Source: visual.ly

Anticipating the newest mobile app is like waiting for the next blockbuster movie; it’s become a major event. With top lists of most popular apps published per month and even per week, there is a whole market around interest in apps. Ruzzle, a word game resembling Scramble, earned the top position on iPhone apps charts as the most downloaded game in January, giving us the first big hit of 2013. Of course, the runaway success story of 2012 was Snapchat, a photo-messaging app, where users were sending about 50 million snaps a day. Think about the volume of data these two apps alone are producing. It’s staggering.

Year-ending Week is The Blockbuster Period

The last week of 2012 was the largest week for both new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history — a record-breaking 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.76 billion applications were downloaded. You cannot ignore the increasing demand for fast reliable data that the mushrooming mobile apps have created. Mobile applications relying on remote data sources and databases need to transmit data through wireless media, requiring improved performance of data transmission over wireless networks.

More Apps, More Data Transmitted Every Second

Applications on mobile devices are increasingly becoming richer and generating more and more data. Consumers expect to see updated data in their apps when they open the apps on their mobile devices, which mean automatic updating of data via faster transmission of data. Throughout the wireless industry, companies are innovating to keep up with the expectations of customers.

T-Mobile USA strives to be at the forefront of those changes and is handling about 60 million transactions per day, which translates to over three billion messages being passed through the various components in the process flow. And now there are a hundred systems that are talking to each other seamlessly, massively expanding the exchange of data across systems. TIBCOmessaging and integration software have been core to all this, allowing T-Mobile to expand and handle the increasing volume of data transmission.

“From a T-Mobile middleware perspective, launching a new platform like our highly regarded Android application is quick and simple because we can quickly develop the components that need to be created and integrate them with the large number that have already been built.”

– Mark Johnston, Manager – Middleware Space and Application Support, T-Mobile USA

All this data from mobile apps can be analyzed and insights gained into customers’ data behavior, enabling service providers to proactively market and deliver services that fit with the customer. So big data is set to play a starring role in the mobile apps blockbuster story, but that is a different movie for another day.

Source: Thetibcoblog

Apple receives 30% of the revenue from app customers, having made $3.86bn (£2.5bn) from the app store. Photograph: Rex Features/KPA/Zuma

More than 50 billion apps have now been downloaded from Apple‘s App Store since it opened inJuly 2008, the company said yesterday — and Google is not far behind, announcing 48bn downloads from its Google Play store so far.

Together, the figures highlight the huge new business created by the explosive spread of smartphones over the past five years, with downloads running at around 1,500 per second across the two stores and generating millions for developers.

The 50 billionth app was downloaded by American Brandon Ashmore from Ohio, who receives a $10,000 gift card after downloading the word game Say The Same Thing — but that’s small beer compared with the $9bn (£5.9bn) that have been paid out to app developers, representing 70% of the app prices. It’s a gigantic new economy that can now make teenagers into millionaires and create entire new businesses. Apple, which takes the other 30% of the revenue, has generated $3.86bn.

Finnish company Rovio, which introduced its Angry Birds game to the App Store in December 2009 has since seen almost 2bn downloads worldwide on smartphones and tablets, while 17-year-old Londoner Nick D’Aloisio, sold his company that makes the Summly app to web giant Yahoo in March for an estimated £18m.

Apps have also been used to create new sources of publicity by musicians such as Björk, and even Olympic athletes. Usain Bolt’s app was downloaded millions of times last summer during the Olympics.

With close to 1 billion people using smartphones, and using them much of the time, apps have begun to change how we think about computing, argues Dave Addey, founder and managing director of Agant, which developed the UK Train Times app. "Desktop software used to be complex and would do lots of things. Now we think of apps as doing one thing really well, but individually focused. They’ve also changed the perception of pricing for software." Where desktop software can cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of pounds, app prices are typically measured in tens of pence – or, frequently, are free.

Apps have proliferated dramatically: both Apple and Google boast around 800,000 through their online stores, while Microsoft’s Windows Phone Store has 150,000 and BlackBerry World about 205,000.

Yet for developers, the growth of the App Store has brought its own problems. The sheer number of apps available has meant getting noticed has become essential to hitting the charts, and so making money; that $9bn paid to developers is very unevenly distributed, with the vast majority going to a comparatively small number of developers. The importance of making a splash with an app has led to schemes outside the store in which third-party companies offer to "buy" positions in the top-selling or most-downloaded app charts.

For those on the Google Play store, the problem is piracy, leading to as many as 9 in 10 copies of games in use being pirated versions.

Apple’s insistence on taking 30% of any sales made through the App Store – including in-app purchases – has also led to clashes with large organisations, notably including Microsoft, which has declined to produce Office for the iPad, apparently because of disagreements about how to pay for it. The Financial Times also withdrew its app from the store in favour of a web version, protesting at the 30% take and Apple’s refusal to pass on details about subscribers.

Richard Dodd, of the British Retail Consortium, said: "This is a really sharp illustration of how rapidly the ways in which customers are choosing to shop and the things that they are shopping for are developing."

