Mobile Phone Development

Android Free vs Paid Anomaly

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:45:30 +0000

Lots of people are regurgitating Distmo’s latest numbers on the various app stores without including any sort of analysis. Here, I take a look at the free vs paid chart and make some observations.

Most of the platforms have approximately the same ratio free to paid applications. The exception is Android that has a much greater proportion of free applications than paid applications. The report itself says this might be because…

"…developers from only 9 countries are currently able to distribute paid applications in Google Android Market, and by the fact that users from only 14 countries are able to download paid applications (out of the 46 countries where Google Android Market is currently available). Additionally, users need to register for a Google Checkout account in order to download paid applications in Google Android Market (except for the locations where operator billing is available)."

Here are some other factors that might be causing there to be more free than paid applications on Android…

The 48 hour ‘no questions asked’ refund policy (use to be 24hrs until July this year).
Up until very recently, the ability to easily pay, copy and refund an app.
Up until recently, the greater popularity of the iPhone providing a seemingly larger market.
A realisation of developers coming from iPhone, that paid applications aren’t lucrative for the majority of applications.
Confusing Android Market pricing in multiple currencies and hidden VAT charges
A thriving piracy community

Connected Mobile Apps Resource Usage

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:48:37 +0000

A great many of the applications I create, run in the background and periodically send or receive information from a server. The Sony Ericsson Developer blog has just published an interesting post today on ‘Reducing power consumption of connected apps’. While the post talks about and provide examples for Android, the techniques can also be applied to some other platforms.

In summary, they are…

Synchronize your polls with other apps
Make polls short
Manage your connections
Stop your services

Now that network operators are starting to drop ‘unlimited‘ tariffs, it’s not just power consumption but also data consumption that is becoming critical for users. An app communicating several times an hour can quickly rack up significant data use.

Here are some corresponding tips on reducing data usage…

Optimise your data design to do multiple requests for data in one transaction with the server
If using HTTP then use HTTP compression
Allow the user to view how much data has been used and allow them to change polling periods
Have the server know when the phone was last updated and only send what’s charged rather than ‘everything’
Avoid XML based web services and use simple HTTP GET, POST and JSON
Think about using TCP rather than HTTP
Don’t use SSL unless you really have to (does it really have to be that secure?)
Where possible, use server initiated notification systems rather than polling

Thinking more about data use and polling will also provide large server scalability gains that you will appreciate once you start getting larger numbers of users.

Related Articles:

MonoDroid c# Apps for Android

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:01:38 +0000

MonoDroid is a new way to develop Android applications using c# and .NET. It’s based on Mono, the open source development platform based on the .NET framework, that’s itself is sponsored by Novell.

The idea is that you use a Visual Studio 2010 plugin to develop Android applications against the API profile for the MonoTouch core libraries (the Silverlight-based API).

This set me thinking why you might (or might not) want to do this instead of programming using Android’s Java.

Advantages

It allows developers with c# expertise to develop Android applications.
It allows both Windows Phone 7 and Android to share some common code (note it’s not possible to have a WP7 app instantly run on Android. The APIs differ and common code, usually business logic, has to be factored out so it can be shared).
Visual Studio is, in my opinion, the best available tool for mobile software development.

Disadvantages

You become dependent on a on 3rd party tool that won’t have a complete API nor evolve as fast as the Android API itself.
It won’t work with Visual Studio 2010 Express (the free version) as it doesn’t support plugins. Visual Studio 2010 Professional or better is required.
There’s no UI designer (one of the main strengths of using Visual Studio).
It costs - probably in the same range as MonoTouch ($400 USD for individual users, and $1,000 for enterprise users).

Related Articles:

App Market $2.2 billion H1 2010

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:25:23 +0000

Research2Guidance has some research that shows the smartphone application market reached more than 2.2. billion dollars in the first half of 2010. For comparison, this half year figure is more than that for the whole of last year (2009).

We are told… "the overall decline of app prices has reclined" and "Average application prices steeped to $3.60 US per paid application in the first half of 2010"

Research2Guidance predict that "The next wave of new app stores will be niche stores specializing on e.g. business or mobile health apps."

While I believe there’s a lot of potential in more vertical apps, I suspect they will be sold B2B rather than via niche stores.

Related Articles:

Java ME Fragmentation vs Android Fragmentation

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:57:47 +0000

James Gosling (the original designer of Java) has an interesting post on comments to his previous blog entry about Google, Oracle and Java.

When asked why Android works well across many phones while Java ME didn’t, he says that…

"Today’s high end phones have an incredible amount of RAM and CPU, which makes interoperability hugely easier for Android."

and

"Differences will creep in as the Android world ages: version skews, different bug fixes, and the handset makers attraction to ‘added value’ and ‘product differentiation’ will all take their toll without strict governance"

While I agree and have previously written about difference creep, I am not sure how more powerful phones necessarily make phones more interoperable.

