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.

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The use of tablets and apps in the workplace is growing – and it isn’t expected to slow down any time soon!

From Online Marketing Trends

This is one way to ensure your app is easy to use and intuitive…

… but you should probably make sure your tester is de-clawed first.

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.

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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. …

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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.

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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.

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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!

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.

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Since this was the last hoorah for Microsoft at CES, we’re not completely surprised that they decided to start some controversy. With a little help from Nokia, it looks like a new mobile war is underway. Make of this what you will (via Wired):

Nokia declared all-out war on the mobile industry on Monday, publicly unveiling its flagship U.S. device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The new device, the Nokia Lumia 900, is the first Nokia-made phone to run on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, the high-speed wireless mobile network slowly expanding across the States.

The Lumia 900 runs the Windows Phone operating system, and in showing off the device, Nokia president and CEO Stephen Elop re-emphasized Nokia’s dedication to Microsoft’s mobile platform. Nokia is the only major mobile device manufacturer to bet the house completely on Microsoft’s platform alone (other Windows Phone manufacturers like HTC and Samsung also make Android phones).

“We believe that the industry has shifted from a battle of devices, to a war of ecosystems,” Elop said at a press conference on Monday. “With Lumia, our intent is to establish a series of beachheads…it started in Europe, now in the U.S., and more in the coming year.”

Elop wasn’t alone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer joined Elop, his former Microsoft lieutenant, at the press conference on stage, a clear signal that the companies are betting big on one another. Towering above Elop and the rest of the crowd on stage, Ballmer delivered the rallying cry for his company’s small-but-rapidly developing platform at the event.

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