Mobile App Testing

Okay that might not be breaking news, but it’s true, according to students at the University of Mississippi, who are finding mobile apps to be an integral part of their collegiate lives. Here’s a nice summary from The Reflector on some of the more scholarly mobile apps:

The most popular school-related applications among students polled include Dictionary, Wikipanion, Google Translate and Twitter. Students said these applications were useful in multiple classes and are usually free for mobile users.

Lauren Joffrion, freshman biology major, said she uses mobile applications specifically for organization and note taking. She recommends using the calendar pre-loaded to the phone to keep up with assignments and Evernote to record and organize lectures.

“I have a schedule on my phone and schedule events and assignments,” Joffrion said. “Evernote records my notes and (tries) to type them out for me.”

Shelly Hargis, transfer sophomore biology major, said when she was a student at Lamar University, she used the Blackboard application to complete many of her online assignments.

Chris Wilbourn, freshman political science major, said he finds functionality in In Class, a free application that helps organize everything school related. In Class features a schedule, to-do list and note section.

Read more…

Looking for tips on tailoring your mobile app for a tablet device? Then be sure to check out this brief tutorial from Adobe:

As testers do you own both an Apple and an Android phone? If not, how did you pick? Was it personal preference? How about platform marketshare? Or did you take developer-platform preference and app marketplaces into consideration?

I’m putting my money on personal preference, but in the event that your decision was driven by platforms, developers and marketshare here’s two interesting pieces of news:

1. While Apple has historically been the preferred developer platform (because it’s more lucrative), research firm Ovum is predicting Android to take that title by the end of the year.

2. Android and Apple marketshare are neck and neck as of the end of Q4 2011.

Here’s some more information on Point 1 from PCWorld:

Google’s Android will become the preeminent platform for developers over the next 12 months, edging ahead of Apple’s iOS, according to a study by research firm Ovum. Nearly all developers, however, will support both platforms.

Ovum’s call comes as Android continues to suck up market share, with more companies using the platform to crank out a wave of mobile devices. While iOS has seen its market share growth slow in the recent years, it has always been seen as a more lucrative location for developers to make money. As a result, most apps came to iOS first, and the other platforms second.

That, however, could all change in the coming months, Ovum said. Android’s prevalence is getting hard to ignore, and developers have incorporated new business models such as advertising and in-app purchases to spur revenue.

Read the full article >>>

And now a bit on Point 2 from Digital Trends:

Apple’s iPhone owned more of the US market than all Android-based devices combined during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new study from market research firm Kantar.

Read more…

Less than a month ago I wrote about the Microsoft Windows Phone Marketplace reaching the 50,000 apps mark. Fast forward only 25 days and the Marketplace has already grown by another 10,000 apps! From IntoMobile:

The number of apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace has just surpassed 60,000 according to the folks at All About Symbian. To put that number into some context, the 50,000 app barrier was passed just 25 days ago. An average of 400 apps are being added on a daily basis, though we don’t exactly know which type of apps are getting the most traction.

Unfortunately, quite a few reports say that while the explosive app growth seems impressive, the numbers don’t reflect the quality. More from IntoMobile:

Read more…

Google has been making some changes to aid Android app developers lately. First came Google’s insistence that the Holo theme be included on every Android phone that comes bundled with Android Market and now it’s pushing to streamline app development. Will the intended benefits of these efforts carry over to Android app testing? Will it make your life easier if a default theme is already on your Android 4.0 phone or if there are fewer development quirks to wade through with every app you test?

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a recap of Holo from ReadWriteMobile:

Google is making incremental improvements to the Android platform to ease the burden of fragmentation on developers and original equipment manufacturers. While still allowing manufacturers to create custom skins, Google is doing its best to standardize the rest of the of the Android development environment with version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Themes are a big part of standardizing the Android experience. Android has instituted a requirement in ICS that that the “Holo” family of themes be implemented into devices unmodified. This will mean that widgets, apps buttons and menu screens will be much easier for developers to integrate.

Read more…

Five years ago, if you’d have told me that eBay would soon record $5 billion in mobile GMV (gross merchandise volume) I would have said no freaking way…after asking what GMV meant. We’ve certainly come a long way. Here’s TechCrunch with the milestone news:

At his CES keynote yesterday evening, eBay CEO (and new interim PayPal CEO) John Donahoe revealed a number of new mobile payments forecasts for both eBay and PayPal. As we heard from PayPal VP David Marcus a few days ago, PayPal surpassed its expectation of $3.5 billion in mobile payments in 2011, reaching $4 billion for the year. Donahoe said in his keynote that eBay reached $5 billion in mobile GMV (gross merchandise volume) in 2011, doubling 2010′s GMV.

