Breaking news: Microsoft and Google don’t get along. Okay, that’s not really breaking news. But there was something between the two companies that did make recent headlines: Google ordered Microsoft to remove its latest YouTube app for the Windows Phone store.

It’s a good bit of tech drama (if you’re into that sort of thing), but it also touches upon an important app testing criteria: interoperability. That is, the ability of an app to integrate with other apps and 3rd parties services.

PCMag.com posted all the dirt. Here are a few clips:

Microsoft might be tickled pink about its updated YouTube app for Windows Phone 8, but Google certainly doesn’t feel the same way. The search giant on Wednesday sent Redmond a cease-and-desist letter, ordering Microsoft to remove the app by May 22.

Francisco Varela, director of global platform partnerships at YouTube, penned a letter to Todd Brix, general manager for Windows Phone, arguing that the Windows Phone version of YouTube violates Google’s terms by allowing video downloads, not displaying ads, and allowing access to videos that its partners have restricted.

In a statement, a Microsoft spokesman said today that “YouTube is consistently one of the top apps downloaded by smartphone users on all platforms, but Google has refused to work with us to develop an app on par with other platforms.”

“Since we updated the YouTube app to ensure our mutual customers a similar YouTube experience, ratings and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive,” he continued. “We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.”

Read the Rest >>>

iOS, Android and Windows are the leading mobile operating systems, right? Well, don’t write off BlackBerry just yet.

This week, the company’s execs have been making a lot of noise about big things coming from the once king, now slightly back-of-the-race mobile player. So how will BlackBerry reclaim its spot on top?

Wednesday morning at a BlackBerry keynote, CEO, Thorsten Heins shared his new strategy and his prediction for company’s future. As covered by AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski:

“‘Drilling down from desktop experiences and trying to fit them in the mobile space just doesn’t work,’ Heins said. ‘People don’t want the desktop experience in a mobile device. Mobile devices need a mobile experience. Putting the desktop paradigm on them doesn’t work. Our only focus is mobile. We are the original mobile-first company.’

So that’s the big pitch. And now that Heins has made it, BlackBerry has to begin the difficult work of delivering on it. A daunting task when Apple and Google continue to so thoroughly dominate the mobile computing space. But BlackBerry has managed to hang on this long after the upheaval of 2012. Who’s to say it won’t scramble back.

‘Some people told me last year that BlackBerry World would be the company’s last conference and my first and last time on the stage,’ Heins said. ‘Well, I’m happy to say they were wrong. Not only are we still here, we are firing on all cylinders and we are definitely in the race.’”

 This ‘watch out, world’ attitude comes just a day after a whole lineup of BlackBerry news. Roger Chen of CNet explains:

“There was the device announcement in the form of the budget-friendly BlackBerry Q5. There was the updated BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10.1 for the business-minded. There was the milestone of 120,000 apps available in BlackBerry World. Most surprising was the company’s decision to open up BlackBerry Messenger to multiple platforms, starting with iOS and Android.

All of those announcements are meant to convey a sense of building momentum at BlackBerry. Indeed, over the last several months, the company has launched a brand new platform, worked to repair its wounded reputation, and fleshed out its product portfolio to three products.”

Looks like BlackBerry is making some rapid changes. While BlackBerry might have some major catching up to do, they certainly have the potential to make a big come back. So what will BlackBerry’s comeback mean for developers? For one, that’s another OS for developers to make a top priority, further adding to the massive app testing matrix. As BlackBerry continues to grow and release new features, in-the-wild testing will become a necessary part of developers’ QA strategies.

What do you think – will BlackBerry reclaim its glory? Let us know in the comments section.

Clearly, mobile apps are extremely popular. At this point I think it’s also fair to say that many people favor a native app over a mobile website. Because of these combine trends, disposable apps have been making appearances for a couple of years now.

A Dr. Dobb’s article defines disposable apps as apps that “are intended to exist only as temporary pieces of software devoted to (for example) a four-day IT show such as IBM Impact, a new car launch, or some other short term special event.” You’ve likely seen these time sensitive apps at conferences, events or, more generally, during the most recent presidential election.

The question is, are disposable apps worth it?

