iOS 6 introduced a whole slew of new built-in features and apps to the iOS community. Unfortunately for developers and testers, those new features may make their market share obsolete. Here are some of the potentially hardest hit areas, according to TechCrunch:

Turn-by-Turn Navigation
The most obvious app makers who will be affected are probably Garmin and TomTom, famous leaders in the space that sell GPS-based navigation apps at a premium. Both have USA navigation apps priced at around $50 on the Apple App store today. … But forget about the big guys: There are a number of startups and free apps that could also be hurt by an improved Maps app.

Payment and Loyalty Programs
The introduction of Apple’s PassBook could be great for consumers, as it has the potential to allow them to aggregate all sorts of “passes” all in one place: That includes stuff like boarding passes, store cards, and movie tickets to start, but there are all sorts of possibilities here to disrupt the larger mobile payments industry, as well as upend a whole bunch of smaller loyalty programs that are emerging on iOS.

Offline Readers and Bookmarks
The new offline reading lists will allow users to cache entire websites rather than just individual links. For users who have to date relied on Instapaper, Pocket, Spool, or other apps to save content for reading during their commutes or when not connected to the Internet, having the same native capability built into iOS could obviate the need for those apps.

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We talk about the testing matrix, well, all the time. It can seem intimidating. And, in fact, that was the complaint from some readers regarding a recent TechCrunch article detailing how a few developers test their Android apps.

Striving to uphold journalistic integrity and remain unbiased, TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler took the complaints to heart and reached out to more developers to get a fuller picture of Android QA practices. Here’s a snapshot of how four developers with successful apps do their testing (from TechCrunch):

Red Robot Labs (Veteran founding team from EA, Playdom and Crowdstar. More than 3.5 million downloads. They currently have the #27 top-grossing game in the Google Play store.)

Red Robot uses about 12 devices in-house and has a quality assurance team of two people. They then use a U.K.-based company called Testology to get further coverage with 35 handsets.

Pocket Gems (More than 70 million downloads. Newer to Android, but they had two of the top 10 grossing iOS games for all of last year according to Apple’s iTunes Rewind. #35 top-grossing game in Google Play.)

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Hopefully you enjoyed a long weekend with no work whatsoever. But if you work in mobile that probably wasn’t the case. According to a new study by iPass, an enterprise global WI-FI network provider, mobile employees tend to be workaholics. From PCWorld:

Almost two-thirds of mobile employees say they are working 50 to 60 hour-plus weeks, with most working weekends too, according to research. …

Enterprise global Wi-Fi network provider iPass surveyed 1,700 mobile employees at 1,100 enterprises worldwide, and found there was almost a 20 percent increase in a year of mobile workers reporting they were waking up through the night due to stress.

The survey also found that 88 percent of these wireless heads thought cable-free access was “as important to their lives, or almost, as running water and electricity”. Another 95 percent reported significant reductions in their job productivity without wireless access.

Also, 58 percent of mobile workers expressed frustration accessing corporate applications that are not optimised for smartphones and tablets.

Maybe not surprisingly mobile usage is causing “slightly increased friction” in mobile workers’ personal lives with their partners, family and friends. The highest amount of friction was reported in Europe at 38 percent.

Read the full article at PCWorld >>>

How many hours a week do you work? Are there any times when you totally put away all electronic devices?

In February I wrote about Mozilla’s plans to launch a cross-platform app store. Two weeks ago I wrote about Facebook’s new app center. And here we are again, with another new app store announcement. I’m beginning to feel like a broken record.

This time Gamefly, the video game subscription company, is throwing its hat in the ring. Not only is the company planning on producing Android and iOS apps, it will also create its own gaming app hub for Android. From the Gamefly press release (via engadget):

GameFly, Inc., the leading video game service, announced today its plans to begin publishing mobile games for the iOS and Android platforms, as well as launching the independent GameFly GameStore for Android later this fall. …

GameFly will also expand its mission to be the top resource for all gaming needs, offering expertly curated Android games in the GameFly GameStore with thousands of the best games and daily deals. With its large social network for gamers, game discovery will also be made easier via friend recommendations, and ratings and reviews from fellow gamers.

“GameFly is dedicated to giving consumers the best user experience possible, and to be their single destination for console, PC and mobile gaming needs,” said Sean Spector, GameFly co-founder and SVP of Business Development and Content. “We plan to be a leading player in mobile games by launching our retail GameStore for Android.”

Read the full press release at engadget>>>

You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Well in the case of Android fragmentation – a subject discussed at great length here and on the uTest blog – a picture is worth a few thousand devices.

The image you’re seeing is a data chart of thousands of separate device models encountered by the dev team at OpenSignalMaps over the course of a six month period. It may not be a flashy infographic, but it’s one of the best visuals I’ve seen to convey the challenge of Android hardware fragmentation. Here with more details on the chart (and on Android fragmentation in general) is arstechnica:

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The debate has been raging for awhile: Which will win out? Mobile websites or native apps?

There have been solid arguments for both and even hybrid compromises (like native app icons that take you to a mobile site). But another melding of the two forms has just appeared in the form on CNET’s new mobile site.

