Mobile App Testing

IBM recently released its 2011 Tech Trends Report. They surveyed more than 4,000 IT professionals across 93 countries to get a sense of where IT will be headed in the next two years. The main topics that kept coming up were business analytics, mobile computing, cloud computing and social business. Each topic gets about two pages in the brief (visually appealing) report … here’s what they said about mobile computing:

Mobile computing is here to stay, and offers room for IT professional growth as more and more organizations build mobile applications. Globally, Android emerged as the top platform for mobile application development; 70% of respondents are expected to develop for the Android platform over the next 24 months, while 49% plan to develop for iOS. …

Developers looking to increase their mobile skills would be smart to look to Android. With its large and growing global install base, Android is ranked as being the top mobile platform over the next 24 months. This open source platform based on Java and XML offers a much shorter learning curve, and this contributes to its popularity with IT professionals. iOS remains strong in the U.S. and other developed countries.

As an effective channel in reaching many users and as a means of increasing the productivity and efficiency of an organization’s workforce, mobile is viewed by respondents as the second most “in demand” area for software development.
Mobile computing has a high level of penetration, with three in four survey respondents currently working in mobile computing, growing to 85% within the next two years. Respondents see enterprise and industry-specific applications as top areas for adoption within 24 months, with extending mobile capabilities to existing core applications close behind.

Check out the full report >>>

Call of Duty has been having some load issues lately. Last week a stat tracker/social network called Call of Duty Elite (which was tied to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3) crashed when it couldn’t handle the giant influx of excited gamers.

At launch, our registration and login systems were crushed by gamers trying to enter the ELITE site at the same time. We have now fixed the registration and login systems, but we have found that the greater than expected demand is crashing servers. We’re immediately deploying multiple additional servers to beef up the system. We are also going to temporarily limit access to ELITE services on both the console applications and website while we build additional capacity and scale. We’ll look to increase access to greater numbers of users as soon as possible.

The issue is still being resolved.

But since this is MobileAppTesting.com, let’s get into the mobile app side of things. Call of Duty was supposed to launch a mobile version of Elite. That plan is now on hold. Following the initial site crash, Elite’s creators, Beachhead Studios, have decided to delay the mobile release and do more testing to prevent another problem. Here’s what the latest Call of Duty Elite status update said:

While many people are curious and excited to use Call of Duty ELITE’s mobile applications, we plan to release the iOS and Android apps when we’re confident the service will be able to handle the extra traffic they will generate – so stay tuned.

I don’t know if there were simply more concurrent users than Activision & Beachhead predicted or if they just didn’t do enough load testing. But at least they’re taking the chance now to up their testing instead of just moving forward with a faulty product. As they say, “better late than never” … but it sure would have looked a whole lot better if Beachhead had tested all this before a public launch.

From Wired.com: “Marco Cochrane is the sculptor of the 40-foot-high “Bliss Dance” sculpture, created on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. We head to his studio to see how he built this massive, beautiful structure.”

Back in July Mike wrote about a new AT&T Labs Research report that took a look at end to end data transmission paths in an attempt to figure out why some apps drain so much battery life or are slow. The researchers “discovered the source of the problem in the complex interactions between the application, device and the cellular network, looking into network architecture and lower level protocols that are typically hidden from application developers.” Here’s the root of the issue and an example from AT&T’s report:

In particular, application developers are usually unaware of cellular specific characteristics that incur potentially complex interaction with the application behavior. Even for professional developers, they often do not have visibility into the resource-constrained mobile execution environment. Such situations potentially result in smartphone applications that are not cellular-friendly, i.e., their radio channel utilization or device energy consumption are inefficient because of a lack of transparency in the lower-layer protocol behavior. For example, we discovered that for Pandora, a popular music streaming application on smartphones, due to the poor interaction between the radio resource control policy and the application’s data transfer scheduling mechanism, 46% of its radio energy is spent on periodic audience measurements that account for only 0.2% of received user data.

In the most recently released highlight of the report, AT&T Labs Research identifies 11 ways to build efficient apps that will work no matter what carrier you’re targeting (all the recommendations are aimed at carrier-independent standards and protocols). Here’s the list:

• Understand Mobile Networks
• Handle Multiple Simultaneous TCP Connections
• Reduce Inefficient Connections with Periodic Transfers
• Deal with Connection Opening Problems
• Close Connections As Soon As Possible
• Offload to Wi-Fi
• Handle Duplicate Content and Caching
• Utilize Pre-fetching
• Manage Peripherals
• Upgrade from HTTP 1.0
• Handle Screen Rotations

Now let’s break down a few. Since the first few tips were more or less covered in July’s initial post, we’ll jump down the list a bit.

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)

Last week I wrote about RootMetrics’ 4G report and PRWeb’s story detailing which carriers had the best 4g network. Today, PRWeb released another story looking at a different part of the report – which cities had the best 4G coverage. Nineteen of the 27 markets RootMetrics investigated passed their 4G test (which looked for consistent 4G speed). Denver came in at No. 1 while New York City, Boston and Washington D.C. (among others) didn’t pass the test. Here are the top and bottom scoring cities:

RootMetrics™, the first independent service to measure mobile experience from a consumer’s point of view, announced results from comprehensive testing in 27 different local markets* telling which of those cities qualify as “4G Cities.” Since March 2011, members of the RootMetrics test squad have traveled the country and performed more than 238,000 data tests. By aggregating all of these data test results, the company has identified patterns of performance and can isolate carrier consistencies. The good news for mobile users is that RootMetrics tests revealed that 19 of the 27 markets exceeded the 4G threshold. Eleven earned “Upper Tier” status, recording speeds above the 4G threshold in more than 50 percent of tests. These include Denver (61.8 percent), Portland (61.5 percent), Minneapolis (60.2 percent), San Jose (59.2 percent), Dallas (57.6 percent), Cincinnati (56.8 percent), St. Louis (55 percent), San Francisco (52.9 percent), Sacramento (51.8 percent), Cleveland (51.4 percent) and Seattle (50 percent). Eight qualified as “Second Tier” status, recording speeds above the 4G threshold in 40-50 percent of tests. These include Atlanta (49.6 percent), Los Angeles (46.4 percent), Houston (45.2 percent), Milwaukee (45.1 percent), Phoenix (44.5 percent), Pittsburgh (43 percent), Philadelphia (42.2 percent) and Chicago (41.1 percent).

Read more…

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?

So you went with the free antivirus app on your Android (hey, we like free too!). Is it really good enough? According to AVTest, it’s not. Here’s what PCMag has to say:

Researchers at German antivirus testing lab AV-Test.org run regular certification tests on PC antivirus products under Windows 7, Vista, and XP. This month, though, they turned their attention to the many antivirus products available for Android devices. Their conclusion: most of the free ones are useless. Or rather, they’re worse than useless because their users gain a false sense of protection.

For testing they selected seven popular free antivirus apps from the Android Market. They also included F-Secure Mobile Security and Kaspersky Mobile Security for comparison purposes.

Each product was installed on an Android device containing inactive specimens of over 150 recent Android threats. Researchers ran an on-demand scan and recorded how many threats were detected. Kaspersky and F-Secure detected over half. The best free product, Zoner Antivirus, caught 32 percent. All the rest detected under 10 percent, and some didn’t detect any samples at all.

Check out how the other tests turned out at PCMag.com >>>

Thomas Suarez did. Take a look:

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!