Since tablets became popular the iPad has dominated the space. No other tablet has even come close to its massive sales numbers. Even now, with a collection of other tablets options taking a bite of sales, the iPad is still the top selling tablet by far. From GigaOm:

Apple is still the world’s largest tablet seller; it shipped 19.5 million in the last quarter, up from 11.8 million the same quarter a year ago, according to IDC and its own numbers released earlier this month. That’s an increase of 64 percent. Its No. 1 mobile competitor, Samsung, saw its shipments grow even faster, from 2.3 million tablets a year ago to 8.8 million in the latest quarter. Rounding out the Top 5, Asus and Amazon also more than doubled their tablet shipments from a year ago. Microsoft, which did not start selling tablets until October 2012, shipped 900,000 Surface units between January and March.

But if you look at the top five tablet manufactures closely, you’ll notice something important: three of the five top tablet providers run the Android OS. And that doesn’t account for the other popular Android-based tablets that didn’t make the top 5 – like Barnes & Noble’s Nook. According to the IDC report, “Other” tablets made up 31.5% of the market share in Q1. That large number, plus the sales of Samsung, Asus and Amazon means Android has taken over as the most common tablet operating system. From GigaOm:

The overall growth in tablets means Android is now the most popular mobile OS in tablets shipped during the quarter; a year ago it was on 8 million of tablets shipped worldwide, compared to the 11.8 million iPads. This past quarter saw Android shipped on 27.8 million tablets that were shipped and 19.5 million iPads and iPad minis.

So while one, individual tablet or manufacturer has a long way to go to catch up with the iPad, Android as a whole is overtaking iOS. With Apple keeping its operating system all to itself, this development was only a matter of time once other makers started putting out tempting tablets.

The take away: Even though we continuously hear about the iPad crushing the competition, don’t neglect Android tablet apps – they have a pretty far reach.

Don’t worry Apple fans; you won’t have to wait too long for iOS 7.

iOS 7 delay rumors have been shut down, and according to recent reports iOS 7 is on its way. It will be available for a preview release in June and will fully launch in September.

While delay rumors have circulated, Darrell Etherington, of TechCrunch says changes have been made so that Apple can proceed on schedule:

“Apple blogger and noted beard-wearer Jim Dalrymple gave one of his famous one-word confirms today on his blog, agreeing with a source which told AllThingsD that while Apple has had to shift engineering resources away from OS X to iOS to make sure things proceed on schedule, the update will arrive on time.”

The struggle of meeting deadlines and properly extending your engineering and QA resources plagues almost all organizations, so it’s no wonder Apple has been facing this predicament. Hopefully they can utilize the right people and services to get the development and test coverage they need to launch iOS 7 successfully.

So what’s coming in iOS?

Etherington says while Apple hasn’t spelled out the updates, it is expected that Apple is working on a new, modernized UI – something Apple hasn’t dared to make major changes to in years.

What do you hope Apple includes in iOS 7? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Google Android is famously different from Apple iOS because of its policy of openness. While iOS is often referred to as a “walled-garden,” Android allows for customization and gives users the option of downloading apps from other stores. While many Android users love the OS for those exact reasons, it has also led to a malware-laden reputation for Android. Google has taken steps – like adding built-in antivirus – over the past year to help solve those issues, but it recently announced yet another step.

Google updated its policies to prevent developers from releasing app updates in any form other than via the official Google Play store.

Sophos notes that this can be a good and bad thing:

One possible downside to this is that it now explicitly prevents developers from publishing emergency patches via their own websites, even if only part of the app is changed, while waiting for the new version to be approved into the Play Store.

On balance, though, this seems like a loophole that needed closing.

The risk of a bait-and-switch, where an app draws you in under a veneer of Google-bestowed legitimacy and then turns itself into something you’d never have chosen if only you had known, are obvious.

This obviously won’t effect apps downloaded from other Android stores so it won’t eliminate malware all together. Taken together with Google’s other recent app security steps, though, it shows that Google understands the issues its open platform inherently faces. The company is trying to strike a balance between protecting users and walling off its own garden.

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.

Smartphone operating systems often inspire dire loyalty in their users. Once someone owns an iPhone/Android/Windows Phone they rarely switch. But sometimes it’s good to put emotional attachment aside and take an objective look at what each OS really offers – you never know, you might be persuaded to switch.

Rosemary Hattersley, of PC Advisor, took the time to write a multi-page look at the most recent versions of the iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry operating systems. Here’s a recap of some of the pros and cons of each OS:

iOS 6

Pros

• The latest version of Apple’s mobile OS … offers the broadest choice of apps of all smartphones and comes with plenty of Apple’s own apps.
• The likable Safari web browser supports multiple web pages.
• You can easily add multiple email accounts from Outlook to iCloud Mail, Yahoo, Google and Exchange, then designate contacts as VIPs. You can view inboxes separately or show all messages in a single inbox view. Mail is searchable by name or subject via a field at the top of the screen.
• Integration with audio hardware is impressive via both Bluetooth and Apple AirPlay wireless streaming.
• Aside from the sheer number of apps in the App Store, one of the big advantages of iOS is that Apple curates all apps, so rogue installations (and malware) are less likely than with Android.