There are plenty of companies out there that specialize in making quick-turn-around mobile apps and crowdsourced, in-the-wild testing can help you fit a lot of comprehensive testing into a limited schedule. But overall, creating a worthwhile app still takes time. The question organizations and companies need to ask themselves is, “Is the effort worth it?” A Read Write article points out that the return on investment for disposable mobile apps is often nonexistent.

Today, many businesses create apps for a variety of occasions, including one-time events like conferences and product announcements. But for most businesses, building these apps is a process that can take several months. At Demo Mobile 2013, Raw Engineering CEO Neha Sampat showcased an app her team built in a week.

“The life of an app used by enterprises is sometimes as short as a month,” said Sampat. “If it takes you three to four months to build an app you’re only going to use for a month leading up to an event or a conference or an announcement, there’s no [return on investment] there.”

Maybe it is worth it from a brand perspective. People are interacting with your brand in a way that they’re comfortable with and that lets you capture data. But first, your app has to make it into the app stores (in time for the event, might I add) and be found by users. Google Play and Apple’s App Store both reportedly have more than 700,000 apps. That’s a lot of noise to contend with. Even with exact app titles it can sometimes be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. If your app gets buried, or you don’t spend extra time, resources and possibly money promoting its existence, no one will ever know about it.

Now what if you’re the consumer? You hear about this app at an event you’re attending. You search the app store and find it among the 700,00 other apps. You download it to get all the great, pertinent information during the event. Then what? It’s this “then what” phase that Carin van Vuuren, CMO of Usablenet, has a problem with. From DigiDay:

“If you’re creating an app for every single campaign, then you’re not fully leveraging browser-based devices,” said Carin van Vuuren, CMO of Usablenet, an app and mobile website developer. “The companies that do this are likely not investing into a multichannel infrastructure and are using apps as a placeholder for that. It’s like app spam. It drives me crazy when I go to an event and they’re asking me to download the app. I’m not going to use this when I leave here, so why would I download it? So it clutters my phone? Send me to a URL. With HTML5, app-like experiences are very possible on the mobile Web.”

Ultimately, it’s not that hard to uninstall an app when you’re done with it. As long as a disposable app is free it’s possible that the benefits of having the app outweigh that minor inconvenience for consumers. There’s also far less chance of accidentally closing and losing the app than with a mobile website – which adds a level of convince.

It really comes down to whether or not brands feel disposable mobile apps with a built-in shelf life are worth the effort and expense of creation. As long as consumers continue using them, brands will keep producing them. So the power is in your hands, users. Do you think disposable apps are a good thing or do you find them annoying?

 Loading ...

The app industry has evolved significantly since its first introduction to the tech world.

Over the years, app developers have had to continuously adapt their processes to the ever-changing mobile experience. But the evolution isn’t expected to stop. More changes are coming that will in turn create many new challenges – and problems – for developers.

Jeffrey Hammond of Information Week recently highlighted a few challenges dev teams should prepare for:

1. Context.
2. Device Proliferation.
3. Voice, Prioritized Over Touch.
4. Heads-Up Interfaces.
5. Bigger – And Smaller – Touch Devices, And Adaptive UIs.
6. Mobile Apps Become Pluggable Mobile.
7. Wearables, Connectables And Local Networks.
8. Hybrid Application Model.
9. Cloud-Powered Development.

See the full list here>>

So… what do Hammond’s challenges really mean for app developers? For starters, wearables, connectables and heads-up interfaces mean learning how to develop apps for an entirely new interface.

As Hammond says, “We’ll have to adapt to peripheral cues such as reminders and alerts that don’t block the user’s vision. We’ll also need to integrate tactile and aural feedback such as voice commands and vibrating sensors that alert users they need to take action.” Changes like this mean learning from the ground up. There will be no best practices; bugs, glitches and errors will appear in entirely different – and unexpected – ways. Not to mention the overall development process will become that much more complex.

This is why QA will be so important. In the lab or automated testing won’t be enough for these new generation of apps. Developer will need to draw on leading testing services to ensure their apps work on these new devices in the wild, under real world conditions. Voice over touch, adaptive UIs and device proliferation will also prompt real world QA, but in-app crash reporting and other QA tools can provide better feedback so developers can improve their apps to successfully fit the changing landscape.

Are there any other major changes you think are coming to the mobile landscape? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

You’ve successfully developed your app, tested and launched it. However, you’re not done just yet. You now need to develop a strategy to drive awareness to your application, and acquire loyal users.