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Unity Technologies will grant indie developers free publishing tools for the development of iOS and Android games, the company announced today.

Beginning today, indie developers will have access to Unity’s basic mobile tools and will be able to publish their games and apps for iOS and Android via the build menu. Publishing services for Blackberry and Windows Phone 8 will also be added in the future, and will be included in the deal without additional cost. The Unity license to publish on mobile platforms cost $800 before today’s decision to release them for free.

"We were able to make Unity free for the web and for desktop computers a while ago, but have been dreaming of doing the same for mobile for what seems like forever," Unity CEO David Helgason said in a statement. "Mobile games development is possibly the most dynamic and exciting industry in the world, and it’s an honor to be able to help so many developers be so successful in fulfilling their visions and in building their businesses."

Rendering architect Aras Pranckevičius took to Twitter to share more details, stating developers who already paid for the license will receive some sort of compensation.

"There will be some compensation, but I don’t know the details right now," he said.

Source: Polygon

 © AndroidPIT

While we call less and less, we are online more with our smartphones, using services such as Messenger to communicate, watching online videos, playing games, listening to music, reading news, and keeping in touch via Twitter and Facebook. In essence, we use less of our talk minutes and gobble up more and more data, or so it seems. It appears that all this would not be possible without flexible data plans, at least not without spending a lot of money. I guess the nagging question for smartphone enthusiasts is as follows: “Will I be able to get by in one month with just 1 gigabyte of data?”

And so, I was surprised by the message about the upcoming new tariff “O2 Loop Smart” that was published on the Telefonica blog. In it this report, it says that the average data consumption in Germany is 196 megabytes. "Come on!” I thought. Shouldn’t this be much higher, considering the way trends are going with smartphones? It seems too impossible to believe. Here at the AndroidPIT office, our consumption is definitely higher than this national “average”: Sophia constantly complains that her 1 Gigabyte limit is always throttled, Nico and Andreas classify themselves as power users and are regularly at the limit of their plans,  and Toni and I constantly come in around 500 megabytes per month.

Until recently, I even got by with 300 megabytes per month and I was only able to achieve this by being very cautious with reducing the amount of apps I had synchronizing in the background. I also never used data heavy apps while on the road, such as video streaming, Youtube and the likes.  And sometimes I was still taken by surprise: once just using Google+ while out and about caused me to rack up 250 megabytes in data.

However, when you step back to think about it, this average might not be so unrealistic: only about half of smartphone users, according to Telefónica online, are always online. Only a third of users employ their smartphones when on the go, meaning outside of Wi-Fi reception.

The numbers showcased in this report are from last year, and one would expect that data consumption would continue to increase as an average. The whole song and dance behind this new tariff just reeks of a bait and catch tactic. By having customers bound to cheap contracts, how many of them will reach their limit within a week and then have their data connection throttled for the remainder of the month?

What do you think about this? How much is your monthly data usage? And what do you do if you have reached your data limit?

Source: AndroidPIT

The charging device has been dubbed a supercapacitor by Esha Khare of Saratoga, California, the Daily Mail reported.Khare won $50,000 for her invention at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Phoenix.

Khare has only used her supercapacitor to power a light-emitting diode (LED), but says that one day her invention will power cell phones, cars and any gadget that requires a rechargeable battery.

18 year old girl invents super supercapacitor. (photo credit:coolage)

Asked what inspired her to work on the technology, Khare said: "My cell phone battery always dies.""It has a lot of different applications and advantages over batteries in that sense," she was quoted as saying.

The supercapacitor is flexible and tiny, and is able to handle 10,000 recharge cycles, more than normal batteries by a factor of 10.Khare is a student of nanochemistry, and is now heading to Harvard.

Google has been in contact with Khare to explore how she plans to change the makeup of cell phone battery life, the report said.

Source: Tech2

Source: NDTV Gadgets

Oh, Google. Only you know how to get us in a tizzy. When we heard rumors that Key-Lime Pie would be at Google IO, we were expecting something… different. It was there, though — we just weren’t looking hard enough to find it. Google slipped these easter eggs into various sessions of theirs, with one showing a BugDroid chilling on a park bench eating a delicious-looking slice of key-lime pie, with another showing an RPG where one of the characters’ special moves is, you guessed it, key-lime pie. Now, if only we could get the Mountain View company to bestow upon us the software upgrade by the same name…

Source: Phandroid

Delivering apps via browsers avoids the hassle of trying to make them work on different platforms. But is that advantage sacrificed if they are ‘optimised’ for a particular browser?

I’ve been reflecting on this issue after reading an announcement late last week that SAP’s new Fiori web apps have been optimised to work with Google Chrome. Fiori apps are built in HTML5, which means they should work well in any modern browser, but SAP was happy to let Google boast that the apps wereoptimised for Chrome.

Chrome is a well-regarded and popular browser, so ensuring good performance on that platform makes sense. But there’s part of me that worries that the journey from “optimised for this platform” to “can only run on this platform” is a short one. What do you think?

Source: Lifehacker