I worked at Symbian for a year, on the Symbian Java VM, towards the end of it’s life and these are the things that I think are the main contributors to Java ME fragmentation…

- Differences in hardware. Almost all smartphones (not just Android phones) have converged on a very similar high specification. I’d say this similarity of phones has aided Android interoperability as opposed to them necessarily being powerful.

- Differences in JVM implementation. Different Java ME phones use a variety of JVMs that have interpreted the JSRs (specifications) in different ways. Android has one JVM so there are no differences across phones for a given JVM version.

- Bugs in JVM implementations. Again, the variety of Java ME JVMs implementing the same specification allows different ones to exhibit different bugs.

- Differences between successive versions of JVMs. Java ME and Android both suffer from this but Android less so because some phones can be upgraded to later OS (and JVM) versions.

- Additions to the official SDK APIs. This is part of the difference creep ("added value" and "product differentiation") James refers to. On any platform, additional APIs tend to be ignored by the majority of developers as they restrict the market for an application. Very few apps need or use these APIs. There’s a disincentive to use them.

Related Articles:

Mobile Statistics

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:30:08 +0000

Mobile Entertainment has a great new presentation at SlideShare on 157 App Stats You Should Know About. It brings together mobile statistics from many sources and also provides lots of success cases.

While mentioning success cases, you might also like to take a look at Arron La’s Advanced Task Manager Android Revenue. Arron’s experiences are contrary to mine and I suspect much of his success was due to his application being listed by Google as a top application.

Ericsson Labs on Delicious

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:23:49 +0000

If you are in any way interested in mobile then you should take a look at Ericsson Labs links on Delicious. They have over 1000 mobile related links that I believe are an archive of what they have posted on Twitter. I have found Ericsson Labs on Twitter to be one of the best sources for new mobile news.

While mentioning Ericsson Labs, I should mention they have many interesting and innovative APIs you can experiment with in your own apps. Their motivation for providing these APIs is to eventually move the more popular ones over to Ericsson IPX.

Symbian Gaining Interest

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:59:24 +0000

As an independent developer working of different types of projects over time, I am sometimes the first to experience changes in the type of mobile development being undertaken. For example, last year, I saw and reported on the rise of brandware and marketing agencies commissioning applications.

At the moment I am seeing an unexpected increase in interest in Symbian development. This is interest in native Symbian development rather than Qt. I say ‘unexpected’ because new Symbian development has, from my viewpoint, been dead and dying for many months now. So what’s causing the new interest in Symbian?

Many new Symbian projects are coming from companies that have already implemented on iPhone or BlackBerry and are looking to diversify their platforms. Symbian (mainly Nokia) still has large sales volumes and with the forthcoming Nokia N8, I guess companies are starting to hedge their bets.

Related Articles:

Can Android Licensees Compete?

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:35:25 +0000

There’s a thought provoking article at asymco on what it calls ‘Android’s Pursuit of the Biggest Losers’. The observation is that Android’s licensees (Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson) are those with low operating earnings. The question is how these companies will be able to align with Google’s offering (based on services and advertising) and also whether they can invest in improving on Android.

The article says…

"So how likely are these disrupted ex-giants to recover and take Android forward? My bet: slim to none. Android does not offer more than a lifeline. It is not a foundation for long-term profitability as it presumes the profits accrue to the network and possibly to Google… Android’s licensees won’t have the profits or the motivation to spend on R&D so as to make exceptionally competitive products at a time when being competitive is what matters most."

I am not so sure why, with Android, the "profits accrue to the network and possibly to Google" necessarily has to be true. I think there’s more handset OEMs can do to improve on Android and differentiate their offering without necessarily spending large financial amounts.

These improvements involve thinking about Android as more than just devices, apps and different shells (home screens) and instead concentrating on getting ‘useful things done’. For example, partnering with 3rd parties to incorporate essential services (e.g. government, medical etc), entertainment services (e.g. video on demand) or even some vertical services that have sufficient numbers of potential users.

Mobile Rollout to the Wrong Platforms

Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:23:04 +0000

There’s a news item at New Media Age telling us that, here in the UK, Sainsbury’s (one of our large supermarkets) and Nectar (one of our large loyalty card providers) have launched "two mobile apps after research indicated that 92% of its customers wanted information on their mobile phones."

Unfortunately, they have chosen the iPhone and iPod Touch that the large majority (probably up to 95%) of their customers don’t own. Let’s hope they plan on also rolling out to other platforms.