If you’re a mobile app tester you really should consider expanding your hardware collection to include a tablet (if you haven’t already). In just a few short weeks tablet sales exploded – to the tune of a 9% ownership increase. From PCWorld:
The holidays were certainly prosperous for the tablet industry.
The number of U.S. tablet owners just about doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between the middle of December and the start of January, according to a Pew Internet report out today.
Coming from a period from flat growth since the summer, tablets enjoyed a surge during the holiday season as lower-cost devices such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablet reached shoppers just in the nick of time. …
Drilling down to the buyers themselves, tablets proved especially popular among households earning more than $75,000 and those with at least a college degree. A full 26 percent of those with incomes higher than $75,000 and 31 percent of those with higher levels of education now own a tablet. People under 50 were also a huge market for tablets.
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:
….by the time 2015 comes around. This according to research firm IHS iSuppli, who’s forecasting that the Windows Phone OS to overtake Apple’s iOS within the next couple of years. Seems far-fetched to me (and I’m a huge WP7 fanboy) but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Here are a few details courtesy of The Daily Mail:
So far, Windows Phone has remained niche, despite fan and reviewer enthusiasm for the operating system.
Last year, Windows Phone accounted for just two per cent of the smartphone market.
By 2015, that figure will be 16.7 per cent, says iSuppli.
The analysts say that Nokia’s recent adoption of Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system will be key to the operating system’s dominance.
Analyst Wayne Lam says that the new Lumia 900 phone, a high-end smartphone recently unveiled by Nokia, will be the start of Windows Phone’s revival – and will help Nokia regain the market share it has lost to Android devices and iPhones.
You’ve heard of eComm, now get ready for mHealth – mobile health. Apps geared toward helping people monitor and manage their health are expected to grow from $230 million in revenue in 2010 to $392 million by 2015, according to research by Frost & Sullivan. InformationWeek has the scoop:
Among those projected to download and use mobile health apps more frequently over the next few years are older Americans and their caregivers and patients with chronic conditions. The study notes that as the healthcare industry seeks to reduce costs, mobile health apps will become more prevalent. The aim of these tools is to better monitor patients’ health and prevent costly events such as hospital readmissions.
Furthermore, in a consumer-driven patient-centered healthcare model, patients are encouraged to play a greater role in tracking their health through mobile health apps that monitor vital information such as medication adherence, blood pressure, and glucose readings.
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.
The average smartphone user has 65 apps on their phone (according to a Flurry estimate). (Even I – who hates clutter, even on my phone – have 40 some-odd apps!) But what if you’re a mobile app tester instead of a casual user? You could easily have five times that average on your phone, especially if you’re like Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, who doesn’t like deleting apps. Even the ones she doesn’t use anymore.
The average smartphone user has 64 mobile apps installed on their mobile device. I’m ahead of the curve. I have around 400. It’s pushing nearly 7 GB of storage. Granted, many of these apps were installed for testing purposes only – they aren’t used daily by any means. But my real problem is that I’m not inclined to remove apps I don’t use. They just sit there on the phone, abandoned, languishing on the back screens. I could delete them, but I don’t. You know…just in case.
But she may have found a solution for her over-crowded phone problem – albeit a work-in-progress type of solution:
The promise of iCloud, as I see it, is that these apps can disappear from the iPhone’s homescreen, but never have to fully disappear from reach. They can be recalled through a simple search. …
What happens to all your testing work when apps intended (design and tested) for a specific platform are transffered unceremoniously to an entirely different platform – completely as is? From Engadget:
Back in October, BlueStacks unveiled an alpha version of its App Player, bringing a slew of Android apps to Windows PCs, tablets and desktops. Today, the company expanded its reach with a new, Windows 8-compatible version of its software, integrating more than 400,000 Android apps into Microsoft’s latest OS. The latest App Player, which will support both standard desktop and Metro UI modes, effectively allows Windows 8 users to run “most every app” from the Android catalog, without having to conduct any porting magic. BlueStacks demonstrated its new virtualization tool on a Windows 8 Ultrabook at CES today, and plans to bring the App Player to a brand new device this March, when Taiwanese manufacturer InHon releases its first Ultrabook, with the software pre-loaded.
A “virtualization tool” is mentioned and this video accompanied the full press release, but it doesn’t really show you anything other than some icons on a supposedly PC-sized screen.
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.
If you’re a mobile app tester you really should consider expanding your hardware collection to include a tablet (if you haven’t already). In just a few short weeks tablet sales exploded – to the tune of a 9% ownership increase. From PCWorld:
