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Do the Size of Mobile App Stores Still Matter?

cgseo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:34:21 +0000

According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform's app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora. Sponsor Mplayit also found that one of the fastest growing app categories across all the major platforms are barcode scanners. Apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser have clearly hit upon an unfulfilled need. Size Doesn't Matter According to Powers, asking how many apps exist for a given platform is now a moot question. All the major platforms now offer more than enough apps and as long as people can find the apps they are looking for - and as long as these apps are good - most consumers will be happy. Most users simply don't need 50 different apps to write their grocery lists. Looking at Mplayit's list of the most popular apps across the top platforms, it also becomes clear that quite a few of these categories are being dominated by known brands like Shazam, Pandora, Evernote and Facebook. Mplayit, of course, is in the business of giving app recommendations across platforms and doesn't fail to note that it's own store is a good alternative for finding apps outside of the standard top 20 charts. Or Does It? To some degree, Powers' comments about the size of today's app stores rings true. Maybe it really doesn't matter that the Android store only features about 20,000 apps and that the Apple App Store now holds more than 100,000. Maybe it is true that consumers tend to gravitate towards the same brands on all platforms. At the same time, though, having more apps in the store also means that there is a more active developer ecosystem around a given platform. While iPhone developers rightly gripe about Apple's approval process, we've seen a lot more innovative apps for the iPhone than for Android. Is the size of the Android market holding you back from making the switch? Do you think Android has enough good apps that make up for the smaller app store? Do you think the quality of today's BlackBerry apps is good enough? Feel free to let us know in the comments. Discuss

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Do the Size of Mobile App Stores Still Matter?

Droid’s December Boom: AdMob Metrics Show Android Platform’s Growth

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:59:15 +0000

The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December's stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC's Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner. Sponsor Having been compared extensively with the iPhone, the Droid stands up solidly even under extensive scrutiny . And in terms of 3G network access, we've personally seen fewer issues than with any other mobile carrier we've tried to date. (Note: I'm a Droid owner and a former iPhone user. I've also suffered through my share of BlackBerries, Palms and their ilk.) If any device is to become the iPhone killer, it will be the Droid or something very close to it (here's looking at you, Nexus One). AdMob's numbers show that requests from all Android-driven devices increased by 97 percent between October to December in 2009, totaling more than 1 billion requests in December alone. The open platform has also seen a refreshing diversity of devices and manufacturers. AdMob shows that in December, 56 percent of requests were from HTC devices, 39 percent were from Motorola devices and 5 percent were manufactured by from Samsung. And in December, seven devices generated more than three percent of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Moment. This stat represents a significant increase from just three devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero). Already, the Motorola Droid is the leading Android device on AdMob's radar, generating a third of all the network's requests in December. Released just under two months ago, it's already the top-selling Android device on the market, a title it's held since a scant fortnight after its launch . Granted, AdMob's metrics show a small slice of mobile device usage. But they've consistently been reliable in showing what mobile users use and need and in predicting trends. We are internally excited about what Android-powered devices will do in the market in the months to come, and I am personally quite optimistic about Droid adoption specifically. Let us know what you think in the comments, particularly if you're a fanboy or fangirl of a particular device! Discuss

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Droid's December Boom: AdMob Metrics Show Android Platform's Growth

LinkedIn’s New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:33:26 +0000

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments. The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it's less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company's mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you're looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post . Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it's a work in progress and will improve soon. Sponsor What's The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs! For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase "contact X has updated their profile." They have? How did they update it? It's maddening. LinkedIn says it's working on solving this problem, but it doesn't seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn's strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world - not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages. Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary Perhaps LinkedIn isn't to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts' info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you've got someone's name and phone number on your phone already - it's a headache to pull in a person's LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually. Of course your phone number isn't an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you're unable to call. You won't even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone's contact list - peoples' LinkedIn profile page URLs aren't included in the contact info that gets imported. There's No Push Notifications This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone - shouldn't it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example - you know they'd like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too. Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she's founded a new company called Shwowp . I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don't know about it until a month later because I didn't want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara's news and I didn't want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland "Tara Hunt has updated her profile" in order to see if she's happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page. When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn't seem like too much to ask and that's when I'll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life. Update: LinkedIn's Adam Nash, author of the company's announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: "we've discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue...Rest assured, we wouldn't have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn't have big plans for it. " Discuss