Cons

• The lack of support for Flash means some websites don’t work.
• Voice search via the Siri digital assistant is largely a gimmick and requires a Wi-Fi connection to use.
• [Document attachments] can be saved locally only if you have certain apps installed which support those file types.

Android

Pros

• Google Ice Cream Sandwich (the version before the current Jelly Bean) covers all the basics, with fancier media management options (Samsung. HTC and Sony) and prettier weather and contact features (HTC in particular) being added on some handsets by manufacturers.
• One clear advantage is the well-developed Google Maps app. Strong mapping, 3D and satellite views are accompanied by built-in voice-control and turn-by-turn navigation.
• Android also offers built-in voice search, NFC support, screen mirroring and contactless content sharing. You can ‘throw’ photos and music to devices across the room and queue up actions in a form of home automation.
• Google Now (which is now available for iOS devices, albeit in a slightly more limited form) serves up useful information based on your past behaviour, but also on location and time of the day.

Read more …

We’ve heard enough depressing mobile security and malware news, so let’s take an “up-side” look at some recent research on the subject. Here’s how it went down, from Dark Reading:

Researchers from Northwestern University and North Carolina State University for one year tested popular mobile AV apps for Android on their ability to detect malware that uses evasion techniques, such as changing up the code or morphing a malware sample. Polymorphism can be as simple as changing the order of the code and data files or just renaming the file, or as complex as changing the appearance of the code but not its behavior.

Guess what, malware is still an issue and mobile antivirus software still doesn’t stop all the threats, blah blah blah, we know how that story goes. Instead of rehashing those issues, let’s focus on the positive: According to the study, many antivirus software options are getting better at detecting certain malware techniques.

The good news is that the tools appear to be getting better at detecting malware that uses basic transformation/obfuscation techniques, such as repacking or reassembling the malware, via unzip or rezip, for example. These methods don’t change the code, just the packaging. In 2012, 45 percent of the AV signatures failed to detect malware that used such basic transformation techniques, but this year only 16 percent of them have missed “trivially” transformed malware samples so far, the researchers say.

In the ever-changing threat landscape of mobile security, progressive is impressive. Companies have to stop the little things so they can focus time and energy on addressing larger, more complex challenges. The next challenge, the research suggests, is detecting malware that disguises itself by changing its code.

“The result that we have here certainly indicates improvement: Anti-malware tools do not succumb as frequently to such trivial transformations. However, this is far from good. As long as anti-malware tools continue to use content-based signatures, evading them is really easy,” Chen says.

Today’s mobile AV signatures are based on byte patterns in the malware, and malware writers can easily evade AV tools by changing those bytes, according to the researchers. Some 90 percent of the malware signatures studied by the researchers don’t use static analysis of the byte-level code. Dr. Web was the only AV product employing static analysis, they say.

Read more …

The title of the post says it all:

Could chat apps kill off the infamous ‘text message’? Recent studies point to yes.

According to David Myer, of Gigaom, people are now sending more messages on mobile chat apps than they are through SMS messages:

“Informa says 2012 saw nearly 19 billion messages sent over these apps each day around the world, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. The analyst house reckons the contrast will be even starker in 2014, with 21 billion text messages projected, against almost 50 billion app-based messages. As you will note, this suggests that SMS volumes will continue to increase, at least in the short term.”

So what does this mean? For one, these are scary stats for mobile carriers and they could mean a big change in the way many carriers operate. Nokia has already made the first move towards a chat app smartphone integration, by reportedly adding a new mobile chat app button, “WhatsApp”, their newest model. If this trend continues other mobile carriers are sure to follow in Nokia’s footsteps.

But this also means both good news and increased pressure for developers of mobile chat apps. If consumers are increasingly relying on chat apps to communicate, app developers need to be prepared. Can the chat app handle the load of a growing user base? Do their apps work everywhere, every time? In-the-wild testing will need to play a huge role in order for chat app adoption to continue to grow.

Will chat apps continue to overtake texting? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

When it comes to software bugs, the devil is in the ____. VentureBeat reports that a small subset of Mac users are experiencing a bug within the Messages app that deletes the last word of said messages when sent to an iPhone.

Judging from past experience, I have no doubt that the bug will be fixed in short order. What I found interesting about the situation, however, was the way in which the issues was originally reported by a user. Often times, users will post gripes along the lines of “this app sucks and doesn’t work.” Not so in this case. Here is a terrific, detailed bug report from the Apple message boards:

- It’s repeatable.  For example, the following message always causes the issue:  “man, why are you here?  Two are in testing places”.  On the iPhone it appears as “man, why are you here?  Two are in testing”.

- It’s a problem with iMessages.  If I send the exact same text from the iPhone, it goes through just fine.  The message has to originate from MacOS iMessages.  (I’m using the latest Mountain Lion and all updates as of 12/21/12)

- The full message is actually being successfully transferred to the phone;  it just does not display correctly.  There are two pieces of evidence for this.  If on the iPhone, the user copies the truncated message and pastes it somewhere else, the full message is pasted!  Moreover,  on the top level the messages app (where you see the last message from all the recent people you texted with), the full message displays.

- It can happen with both short and longer messages.   Here’s another longer message I noticed got cut off: “That’s funny that you though I was joking when I said I was debugging.  Why is that so weird?”

Read the Rest >>>

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.