Mobile App Testing

We know the world (or at least the U.S.) is getting more and more mobile-centric. Online shopping stats for mobile devices exploded in 2011 (see here and here). In addition to shopping, we use mobile devices to read, surf the web, play games, get the news and the latest scores, keep in contact with friends, acquaintances and total strangers, take photos and videos, do our banking, just about anything you can think of. We’re so attached to our mobile devices, in fact, that it’s beginning to be a “mobile-first world,” according to GigaOm.

In the last day, I’ve gotten two notes from start-ups that began on the web but have seen their businesses transformed by mobile, as users increasingly shift their consumption to mobile apps and browsers. This might seem obvious in a world in which services like Twitter and Pandora now get most of their traffic from mobile. But it bears highlighting because the trend is happening across all sorts of apps and websites and that has implications for developers, publishers and businesses, who must now consider what a mobile-first world looks like.

The latest examples came to me from online design store Fab.com, which just launched in June and then pushed out its first mobile apps for iOS and Android in October. In just three months, it said that 30 percent of its traffic is now on mobile. MyYearbook, a social networking site that was bought by Quepasa last year, said, thanks to a big holiday push, it now has 54 percent of its traffic coming in on mobile.

Read more…

As of July 2011 roughly 6 billion Android apps had been downloaded. Fast forward five months and that number has exploded to 10 billion. Take a look at this growth chart and analysis from TechCrunch:

Read more…

Here’s a quick look at some native app user data from 2010 and 2011, courtesy of LukeW and Data Monday, enjoy!

• Adult mobile users who have downloaded an app to their phone nearly doubled in the past two years – rising from 22% in September 2009 to 38% in August 2011. (source)
• The average iOS device owner will download 83 apps in 2011 vs. 51 in 2010, a 61% increase year over year. (source)
• The average smartphone user in the [study] adds just 2.5 new apps per month. (source)
• In May 2010, only about two-thirds (68%) of adults who had apps on their phones reported actually using them. (source)
• In March 2011, 26% of all apps downloaded were opened only once and then never used again. 26% were used 11 times or more. Of the remaining 48% of apps: 13% are opened only twice, 9% are opened only three times, all the way to 2% that are opened 10 times and never again. (source)
• 38% 
iOS & Android users stick with an app after one month. 14% 
iOS & Android users stick with an app after six months. After 12 months, only 4% are left. (source)
• Roughly half (51%) of mobile owners use a handful of apps at least once a week, while 17% report using no apps on a regular basis. Almost a third (31%) could be called app “power users” in that they use 6 or more. (source)
• The top 10 Android apps account for 43% of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61% of all time spent. With 250,000+ Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950+ apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie. (source)

It’s not official yet but according to ReadWriteWeb, Flurry (a mobile analytics company) is predicting the mobile app downloads will hit the 25 billion mark by the end of the year. Meaning mobile downloads increased by 300% during 2011! The New York Times even picked up the data for a story. Here’s what ReadWriteWeb has to say about it:

Mobile analytics company Flurry estimates that application downloads to Android and iOS will hit 25 billion in 2011. That is a 300% jump from 2010, when six billion were downloaded. Of those 25 billion, five billion are expected to come in December as consumers buy new smartphones and start downloading to satisfy their insatiable hunger for mobile goodness.

Smartphones have hit an inflection point. It is not the one we are waiting for quite yet (when 50% of all U.S. consumers have smartphones) but growth like this happens when critical mass of adoption has been realized and a behavior once reserved for early adopters becomes the cultural norm.

Around 43% of U.S. consumers have smartphones. It is likely that the 50% inflection point will come before Q3 of 2012. What will app downloads look like then? There is no way that 300% growth year-over-year can be sustained but the exponential rates will continue throughout the rest of this decade until smartphones and app adoption reaches the point of cultural ubiquity.

Flurry says that revenues from app downloads will reach $2.5 billion this year. In the New York Times story about Flurry’s data, there is no breakdown on where that revenue is broken down between paid downloads, in-app purchases, freemium services or advertising. It is likely that revenue number will double next year as more apps are downloaded and a lot of the marketing programs, analytics services, engagement activities and all the push notifications tied to those solutions mature and become more prevalent.

Read the full story >>>

What do you think? Will it really take until Q3 of next year for the US to hit 50% smartphone saturation?

VentureBeat started a recent article in its DevBeat stream with a very bold statement: “The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history.” It’s not an unfounded, out of left field, shock and awe statement either. They’ve found quite a few big industry names to that are preaching the virtues of mobile web apps and HTML5 over native apps. Here’s what DevBeat has to say:

“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

Read the whole story at VentureBeat’s DevBeat (be sure to keep reading past the large, bold headers – they’re part of the overall story) >>>

What do you think? Will mobile web apps crush native apps soon? Ever? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Adobe’s Flash has not been playing nicely with mobile devices for years, but now the disagreement is coming to an end … and Flash is going away (on new mobile browsers, not all together). The announcement was made on Tuesday to Adobe partners via email. Here’s Wired with more details…

In an abrupt about-face in its mobile software strategy, Adobe will soon cease developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, according to an e-mail sent to Adobe partners on Tuesday evening.

And with that e-mail flash, Adobe has signaled that it knows, as Steve Jobs predicted, the end of the Flash era on the web is coming soon.

