The theme today seems to be mobile stats and different ways to view them. First take a look at Gartner’s Q1/2012 stats released today. The interesting part for mobile developers is the breakdown by operating system…

 

Android has made a large gain in market share. Symbian is dying fast and Microsoft has less share than Bada that, according to rumour, will be retired soon. If the Gartner stats aren’t enough for you, take a look at the Google sponsored Our Mobile Planet, that allows you to create your own charts based on consumer stats. Finally, if your focus is Android then visit the opensignalmaps fascinating analysis of Android fragmentation and then read how Google is shifting tack to try to reduce fragmentation.

ABI Research has a new survey that found that 3% of users account for one-fifth of all money spent on mobile apps. What does this mean for mobile developers?

Firstly it probably means you need to make the most of the 3% of users who will pay. This means cross promoting your other apps to them, offering them extra in-app purchases and related (web side) services.

The press release doesn’t say why the 3% chose to pay. If you can discover this, for your particular app, maybe you can concentrate on this aspect (technically or marketing-wise) to get more paid users. Support and talk to your paid users and get some insights into their motivations. Many paid users want you to succeed so they get continuation and upgrades to the app. My experience is that most will be open to helping you.

Hewlett Packard has a useful technical white paper (pdf) on 2011’s top cyber security risks and identifies mobile as a rising non-traditional vulnerability for the enterprise. It’s interesting to see this from a non-malware provider’s perspective.

HP assesses the mobile risk and says the device-centric approach of anti-virus on every device is outdated and misses all attacks apart from certain categories of malware. In particular, there’s a risk of apps reading data streams of other apps. Over half of all apps tested leaked information. No mobile platform is totally safe.

This reminded me about my past posts on the security of login tokens and safe coding (see Related Articles below).

  

App Promo have a useful infographic based on their first annual developer survey last month. It shows how 59% of apps don’t generate enough revenue to break even on development costs.

 

The infographic also gives lots more information on the truth behind the success of mobile apps. While the 59% of apps losing money might seem high, I think you also have to consider…

• Many apps are free to promote something else and won’t create a profit in themselves.
• An app can have a very long lifetime and might come into profit over a longer period.
• Many apps end up being re-purposed or code re-used in other apps. It can be as much a learning experience and source of pivot for many people.
• You can’t expect all apps to be successful and 41% successful could be viewed by some as being encouraging.

There’s an interesting article at Wired on Football Manager Handheld and its 9:1 piracy rate. Piracy isn’t new. All platforms I have worked on, right back to Windows CE in the 90’s, suffered from severe piracy. Somehow, games always seem the worst affected. There’s some correlation between the kind of people who like games and the mindset of people who think it’s acceptable to a) crack and b) download cracked games. Android doesn’t help in that it’s one of the easiest platforms to pirate.

However, the developers of Android paid apps can do better. There’s seems to be a general lazyness of developers at the moment. Whether it’s blind porting or iOS apps, incorrect use of synchronous calls, safe coding or anti-piracy, the attitude seems to be to do as little as possible. People employing developers are also at fault for not putting enough effort into choosing Android developers.

To combat piracy, the first line of defence is to use the License Verification  Library (LVL). Make sure you implement the DeviceLimiter policy to limit the number of devices that can use a single license. Also read the Google’s tips on how to make your app and the LVL more tamper resistant.

If you want to go further (or distribute outside Google play where the LVL isn’t available), then think about how you might tie essential functionality for that user (e.g. top scores, multi-player, download new levels) to your server such that they only get these if they have paid. How do you know, server side, that the user has paid? This depends on which app store you are using. For Google Play, you can send the initial LVL response to the server. If a hacker has bypassed your LVL code then the app won’t have a LVL response and the user won’t get the server side supported app features.

People underestimate the effort required to create a great web app. They tend to get blinded by the write-once promise but in practice it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Brian Leroux takes a deep look at in his presentation on how the mobile web is a mess. I have previously written a lot about this (see the related articles below).

However, there are still some types of project, particularly self-promoted information-heavy apps, where web apps can make sense. Think very very carefully if you really need a web app or whether a normal ‘desktop’ web site will suffice. Keeping with the latter will save a lot of pain. If you do decide to create an app using web technologies, here are some high level tips to get you started…

• Decide what devices you are going to support. No, you can’t support them all. Plan to fully test the devices you choose to support.
• Think about the implications of different screen sizes and orientations. More specifically, think about families of different graphics sizes. Consider using common layouts to simpify moving between horizontal and vertical orientations.
• Don’t make it look like iOS.  It’s like asking Ford car owners to use a Mercedes steering wheel in their car. Try to give the app a generic web theme that uses touch gestures when available on the device.
• Consider what’s necessary to make the app secure. Motorola MOTODEV has a new article on Designing HTML5 Apps that includes tips on the security of offline storage, cross-origin resource sharing and web sockets.