Welcome to the world of mobile app marketing.

So how do you capture the interest of your app’s customer base and prospects? An article VentureBeat recently highlighted five mobile app marketing strategies for brands:

“1) Dedicate Marketing Resources to Your App

According to the Mobile Marketing Association, the optimal percentage of a marketing budget that should be allocated to mobile is 7 percent — and will only increase with the growth of smartphone adoption. Put the necessary budget and staff behind the marketing of your apps to allow them to become the revenue-generating vehicles they can and deserve to be. Capturing and maintaining app market share requires marketing resources that go beyond marketing your apps at traditional customer touch points.

2) Set App-Oriented Marketing Goals

App marketing presents an entirely new range of marketing goals, with different corresponding strategies and tactics. Measure app-specific goals beyond the obvious metrics such as rank and downloads: measure loyal user acquisition, organic user acquisition, competition, and more. Align your marketing strategies to these goals.

3) Market Your App on Mobile Media

Brands now need to commit an ongoing portion of their overall marketing spend to promoting their apps where mobile users are: mobile advertising networks and real-time bidding exchanges. These channels are the fastest way to build and sustain a large user base.

4) Target Optimal Store Rank and Loyal Users

Reaching users who are browsing the app store is critical to the success of your app. Beyond these organic users, you’ll also want to think in terms of “loyal users.” Loyal users are those who use the app repeatedly, make in-app purchases, and more — they are the users you can build your app business on. Harness technology solutions that help you identify and target these loyal users.

5) Use Optimization Technology to Drive Marketing Performance

Optimization is one of the most critical components of your app marketing program. There are so many targeting variables, and every app performs differently. When working with traditional marketing vehicles, optimization technology is crucial to gain detailed insights into the marketing sources that are delivering on your goals.”

Don’t forget, in order to maintain loyal users you need to listen to what they are saying. If users are saying the app isn’t working properly, crashing or missing certain features – you need to make the necessary changes as soon as possible. Utilizing tools to help you monitor what users are saying, and making informed decisions based on this data, can help you keep your users loyal.

Share your best practices for mobile app marketing in the comments section.

There’s no disputing mobile apps have trumped television, laptops and desktops when it comes to usage.

Mobile is accessible, easy and with us everywhere we go – which has a lot to do with why it has beaten out all other forms of technology in terms of activity. In fact, according to Todd Wasserman of Mashable, Flurry says mobile has hit an audience of 58 million in primetime, which surpasses the top three TV networks on their best night.

But it’s not activity and usage that’s the issue in the mobile market – it’s the lack of advertising revenue. According to Wasserman:

“ The IAB estimates that the U.S. mobile ad market brought in $3.4 billion in 2012… Comparatively, Kantar Media calculated that TV advertising accounted for $74 billion in ad revenues in 2012. Even if apps generated 100% of mobile ad revenues, the market would still be just 4.5% that of TV.

Meanwhile, Flurry also found that there are now more monthly users of mobile apps than there are for desktop computers and laptops. Yet the the desktop ad market is still 10 times the size of the mobile ad market in revenues, according to the IAB.”

So why the lack of ad dollars? Industry leaders and journalist point straight to device fragmentation as the root of the issue. As Michael Becker, managing director of the Mobile Marketing Association, says in Mashable:

“To ensure that the ads are effective, it helps to tailor to them to individual users’ demographics and geographic location. To make things even more complicated, while on desktop, there are basically two operating systems, in mobile there are at least 10 and hundreds of browsers and screen sizes.“

Device fragmentation makes mobile a unique challenge for developers and mobile advertisers. What works on one device might not work another, what works on one operating system might not work on the next, and so on. This mobile matrix requires scalable real world testing in order to ensure quality. For mobile advertisements to work every time, everywhere, testing will need to play a huge role in the development and implementation of mobile ads.

What are your predictions on the future of mobile advertising? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Trying to decide if your business should develop a native or web app? This latest infographic from Bizness Apps shows that there are significant benefits to each, and that small businesses should consider developing both a native app and a mobile website. Here’s a look:

How and why should software designers make ‘continuous design and improvements’ a priority in the development process? This is the question guest blogger Rob James explores in the following guest post. Rob James is a skilled programmer who loves the design process of software development. He can be found blogging about software development, or writing reviews of software (many of which are currently available on the market).

