Tag: Mobile Applications

If Mobile Addicts Were The Population Of A Country, It Would Be Just Smaller Than The U.S.

Yahoo’s Flurry released a new report looking at people’s addiction to their mobile devices. In short, addiction is on the rise.

“On June 29th Bank of America released the findings of its second annual report on Consumer Mobility,” says Simon Khalaf, SVP of Publisher Products at Flurry. “The report showed that the US population is perpetually plugged-in with 71% of those surveyed disclosing they actually sleep with their smartphones. This prompted us to revisit the study we conducted in Q2 of 2014 in which we first uncovered the rise of a new breed of mobile users: the Mobile Addicts.”

According to the report, wordwide mobile addicts grew 59% over the last year.

“This large group of users (more than 280 million people!) are addicted to messaging, productivity and banking apps, and they use messaging apps 6.56 times more than an average mobile consumer,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.

Year over year, the total population of smart devices measured by Flurry grew from by 38% from 1.3B to 1.8B. Regular Users (those who use apps between once and sixteen times daily) grew by 25% from 784 million to 985 million. Super Users (those who use apps between 16 and 60 times daily) grew 34% from 440 million to 590 million. Mobile addicts (those who launch applications 60 times or more per day) grew 59% from from 176 million to 280 million.

According to Flurry, if the amount of mobile addicts were the population of a country, it would be the fourth largest just behind the United States.

Mobile addicts are largely using messaging and social apps, followed by utilities and productivity apps, then games, finance, and news/magazines.

Flurry shares more analysis on its findings here.

Yahoo also announced that its Mobile Developer Conference will take place in New York on August 26.

Images via Thinkstock, Flurry

July 16, 2015
Amazon Launches Live App Testing For Android, Amazon Apps

Amazon just announced the launch of a new developer tool called Live App Testing, which lets you distribute apps in the Amazon Appstore to a pre-defined set of testers. This way, chances of a successful launch are increased, as this testing takes place before the app goes fully live.

Those in the testing group will be able to use in-app purchasing and other Amazon services in its production environment, so developers can make sure things are working right. You can also use the opportunity to gather feedback and make improvements.

“In house testing with side-loaded apps is great for isolating and fixing bugs, but it’s not enough. To be certain that your customers are getting the experience you want them to have, you have to test your app against a production environment,” says Amazon’s Paul Cutsinger.

“Live App Testing allows you to create a version of your app that is only distributed to select testers of your choice,” he explains. “You invite testers by adding their email address to Live App Testing. Once testers are invited to test, they will receive an email with instructions to download the test app and begin testing against Amazon’s production environment. Only invited testers will be allowed to download and test your app. As a part of Live App Testing, you can test your apps on any Android or Amazon Fire device.”

Amazon provides a step-by-step guide to using Live App Testing here.

Image via Amazon

August 13, 2014
Twitter and iPhone: A Match Made In Social Media Heaven

As Chris discussed during his extensive coverage of Apple’s WWDC segment, one of the bigger announcements from their session had to do with the integration of Twitter with iOS 5, the newest version of the iPhone operating system. To some, this particular marriage of the popular social media service and the mobile device that’s synonymous with mobile communications could very well change the way mobile applications are developed, especially for the iPhone environment.

Over at ReadAndWriteWeb, there’s a good breakdown of what the partnership could mean, and if the following idea is close to being accurate — “iOS apps will look like, feel like, read from and publish to Twitter like never before. And they’ll do that in many cases instead of using Facebook” — the idea of Twitter and Apple ruling the applications world may not be that far-fetched, regardless of how popular the Android environment is.

Apparently, the Twitter integration introduces features to iOS 5 that will be similar to Facebook’s mobile capabilities. In fact, as pointed out in the RWW post, thanks to the partnership with the iPhone, Twitter essentially beat Facebook to the punch of making “everything social.” Granted, Facebook is still one of the more popular applications for the iPhone, laying the groundwork for a potential conflict. It’s doubtful Facebook’s developers would want to integrate Twitter features when both services are competing for social media supremacy.

The Twitter/iOS 5 integration gives Twitter an advantage, especially in the iPhone environment. Would Facebook want to assist in the process of lessening its own impact in the mobile device arena?

For those who are wondering about how the Twitter layer in iOS 5 would work, Jason Costa, the head of Twitter Developer Relations, posted a primer at the Google Groups community for Twitter Development Talk. Costa’s post sheds some light on the partnership and what iPhone app users can expect going forward:

There is single sign-on, which allows you to retrieve a user’s identity, avatar, and other profile data. There’s also a frictionless core signing service, allowing you to make and sign any call to the Twitter API. There is follow graph synchronization, which enables you to bootstrap a user’s social graph for your app. Furthermore, there is the tweet sheet feature, giving your app distribution and reach across Twitter.

The last point is important because it basically says applications will feature a “post to Twitter” feature, letting your followers know what you’re doing, and, considering how important location data is treated, where you are doing it.

The RWW post discusses a potential “Twitter versus Facebook” scenario, mentioning that while it was Facebook doing all the talking about social integration in the mobile device industry, Twitter actually formed the partnership necessary to reach that goal. Considering just how frequently iPhone owners download and use applications, it’s easy to see why Twitter is receiving such a rosy outlook:

Of course, there’s the the fact that Facebook is still an incredibly popular application, especially for the iPhone. Could that reduce the impact of the Twitter/iOS 5 partnership, especially if Facebook resists adding Twitter features?

June 7, 2011
Creepy Takes the Work out of Stalking

As the integration of social media continues unabated, there are questions and concerns regarding the reams of data in regards to the geoweb. Be it check-in services like Foursquare or services like Twitter, which also features location-based data, provided the user wants to enable this feature, the ability to track someone based on their social media use is easier than most would suspect.

Now, with applications like Creepy, ~~stalking your prey~~ developing a pattern of behavior for someone of interest, especially if they are ignorant in the ways of geo-technology, is even easier. According to Creepy’s developer, ilektrojohn, the application does the following:

creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.

In other words, creepy aggregates user data from Twitter, provided the user has turned on the location feature, and data from EXIF tags from photos posted to Flickr, among other image-sharing sites.

This data is then mapped on a service like Google Maps, and presto. You can now see the geolocation profile of the user who was queried. Essentially, you’ll get a detailed geo-web based diary of the person’s movements and activities, based on their check-ins and image uploads. Granted, in order to use creepy, knowing the user name of the target in question is essential. While that isn’t much of a problem on Twitter, finding out this information about Flickr users, as well as other image services, may be more problematic. Good thing TwitPic is also represented by the creepy app.

Now, for those of you worried about this explosion in harness-able geo-data, and fear everybody everywhere tracking your every movement, Mike Melanson over at ReadWriteWeb.com has a perspective that might put people at ease:

So, should you stop broadcasting your location? I vote no. (And not because I want to stalk you, I swear.) I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online.

Of course, this little tidbit at the end of Melanson’s post might make you reconsider:

This isn’t for everyone. If you have bad relationships with your exes or lawyers coming after you for bills, you might not want to live so publicly. And are we that far off from insurance companies gathering check-in information and using it to calculate your premiums?

Or how about unsolicited, contextual advertising based on your current location, delivered directly to your mobile device of choice? Does the idea of that creep you out? Granted, the Creepy app does nothing of the kind, but if a freelance developer can do something like this in their spare time, what kind of data collection utilities do you think companies like AT&T have?

Here’s a little art project video from Chris Oakley showing the potential of this tracking technology. While Oakley’s work is fictional, it seems quite plausible and quite surprising:

Still think all this geolocation data is benign?

April 1, 2011