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LinkedIn's New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

My Most-Used iPhone Apps of 2009

cgseo — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:47:46 +0000

App downloads on the iPhone and iPod Touch saw a huge spike this Christmas , especially on the Touch. I know I downloaded more games this weekend than I've ever used in my life, just to entertain kids I was visiting. With all this app downloading going on, though, which apps will prove to have staying power? What can you download today and expect to keep using throughout the next year? Below is my collection of the downloaded apps I used the most in 2009. I'd love to compare lists, so let me know in comments about any hidden gems that you've come back to again and again throughout the year. Sponsor RSS readers may be unable to view the embedded display in javascript but can click through to the full article to check out this collection. Those are the apps I kept coming back to all year, what about you? The app sharing widget above is from AppsFire , my favorite way to share single or groups of apps with other people by widget or email, and one of 5 app recommendation services we compared feature-by-feature last month . Discuss

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My Most-Used iPhone Apps of 2009

Ford’s Wired Fleet: WiFi Hotspots on Four Wheels

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 05:24:37 +0000

Ford is making a serious bid for geeks' business. Scott Monty , the auto company's Internet-famous social media head, wrote to us tonight with some of the most exciting car-related news an Internet-dependent nerd could wish for. The next generation of Ford's SYNC-enabled vehicles will not only be rolling communications and entertainment systems. They'll also be rolling WiFi hotspots. Passengers will be able to connect to the Internet anywhere, anytime. Our crystal ball is showing a lot more Ford-enabled conference roadtrips . Sponsor The way it works is a lot like many devices available from wireless networks. For example, Sprint's MiFi, which we tested earlier this year , allows for multiple devices to connect to the Internet from a small, card-shaped device without a physical connection to any hardware. Other devices we've tested allow for single- and multi-device connections via USB. Ford's solution is allowing for USB modems connecting to the vehicle's SYNC system and enabling Internet connectivity for multiple devices. These vehicles can also connect to other USB devices. In essence, the user's vehicle becomes one with the user's hardware. The WiFi signal is broadcast throughout the vehicle, and password protection will guard against piggybacking. Currently, SYNC vehicles feature hands-free calling, navigation systems, emergency assistance, music searches, news and weather feeds, business search, traffic data and audible text messages. Without built-in hardware, it's a lot like many other devices we've seen. Users will have to work with their carriers to get the hardware and network coverage to make the magic happen. Nevertheless, Internet connectivity in a moving vehicle is something we've waited a long time to see, and we're glad to see Ford recognizing that need. Discuss

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Ford's Wired Fleet: WiFi Hotspots on Four Wheels

Google Taps StackOverflow as Official Android Dev Support for Noobs, Q&A

cgseo — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:06:52 +0000

Just over a year ago, we were excited to report on a new website for programmers. StackOverflow was the brainchild of coders/rockstars Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood , and it was a social Q&A channel that promised to give programmers solutions for even the most obscure bugs. Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets well over half a million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A sites for companies, too. The site's latest merit badge is an official nod from the Android team, which has announced StackOverflow as the official home of Android developer Q&A support. Sponsor Android rep Roman Nurik wrote in a blog post , "We're working with StackOverflow to improve developer support, especially for developers new to Android. In essence, the Android tag on Stack Overflow will become an official Android app development Q&A medium." Nurik further noted that StackOverflow's format was particularly helpful for beginners new to the Android platform. However, he did state, "It's also important to point out that we don't plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there." The StackOverflow "Digg for developers" model has worked well for all kinds of programmers, clearly. The models has also been successfully applied to such diverse topics as mathematics , parenting and even World of Warcraft - all built on the company's StackExchange white-label platform. Discuss

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Google Taps StackOverflow as Official Android Dev Support for Noobs, Q&A

