But in 2012, around the same time as Pinterest moved to San Francisco, the hot local app was Path. A mobile social network founded by a former Facebook executive, it is a beautiful and useful app. But being Silicon Valley’s darling did not help Path to reach the masses, who were soon to fall for something quite different: Snapchat. While filling a similar need – sharing photos on the go – Snapchat is as inelegant and fast as Path is well-crafted and considered.]]>
These are used by some of our advertisers to allow you to interact with ads via voice commands or through your calendar. These will only be used if you tap on certain adverts. Users don't seem pleased (judging by reviews). If Android had the granularity to let you reject or accept those, it wouldn't stop you receiving the ads that are used to fund the app. Instead, users get annoyed - and some uninstall.]]>
According to the data collected by Statistic Brain, 62% of Android users never paid a dollar for an app, while the number is a little lower for Windows Phone - currently at 58%. Even when you compare the number of downloads on each platform, Android has a whopping 29bn downloads compared to 4.1 billion on Windows Phone, the difference is massive. In terms of total app store revenue, Android generated $1.2bn, while the Windows Phone Store racked up $950m. In other words, a mean of 4.1c per app on Android v 23.1c per app on Windows Phone. For iOS? 23.7c. BlackBerry? 22.9c. Here are the numbers.]]>
As part of the survey, Appcelerator asked the 804 participants how interested they were in developing consumer and enterprise apps for the various mobile platforms. Apple was on top, with 80% saying they were very interested in developing applications for the company's smartphones and tablets, which is roughly the same response elicited by the first quarter version of the survey.
The third-highest priority was Android-based smartphones, which 71% of the respondents said they were very interested in, an increase of 7 percentage points from the first quarter. But unlike Apple, Google and its hardware partners have so far failed to convince enterprises that Android-based tablets are as important as smartphones based on the OS: 59% stated they were very interested, though that was an increase compared to 52% during the first quarter survey.
…After that there is a big gap down to Windows-based smartphones and tablets, at 26% and 25%, respectively, compared to 29% and 30% in the first quarter study. To add insult to injury more than 60% thought that Windows 8 would ultimately fail as a mobile platform. ]]>
Calling Play Services an "app" doesn't really tell the whole story. For starters, it has an insane amount of permissions. It's basically a system-level process, and if the above list isn't enough for whatever it needs to do next, it can actually give itself more permissions without the user's consent. Play Services constantly runs in the background of every Android phone, and nearly every Google app relies on it to function. It's updatable, but it doesn't update through the Play Store like every other app. It has its own silent, automatic update mechanism that the user has no control over. In fact, most of the time the user never even knows an update has happened. The reason for the complete and absolute power this app has is simple: Google Play Services is Google's new platform…
The only features left that would require an OS update are things like hardware support, Application Frameworks APIs, and Apps that require a certain level of security or access (like the lock screen, Phone, and Settings apps). It's part of the Google apps package, which OEMs can't change. A neat solution to the problem of slow updating. (Thanks #GambaKufu for the link.)]]>
And it’s even more of a headache when compared to web technologies like JavaScript and HTML. These webby alternatives were supposed to replace native apps, letting developers write one version of software that runs on all devices. But consumers have largely rejected web apps.
Developers who brave the matrix of pain often have to make some compromises.]]>
BlackBerria exhibits all the classic signs of a collapsing country. Today, it’s the kind of place that might compel the State Department to issue a travel advisory. It’s a land where crime goes unpunished, where fires burn unextinguished, where citizens wander the streets alive but dazed, where the future is too foggy to inspire any feeling but despondency.
BlackBerria is officially up for sale, and will be sold from a position of weakness — its suitors will look more like the World Bank than casual bond buyers. The picture illustrating the article is utterly brilliant. And the article itself will have you saying "Oh, yeah, true.."]]>
One thing that helped me reach that conclusion was the location statistics for the pirated copies. About 95% of the pirated copies are being installed in Russia and China (and of those, mostly China). We didn’t even translate our Google Play store into Russian or Chinese, so it’s almost certain that the pirates just found our app on localized pirate sites. On the other hand, I’m glad our menu design is intuitive enough that you can play the game without speaking English! Yes, piracy of the Android version of the app (yada yada) but Seznec pulls out far more interesting lessons from the experience. (Thanks #ClarkeViper for the link.)]]>
To me, Apple is encouraging us to look back to those design values. Going back even further, think of books that only use one well-chosen font, in black, on one well-chosen paper, in white, laid out with well-chosen spacing. The goal is that you will get lost in the story and forget that everything you see was carefully designed. Not many app designers have given clues about how their revised products will look; Behringer offers some screenshots. First thought: removing the black element at the top and using white all over makes the screen seem bigger, even though it's the same size.]]>
Why would anyone not in the NSA want an app like this? With Heard, you can capture anything from your baby’s first words to a key point in a lecture without hovering your thumb over the record button all day. Like.]]>
Around 1.2 million people installed Samsung's Android-enabled Magna Carta app, affording them early access to Jay-Z's new LP.]]>
With requests from tablets now making up around 20% of total iPlayer video requests each month, and larger tablets making up the majority of those requests, we wanted to focus on supporting these devices first. We know that more and more of you are using your tablet like a personal TV – and want the benefits that an app can bring (such as mobile downloads – coming later this year) on these devices. That’s why, a month ago we released an update to remove the website link and delivered the BBC iPlayer app to all Android phone, tablet and phablet device sizes (more than 3,000 different models). The Android team is three times as large as the iOS team. ]]>
Paying homage to music that came before by creating something new out of it isn’t a novel idea, and in fact, musicians were borrowing riffs and lyrics from each other before the advent of recorded music, but this ability to trace samples through a simple app is. Back in the day, you had to read through a CD’s pamphlet to find out where the group had cleared its samples, and then seek out the original recording — and even then, you’d miss all the unofficial samples. Bet it's a favourite with record execs looking for some extra royalties. (Thanks @slimbowski for the link.)]]>
That’s a very good thing — if you’re an app developer.