The e-mail, obtained and first reported on by ZDNet, says that Adobe will no longer continue to “adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations,” instead focusing on alternative application packaging programs and the HTML5 protocol.

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores,” the quoted e-mail says.

…

The move indicates a massive backpedaling on Adobe’s part, a company who championed its Flash platform in the face of years of naysaying about its use on mobile devices. Despite Flash’s near ubiquity across desktop PCs, many in the greater computing industry, including, famously, Apple Computer, have denounced the platform as fundamentally unstable on mobile browsers, and an intense battery drain. In effect, Flash’s drawbacks outweigh the benefits on mobile devices.

Read the full article at Wired >>>

Not all 4G is created equal. RootMetrics spent the last eight months sending people around the country to measure 4G data speed across carriers in different locations. Take a look at what they found:

RootMetrics™, the first independent service to measure mobile experience from a consumer’s point of view, announced today a comprehensive progress report detailing how the four national mobile carriers are performing when it comes to delivering 4G data speeds. Since March 2011, members of the RootMetrics test squad have traveled the country and performed more than 238,000 data tests in 27* different local markets. By aggregating all of these data test results, the company has identified patterns of performance and can isolate carrier consistencies. During this eight-month timeframe, Verizon dominated the competition as a result of its LTE rollout, delivering 4G speeds in 66 percent of the tests. AT&T edged past T-Mobile, hitting 4G speeds in 41 percent of the tests. T-Mobile recorded 4G speeds in 40 percent of the tests and Sprint delivered 4G speeds in 33 percent of the tests.

“We’re in the midst of a rapidly changing mobile environment. During months of testing, we’ve been looking for answers to one of the questions we hear time and again from consumers – which carrier has the fastest network?” commented Bill Moore, CEO of RootMetrics. “This Progress Report aims to provide some context around what people are hearing today from the carriers, but also to give a snapshot of what these speeds mean in real-world terms.”

Read more and get specifics on your carrier at PRWeb >>>

Distimo recently released The 2011 Top 100 Best Global Brands and their App Store Status report which notes a sharp uptick in mobile app presence from top brands … a 40% increase in just 18 months to be exact! TabTimes breaks down what the report has to say about different brands, industries and app stores…

Nine in ten major brands now offer mobile applications

The 2011 Interbrand Best Global Brands Report revealed that 91-percent of major brands now offer applications in at least one of the major app stores. This figure represents a significant increase from 18 months ago, when only 51-percent of brands published or licensed a mobile application.

The brands that ranked highest in the report were found to have more presence in the different app stores in terms of the volume of applications.

Distimo said that brands, on average, each offer 24 mobile applications, but this figure was heavily influenced by the results of Disney and Sony, which boast 636 and 285 apps, respectively, across all app stores. When excluding these two companies, the average number of apps per brand fell to an average of 15 applications.

Apple’s App Store for iPhone is the most popular app store (86-percent) for brands, and 66-percent have at least one iPad app, according to Distimo.

59-percent of brands have applications on Google’s Android Market, compared to under 20-percent this time last year, and the just 23-percent of brands offer apps on Blackberry. Nokia’s app store attracts just 9-percent of global brands.

Read TabTimes full analysis >>>

Don’t look now, but the Windows Phone 7 app marketplace is heating up. Granted, the total number is now somewhere over 25,000 (still far behind its Apple and Android counterparts), but it’s enough to warrant frequent articles on the best apps for the Windows Phone 7. Case in point, here’s an excerpt from an article in product-reviews.net:

This brings us to an interesting question: What are the most popular Windows Phone 7 applications?

This is where a recent pcworld.com article by Julie Bort comes in, as it provides a list of 10 of the best and most popular apps available to Windows Phone 7 users. First on the list is Meon Lite, a touch screen puzzle game that tasks players with solving tons of levels to free the Meons. Another application that is definitely worth downloading is the Shazam music discovery app.

Have you ever been somewhere and a song has started playing that you like the sound of, but you don’t know what it’s called or who sings it? With the Shazam app, you simply hold your phone up to the song to identify it. The application not only identifies the song for you, it will also allow you to buy the track, get the lyrics, find related videos on YouTube and share it with your friends.

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We’ll be keeping a close eye on the news coming out of Mobile Apps World in London this week, as uTest’s CMO Matt Johnston will be one of several speakers to address the ever-changing world of mobile apps (how appropriate).

In case you’re new to this event, here are some basic details from the conference homepage:

Mobile App World 2011.
7-8 June 2011
At Mobile App World 2011 you will meet key industry leaders from the global mobile app world, leading brands, app developers, app marketing specialists, device manufacturers and platform owners. Mobile App World 2011 will feature:

World-class speakers
A thought provoking conference programme with visionary keynotes, insightful case studies and exciting panel discussions.

Mobile App Developer Lounge
The networking nucleus, business centre and place to relax for Mobile App World.

Questions to be raised
• How do you make money from your app?
• How do mApps fit in the retail environment
• How mobile apps can provide direct routes to market.
• Challenges and opportunities facing apps?
• How do you create the ultimate sticky-app?
• How do you ensure your app provides the next-generation consumer experience?
• Selecting the right app store for you.
• How to recoup development investment.
• Tips on how to take advantage of app market growth.
• The strategies and options available for today’s content provider.
• What’s the future of apps, where do we go next?

Read more…