In an article published yesterday CNET details how the design aesthetics of a native app influenced the redesign of their mobile site. The thought they put into their site is thorough and interesting and might just give mobile site designers a few ideas to think about and build on. Here’s what CNET did:

We know that there’s nothing as frustrating as a hard-to-navigate mobile Web site. There’s so little space on a phone screen that every pixel has to earn its keep. So when we redesigned our m.cnet.com site from the ground up, we took cues from something everyone knows and loves: mobile apps.

First, we simplified the layout of our mobile site and made its navigation familiar to anyone who uses Facebook, Path, or any other common mobile app. …

Just because m.cnet.com looks like an app doesn’t mean that is an app, though. Anytime you click a link that takes you to a CNET page on your phone’s browser, you’ll get this experience whether you’ve installed a CNET app or not. We’ve made our article pages clean and easy to read, with standard sharing navigation at the upper right.

Get more details at CNET >>>

Has anyone used the new CNET mobile site? What do you think of it? Is it intuitive and easy to navigate or did CNET miss their mark? Is the concept of “native app design for mobile web” something you think will or should catch on?

The readers of the SD Times (Software Development Times) are probably a fairly good subset of the population to poll when you’re interested in how many companies are buying into the mobile app phenomenon. Well BZ Research (another arm of SD Times’ owner BZ Media) did just that and found that 70% of its respondents planned on having a mobile app within the next 18 months. No word on how many people took part in the survey.

Here’s a few numbers for you:

• Of those already building apps tablet specific apps are betting out phone-targeted apps 88.1% to 82.3%
• Apps for e-readers are grabbing the attention of 9.8% of companies
• Android apps barely beat out iOS at a rate of 63.9% versus 63.6%
• 1 in 5 companies are developing for Blackberry

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We write a lot about the scope of mobile fragmentation (particularly within Android) and the vastness of the testing matrix related to that fragmentation. Usually it’s viewed as a pain in the side of developers because it makes it difficult to know how their apps will preform across different devices/OS/etc. It’s also a pain for testers and end users who are upset when a glaring bug appears or an app isn’t offered for their device.

But the folks over at Sourcebits (a development company) used some space in VentureBeat to counter that assertion. In fact, they present five reason mobile fragmentation is actually good for developers! Here’s a summary of their five reasons:

Big fish, small pond

Look at Amazon’s Android-based, highly customized Kindle Fire. Small platform, some might say — perhaps even a niche within a niche. But that’s actually a positive. “We’re seeing impressive uptake on Kindle Fire and Amazon’s marketplace,” said Nat Trienens, co-founder and Director of Mobile Services for Fuzz Productions in New York. “There aren’t as many apps in that market, so there’s a bigger opportunity to get better market position.”

Mobile is really, really, really big

There are currently almost 6 billion people on the globe who have a mobile phone, according to the International Telecommunications Union. 6. Billion. People. That’s a lot. And many of them have or will soon have smartphones: IDC tells us that 491 million smartphones were shipped in 2011.

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Interested in developing apps for the upcoming Windows 8 but don’t want to shell out the money right now for a lowly Windows 7 tablet? Fear not, Splashtop has your back!

The remote desktop maker has created a new iOS app called Win8 Metro Testbed that will allow developers to test their Windows 8 apps on an iPad (before Windows 8 is even available). Here’s their thinking (from Gigaom):

Why an iPad? Cliff Miller, Splashtop’s president of its Asia/Pacific region and chief marketing officer, said this of the potential Windows 8 developers the company is targeting:

“If they want to test their app with touch gestures there’s only one way to do that and that is to buy a Windows tablet, and that can cost $500 to $1,000 or more. … And 99 percent of Win8 tablet developers — they have iPads.”

Now, there are no Windows 8 tablets on the market yet. Microsoft has unveiled a public preview of the software, but the finished version of the desktop/tablet OS is supposed to roll out to the public some time in October. Developers can test their apps on Windows 7 tablets in the meantime, but to Miller’s point, it’s a hefty expense for some individual developers and smaller shops.

Read the full article at Gigaom >>>

So if you are interested in developing or testing an app for the up-and-coming Windows platform, break out the iPad and get cracking! Then when October rolls around and you feel comfortable buying the newest Windows tablet, you’ll already have an awesome app available in the Win8 store!

SEO has been a buzz word for a good few years now, but that’s old news. Now it’s all about ASO, “App Store Optimization.”

Until now the best way to score app downloads was to be featured in one of the app stores. And to do this you either A. had to be getting a ton of downloads anyway or B. have an amazing app that happened to get picked up by the people running the store and highlighted in the featured apps area – not an easy feat. But now a new movement of optimizing apps for search is getting into full swing. I wrote a few months ago about optimizing your app name for easier on-device searching (after it’s already been downloaded). Now that concept of app optimization is being put into practice with an eye toward app store searches, this time targeting the keywords used to describe an app. From TechCrunch:

With over 600,000+ iOS applications, and now some 450,000 on Android, the real challenge for developers is having their app surfaced higher than hundreds of other competitors in the app store search results. Doing this correctly involves ASO, or app store optimization. It’s basically SEO repurposed for mobile….

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