According to the analytics firm App Annie, which launched Amazon app store analytics in beta last month, 19,000 developers are now publishing apps to Amazon, as opposed to 180,000 using Google Play and 210,000 who are publishing apps to Apple’s iOS app store. The lower number of apps and the fewer developers focusing on Amazon make for a less crowded marketplace in which there’s a little more room to grow. “While Amazon Appstore is the new kid on the block, we hear great things from developers about their ability to monetize from the store,” App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt said in a statement.]]>
Unlike lightning, sometimes Vines strike twice. Please be patient if you see a Vine more than once. If it seems to freeze, refresh the page. Suddenly, it's all about video (short-form only). Didn't Flickr try this years ago?]]>
Yet, even knowing all these things, it's easy to be seduced by a negative or positive review that sounds plausible but is what we in the industry call "total unmitigated bollocks."
So, gentle reader, I present perhaps the best app review in the Google Play App Store. And he does. But also has some useful suggestions on how you could get app reviews that would have meaning.]]>
More important are the Android app's traits Google abandoned in the new iPhone version: too many menus and steps to get things done, confusing icons, and a concept called Layers that was techie talk for things like switching from map view to satellite view.]]>
Daniel Danker [head of iPlayer at the BBC]: "It's not just fragmentation of the operating system - it is the sheer variety of devices. Before Ice Cream Sandwich (an early variant of the Android operating system) most Android devices lacked the ability to play high quality video. If you used the same technology as we've always used for iPhone, you'd get stuttering or poor image quality. So we're having to develop a variety of approaches for Android."
RCJ: Why don't you just forget the older devices and concentrate on new ones?
DD: "People write to us saying just that, why bother supporting older devices, why don't you just start with - and then they insert whichever model of phone they have. But more than a quarter of our requests to iPlayer come from devices running Gingerbread. And the number one [Android] device contacting us is still the Samsung Galaxy S2, which can't handle advanced video." And to answer what some ask:
"YouTube has lower expectations of quality, and they have no issues with content protection. Netflix has good quality but it builds the entire video player on phones - they have to reengineer for every device. That is costing a lot of money and as a public service broadcaster we don't have the resources to do that. People also say everybody else is doing it, but that's not true. Neither the ITV Player nor 4OD offers a full Android service."It's screen size, screen resolution, graphics performance, CPU performance, APIs available by OS version - all those things interleaved, not just a single one. (Thanks @alanaudio for the link.)]]>
As part of this switch in focus, from Monday 17 December we will begin directing users who click on a Guardian link within Facebook straight to our website to view articles, so over time all users will no longer be shown the content on a page within Facebook.]]>
Here are some examples: Looks rather like Tasker (also Android) in what it lets you do. IFTTT is "If This, Then That", a web service. Atooma's developers say they're working on an iOS version. Don't hold your breath.]]>
This should help. It's a simple app that registers as a routing provider worldwide.
When you choose it as your routing app, Google Maps will open in Safari with the appropriate directions.]]>
Today, (5 July 2012), in Tokyo, Kromek, a UK based platform technology company, is launching RadAngel™, a new high performance but simple to use personal portable radiation detector.
RadAngel™ uses the most advanced semiconductor detector technology (previously only available to government agencies) to provide accurate radiation readings and, crucially, for the first time, distinguish between man-made hazardous radiation sources in the environment (such as those from the Fukushima disaster) and typical background radiation. Tokyo, Chernobyl, Sellafield.. er.. Cornwall*? Not quite sure where you'd want to use this. (* Don't worry, it's natural.)]]>
By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web — about 10% more than last year.]]>