He also projected yesterday that eBay would reach $8 billion in mobile GMV in 2012, and PayPal will reach $7 billion in transactions in 2012. eBay Mobile currently has more than 65 million downloads of eBay’s mobile applications across platforms. And more than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113% increase year over year.

Read the rest >>>

When was the last time you used a mobile device for your banking? How about to read the news or check the score? Look up the hours of your favorite shop or restaurant? Pay a bill? I’d venture to say probably within the last 24 hours, if not more recently.

In addition to all the time spent playing games on mobile devices, we’ve also come to rely on them as a means of accessing our favorite (or necessary) businesses. And the enterprise world is embracing that trend. From ReadWriteMobile:

No industry vertical has been more disrupted by the evolution of the smartphone than the enterprise. …

Brands are flocking to apps. From March 2010 to September 2011 there was a 263% growth in branded apps. Many of those apps are done in-house but there is a distinct opportunity for developers to make money by focusing on apps for the enterprise and brands.

Business apps were the fastest growing section in the Apple App Store from 2009 to 2010, up 186%. That growth remains strong and more development studios and large corporations, like IBM, are offering solutions for enterprise deployment.

I pulled out anpart of the article’s accompanying infographic (created by [x]cube LABS) I thought would be most pertinent to testers. If you want to read the complete article, visit ReadWriteMobile. And if you want to see the complete infographic, be sure to check out [x]cube LABS.

If the trends continue there’s going to be a lot of testing needs on the horizon!

According to a new study from Flurry, daily web consumption has stayed relatively steady over the past two years … but app consumption has skyrocketed! Read about it at TechCrunch:

Mobile analytics firm Flurry has updated its report from last summer which compared mobile apps to web consumption and found that apps came out on top. In June, Flurry discovered that users were spending 81 minutes per day in mobile apps versus 74 minutes on the web. As of December, the usage of mobile apps has skyrocketed to 94 minutes per day, while web consumption dropped to 72 minutes.

The interesting thing about this data is that the most recent growth in mobile apps usage hasn’t really been at the expense of browsing the traditional web. People have just been using mobile apps more. We should note, however, that Flurry pulls its web data from comScore and Alexa, which aren’t always the best sources and use differing methodologies to determine browsing habits. In addition, users of mobile apps also browse the web, so it’s not so much a question of apps “versus” the web, as it is a look into our data consumption in general (despite Flurry’s positioning it as a battle that’s to be won or lost).

But the bottom line is: apps are hot. …

As a part of today’s research report, Flurry also provided insight into which mobile app categories were the most popular. Not surprisingly, games led with nearly half (49%) of U.S. users’ time spent. Social networking (30%), Entertainment (7%) and News (6%) followed, with the “Other” category (accounting for everything else) at 8%.

Read the whole article >>>

Analyst Chetan Sharma took a step back from making his own predictions about the world of mobile to ask others what they thought 2012 would bring. ReadWriteWeb has some of the results:

• Sharma’s insiders vote Google the “most open player in the mobile ecosystem” for 2012. Granted, the options are not that much better, but Google rocked the competition with a little less than 70% of the vote while no other player, including Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, the carriers, OEMs or Amazon got more than 10%. This is the fourth year that Google has been the most open in the mobile according to Sharma’s polls, though the percentage has been decreasing since its peak in 2010.

• The insiders are still high on mobile payments as the breakthrough category for 2012. … The next breakthrough category is mCommerce followed by mHealth, enterprise and near field communications. Sharma’s insiders are not nearly so high on mobile advertising as they were a year ago.

Read more…

Here at uTest, we know a thing or two about the benefits of belonging to a (tester) community – but we’re certainly not the only ones who understand the value. Take, for example, the recent launch of the Application Developers Alliance. Here’s InfoWorld.com with the scoop:

Being led by Jon Potter, former executive director of the Digital Media Association, the Application Developers Alliance is set to get off the ground with promotions at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas next week and elsewhere. While Web developers also would be welcome, the alliance is initially geared to mobile development for platforms including Apple iOS, Google Android, and RIM BlackBerry. The alliance is looking to recruit thousands of developers. “We’re going to be at the meetups all around the country, we’re going to be at conferences, we’re going to be talking to folks, we’re going to be polling people,” said Potter.

Key services included as part of the alliance include:

• a collaboration network, via an online database
• product-testing facilities offering access to multiple platforms and tools
• discounted and free tutorials on trends and technologies, as well as structured training and certification programs
• discounted hosting and cloud services via Rackspace

Read the rest of the article >>>