attacks

Simon Judge — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:58:16 +0000

Security Week has an interesting article on Android anti-virus software. In summary, most Android anti-virus software relies on signature based analysis that’s easily fooled using simple obfuscation techniques. Obfuscation is more usually used by developers to hide source code from hackers but it can be used by the hackers themselves to transform code into new code that is less likely to be detected by today’s anti-virus software.

The article is based on a paper by North Western University on Evaluating Android Anti-malware against Transformation Attacks (pdf). The authors advocate more research into ways of detecting malware on smartphones. Such methods might include heuristic static analysis of code, crowd sourcing/cluster-analysis of apps system calls and analysis of app power consumption.

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IDC Tablet Sales Stats Show Android More Popular than iOS

Simon Judge — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:47:59 +0000

IDC has some new statistics on Q1 tablet shipments showing that Android is, for the first time, more popular (56.6%) than iOS (39.6%). These market share numbers are similar to those previously reported by Strategy Analytics and also demonstrate that Microsoft’s tablet strategy was flawed.

Geo-based Android Phone Statistics

Simon Judge — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:17:51 +0000

Last March I wrote about choosing Android devices for testing and explained how this should partly depend on the geographic region you are targeting. Consequently, I always find it interesting to see what vendors, other than my immediate clients, are seeing as the most popular phones in particular geographic regions.

Animoca has some useful new stats of the most popular Android Phone in Germany, France and the UK. The post also has some slightly older stats on Hong Kong, India, Singapore, USA and Japan.

Tablet Market Share

Simon Judge — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:15:50 +0000

Strategy Analytics has useful new research that shows that global tablet sales increased by 117 perent in Q1/2013 compared to the Q1/2012. Android is catching up with iOS…

For some reason Strategy Analytics have chosen to exclude white-box tablets in the above figures. If you include white-box tablets, "Android market share of the total tablet market increases significantly to 52% and iOS slips to 41%".

Microsoft experienced "very limited distribution, a shortage of top tier apps, and confusion in the market, are all holding back shipments".

What does this mean for developers? Irrespective of the various OS platform markets shares, it’s clear that at 40.6 million shipments per quarter, tablets are starting to reach similar orders of magnitude as smartphones. (200 million smartphones were shipped in Q1 2013).

Previously, in Q1 2012, it clearly made sense to be developing for smartphones before tablets because tablets were a much smaller market. If the current growth of tablet shipments continues it will be a short time before they will exceed smartphone shipments. This has almost certainly come about due to people not replacing their PCs and instead relying more on tablets.

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Keeping it Simple

Simon Judge — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:41:24 +0000

Quartz has a thought-provoking article on The hardest trick in mobile design: making the product simpler. As an example, it shows how Foursquare started with something simple, made it more complex over time and then went back to having something simple.

I see something similar when working with companies. There’s sometimes a tug-of-war going on between departments and/or people that means there ends up, over time, too much in an app. This is to satisfy all the interested parties. People who think they know best, sometimes don’t. Features sometimes don’t get used and, if the company is forward thinking enough to have analytics, such features get removed. Of course, all this isn’t new and was the case on the desktop and web.

An observation I have is that the ‘featureworthyness’ of an app is often related to how well the inventor of the app knew the actual domain. By domain, I mean the specialist area of the app (retail, automotive, health, farming or whatever). Those closest to the problem tend to know what’s needed. They have also probably used related apps in their specialised area and already know what works and what doesn’t. So, find and use someone with a deep knowledge of the domain.

Path to Purchase

Simon Judge — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:59:00 +0000

Telmetrics have an infographic on their UK mobile path-to-purchase study conducted by Nielsen. More detailed information is also available on the study. UK specific studies are particularly interesting for me as it’s my home country.

Some takeaways…

The top two mobile research activities are price comparisons and reviews
There’s a strong purchase intent but less so than in the U.S.
40% of people intend to purchase within a day and 35% percent within a month
Smartphone users have more immediate needs than tablet searchers
50 percent of both smartphone and tablet searchers expect search locations to be within walking or driving distance

There are many more insights in the telmetrics press release.

What I find ironic is that while price comparison is important to consumers, Google are dumbing down Google Shopping to only show listings that are effectively adverts. I personally use(d) Google Shopping a lot but won’t be doing so once it only lists commercial listings. I believe it would be better to have conventional Google ads alongside rather than just listing what are effectively advertisements.