With Brian Fling in London for the @media conference, Bryan Zug steps in to chat with Chez about the latest mobile news.
Google launches Google Wallet, a consumer based app with nearfield payments, and Square launches their iPad register. Is this the next step into all of us having a Google Life? What this means for mobile payments and why banks will be watching this move very closely.
Instapaper decides to pull their free app and only offer their paid version of the app. Bryan and Chez discuss the learnings we can take from that.
Bryan asks whether we’re in a bubble and what this means for the next thirty years in the mobile industry. They also look at boring / mainstream adoption as a success metric.
Anyone who has heard Brian talk at conferences lately (or been watching The Context) will know that he’s been predicting massive growth for the Windows Phone next year. Well, now the Guardian has backed up that assertion (the highest form of validation as far as I’m concerned) by predicting that the “Windows Phone should easily get 20% of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. It could conceivably do better.”
It’s a pretty bold claim considering that as of 2010 Apple’s iPhone only had 16% of the smartphone marketshare, and they’ve been around for nearly 4 years. The Guardian is basing part of the claim on the Windows Phone app store, given that it already has about 15,000 apps, which has already rivaled Rim’s app store – they clearly have developer momentum. As an aside, I don’t think we’ve had a single client ask us about developing a Windows Phone app, although it does come up (quite far down the list) when we ask what devices we should target when we’re testing mobile web apps.
But the main reason is Microsoft’s deal with Nokia.
Nokia sells around 110m handsets per quarter of which more than 20m are smartphones; and almost exactly 50% of its mobile phone revenue comes from those smartphones. Nokia is a fantastically well-oiled machine for selling phones, and has been doing it for years; it sells more phones than any other manufacturer. And it sells more smartphones per quarter than any other manufacturer.
Nokia has enormous geographical reach, and it’s virtually synonymous with “mobile phone” in a number of countries. Sure, the US and Europe have been going off it. But it’s strong in other regions. It has good relationships with carriers. It can shift phones when it wants to.
So if Nokia turns up in 2012 with smartphones running Windows Phone, carriers aren’t going to turn it away. They’re going to be delighted. Especially if Nokia can use its legendary supply chain strengths (a hardware element) to push prices down. Once Nokia starts shipping Windows Phone products in any numbers, it’s going to sell them as fast as it can make them. What’s not to like? It’s a friendly interface. It connects. It’s not maddeningly confusing.
One thing is certain: the next 24 months in mobile are going to be very interesting times.
Apple reached a milestone today by approving its 500,000th app in the App Store. In contrast, the Android marketplace has about 200,000 approved apps, and Nokia’s Ovi Store has about 50,000. (Although to be fair, the iTunes app store has been around for longer).
It’s interesting that there are only two apps that aren’t games in the top 14.
Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)
I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?
(This is also a major reason why I have no plans to enter the Android market.)
— Marco Ament, on why he has removed the free iPhone version of Instapaper
The BBC just screened a documentary in the UK that examined why technology brands such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter have become so popular and such an important part of many user’s lives.
Secrets of the Superbrands focused the first episode on Apple. I personally have never understood the cult of Jobs or why there are so many Apple fanboys willing to line up in the rain for 24 hours to buy an $800 phone. I love Apple products but I’ve never understood the fanatical obsession.
Very interestingly, the documentary showed neuroscientists studying MRI scans of a fanboy’s brain while he thought of Apple, and then other non-related brands. While this particular Apple fanatic was thinking of Apple, the same parts of his brain were triggered as those of deeply religious people viewing religious imagery.
“This suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion,” one of the scientists says.
Now that is a very interesting brand position to be in. People already jokingly refer to Steve Jobs as the Messiah, and the Cult of Apple. Turns out that it’s triggering the same brain response as religion.
“Like Apple, mobile phones and social networks offer an opportunity for us to express our basic human need to communicate. And it’s by tapping into our basic needs, like gossip, religion or sex that these brands are taking over our world at such lightning speed. That’s not to say that clever marketing and brilliant technical innovation aren’t also crucial, but it seems that if you’re not providing a service which is of potential interest to every one of the 6.9 billion human beings on the planet, the chances are you’re never going to become a technology superbrand.” – Alex Riley, presenter of Secrets of the Superbrands
With becoming a technology superbrand comes great responsibility…
Proving that the internet is basically for sharing photos and videos of cats, Friskies (the cat food company) has released a set of iPad games designed specifically for cats and how they respond to different stimuli.
One of [the] challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones. In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback.
We’ve had a lot of discussion over the years about the best tools to wireframe and prototype mobile design. We have camps from Keynote, Omnigraffle, paper, whiteboards, Interface Builder and HTML, as well as various apps. We haven’t come to a definitive answer about which tool is best, and try to use the best tool for the job on a per project basis.
One of our mobile design directors, Scott, has created a set of Omnigraffle stencils for iPhone 4 to help us rapidly sketch out wireframes. After watching Dan Saffer’s presentation at Web Directions Unplugged we’ve just realised we should release these for everyone else to use as they are a really useful tool. They’re available to download from here.
Designing for mobile devices using HTML, CSS and JavaScript can be painful.
Not just painful for me, the developer, but also for our clients that often don’t understand the challenges that are exponentially added to a project with simple statements such as, “Can we support the Blackberry Curve as well?”
Brian Fling’s book, “Mobile Design and Development” presented a classification system of mobile devices based on support for XHTML, modern CSS, JavaScript and a few other factors. This has been used and improved on internally in pinchzoom when we are in the planning stages of a mobile web project.
What this doesn’t do is display these challenges to the client on an actual device. We needed something that a client could test themselves and that would return some kind of clue as to the support offered by each individual device.
That said, I created Sniffer, a small app that detects CSS support in the browser and returns a true or false value depending on the browser’s support for that feature. It’s a very early alpha release, so it may be buggy or sometimes return information that isn’t extremely helpful to the client – but the basic idea is there.
The code is on GitHub, so feel free to have a play. We have a long laundry list on how to make it better once we use it on an actual project with both our clients and internal developers.