Android Developers: Here’s Some Sample Code & Tutorials

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:43:29 +0000

Ever since finding myself the happy owner of a Droid (+1 for early Christmas presents), I've found myself increasingly interested in the app market for Android-powered devices. As has been noted in many iPhone/Droid sudden-death-round comparisons, the latter languishes in quality and quantity of available applications. Perhaps in an effort to increase Droid's competitiveness in the market, the powers that be have created a new section of resources for Android developers . Let the games (and other apps) begin! Sponsor In the new Resources tab of the online Android SDK documentation , devs can now access technical articles, some pretty detailed tutorials, a breakdown of platform versions, common tasks, troubleshooting tips, a community across groups/IRC/Twitter channels and a library of code for sample apps - just what a mobile/smartphone dev would need to get started. The list of sample code now includes: API Demos Bluetooth Chat Contact Manager Home JetBoy Lunar Lander Multiple Resolutions Note Pad Searchable Dictionary Snake Soft Keyboard Wiktionary Wiktionary (Simplified) The Android dev team has also taken their most popular developer blog posts and turned them into a series of technical articles ranging in scope from backward compatibility issues and future-proofing apps to layout tricks and text-to-speech uses. Currently, around 10,000 applications exist in the Android Market as compared to the (roughly) eleventy bajillion apps in the Apple App Store. Hopefully, these resources will help this open-source mobile development platform take off, allowing Android's available applications to become a selling point for Android-powered devices rather than a point ceded to Apple in the smartphone wars. Discuss

Lonely Planet Launches Augmented Reality Apps

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:12:01 +0000

Popular travel book publisher Lonely Planet has begun selling Augmented Reality apps for 10 US cities for $5 each in the Android Marketplace. The apps were built in conjunction with Mobilizy, the company behind user generated content AR app Wikitude . In addition to offering Lonely Planet content overlayed on top of locations you view through your phone's camera view, you can also plan itineraries and get step by step directions from the app. Augmented Reality is a technology in a formative stage but support from the Lonely Planet brand is a big, if unsurprising, step. Sponsor Will consumers go for it? GoMoNews is skeptical , pointing out that AR technology is still clumsy and Lonely Planet's offering is very limited so far. National Geographic's travel blog voices no such concerns . Travel is the most logical application of consumer-focused Augmented Reality, but we expect a large number of consumer and marketing companies to explore this new paradigm of layering data on top of the viewed world. Some of the most interesting applications of Augmented Reality are outside the consumer market; AR could prove very useful for medical procedures or mechanical repair, for example. The technology remains limited, though, by the inability of most applications to process live video of what they are actually looking at, instead of merely offering up data based on what's believed to be in a given GPS position. Discuss

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Lonely Planet Launches Augmented Reality Apps

Morgan Stanley: Mobile Internet Market Will Be Twice The Size of Desktop Internet

cgseo — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:47:34 +0000

Morgan Stanley has released a couple of bulky documents about the mobile internet: 'The Mobile Internet Report,' a 424 page report which explores 8 major themes; and 'The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes,' a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in the report. We've embedded both documents below. Perhaps the most remarkable statement in the report is that the Mobile Internet market will be "at least 2x size of Desktop Internet," which Morgan Stanley bases on math comparing Internet Users with Mobile Subscribers. Sponsor The report starts out by saying that Apple's iPhone / iTouch / iTunes ecosystem "may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen." It goes on to state that "a handful of incumbents (like Apple, Google, Amazon.com and Skype) appear especially well positioned for mobile changes." Growth in the Mobile Internet is being driven by 3G adoption and the increasing popularity of smartphones, of which the iPhone is the leader. Morgan Stanley predicts that smartphones "will out-ship the global notebook + netbook market in 2010E and out-ship the global PC market (notebook + netbook + desktop) by 2012E." The firm has always been bullish on mobile internet, as Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 conference presentations over the years show. See also our analysis of Meeker's 2009 Web 2.0 presentation . The reports are far too big to summarize here, so we recommend you read them below - or download from Morgan Stanley's website. Via Scribd Via Scribd Discuss

Draw Your Own iPhone Game With Pencil and Paper

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:41:01 +0000

Sketch Nation is a forthcoming iPhone app that takes iPhone photos of drawn images and uses them as avatars, obstacles and enemies in a customized fly-and-shoot mobile game. It's pretty sweet and was the winner of the recent AppsFire AppStar Awards for unlaunched iPhone apps. I was one of 20 judges for that contest and yes, I voted for SketchNation. Check out these demonstration videos below and keep your eyes peeled for Sketch Nation to go live in the App Store. We have no idea if and when that will happen, but hopefully soon. This looks awesome. Sponsor It would be great to see other classic game-types that could be created using this same process (those old Nintendo hockey games would be fun to draw players for), but there's no indication yet whether that's part of the plan. SketchNation is also on Twitter , where we're sure they'll announce the availability of the app as well. Discuss

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Draw Your Own iPhone Game With Pencil and Paper