***

When working on software, it’s important to remember the principle of continuous design, and how it can ultimately benefit a final product. Continued design reflects an approach where different versions of software can be developed through iterative and incremental design for retesting and improvement, rather than being extensively planned out and produced in a linear way. Whether working on commodity trading software or database design, the value of creating, testing, and improving cannot be understated.

More traditional software design processes involve a waterfall model, whereby careful planning takes place at the start of a project’s lifecycle, and is then developed through to a final stage for testing. By comparison, continued design can affect iterative and incremental strategies, as well as evolutionary design and agile models. In this context, less planning is made at the start of a project, and more versions of software developed and testing in a cyclical way.

In this process, developers work on continued testing and changes to a project – the aim here is to learn from testing and feedback of real models, rather than working on a software project through to completion and then having to deal with problems. Redesigning and elaborating on small parts of a software application can depend on extensive alterations in the evolution of a product.

By being more flexible with rapidly developing and troubleshooting prototypes, software companies can fix issues with software during an ongoing lifecycle. This cyclical approach can be useful in terms of widening the number of options for software development as different prototypes are tested, from architecture through to applications, as well as in regards to the end user experience.

In terms of design, incremental approaches to evolving software focuses on continual improvement and the fine tuning of features by going back over the same problems and finding solutions. Each new version is able to benefit from the mistakes of the last, creating  what developer Jeremy Miller describes as a ‘process of continuous design that happens throughout the project life cycle.’ Martin Fowler and Pramod Sandalage also advocate an approach to software design where bugs and the general architecture of a project are worked out over time and improved by consistent testing and feedback from users.

Fowler and Sandalage argue that ‘you assume that you cannot fix the requirements of the system up-front’ in the planning stage, but instead have to go through many different versions of a software platform before it gets to where it needs to be. This kind of agile planning can work to embrace change, rather than trying to get everything set up at the beginning of the design process. Fowler and Sandalage go on to suggest that ‘you look at design as an on-going process that is interleaved with construction, testing, and even delivery,’ with software expected to adapt and go through multiple versions before and after it reaches users. By doing so, it’s possible for software designers to make continuous design and improvements an important factor in producing the best possible software.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I think I’ll just develop this app real quick”?

Didn’t think so. Developing an app isn’t something you can just crank out. Theoretically you could – but it certainly wouldn’t be a chart-topping application. Developing a successful app takes careful planning and analysis. David Tucker, in Mashable, recently pulled together a list of things to consider when developing an app. Here’s a look at the highlights:

• Agree on goals for the program.
• Understand your target users.
• Identify a minimally viable solution set.
• Plan for multiple releases.
• Balance your users and your business.
• Know what is out there.
• Bring your IT team into the discussions early.
• Decide on a technology you can live (and grow) with.
• Plan to analyze.

Many of these considerations closely tie into app testing, especially planning for multiple releases. Tucker says:

“Statistics show that many users will re-engage with your application when new features are added. Spread key functionality across the first handful of releases to keep your users engaged.”

In a perfect world releases would only contain new functionality, but the majority of the time releases are put in place with fixes to bugs and other issues. The hard part is getting to the root of any present issues before you’ve lost any users. Through real world testing developers can discover any bugs, patch any them, and release a new version of their app so any current users don’t drop off or uninstall the app out of frustration.

Another extremely important consideration is ‘planning to analyze’. According to Tucker:

“The final step in the process is determining how to measure success. With a morass of potential features, devices, platforms and technologies, success can be challenging to define, but it will affect your ultimate strategy. Consider the following questions.

• Will this increase our transaction volume and, therefore, revenue?
• Will this increase customer adoption and retention?
• Will this increase our brand recognition and loyalty?
• Will this decrease our costs?
• How many people do we want using our app?
• How do we want to integrate the solution with our social media program?
• How will we integrate with our existing analytics tools”

However, defining and tracking success after you launch your app is just as, if not more important. Tracking what users think of your app’s privacy, content, elegance, etc. can not only give you an idea of what users think about your app – but it can help you frame your app updates and new releases. Through regular analysis you can maintain and boost user engagement, furthering your app’s success. Overall -when it comes to mobile apps – the planning never truly ends.

How do you plan for mobile app development? Share your best practices in the comments section.