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February 23 2012
flamewar
I just want to start this out by saying I love you guys. I really do. TechCrunch is lucky enough to have a really smart, well-informed readership which keeps us diligent in our reporting. You guys are also pretty hilarious, and who doesn't enjoy a good ROFL now and then. But if there's one thing I've learned through the comments section here at TechCrunch, it's that these Android vs. iOS fanboy flame wars need to stop.
January 19 2012
scaled.photo 1
Thrillist-owned Jackthreads has just announced the availability of their first mobile for Android and iPhone. Built by an outside vendor using designs and user experience built in-house, the app allows shoppers to browse new deals and sales as they are announced on the site and, if so inclined, make purchases. I spoke to lead developer Chris Steib who said that JackThreads saw that much of the traffic was coming through mobile sites, something they had not initially expected.
ios-soul
Ready for a blast of late 90's fighting game nostalgia? Well, get those thumbs ready, because Namco's arcade/Dreamcast classic Soul Calibur has just been released for iOS. I enjoyed a long-standing fling with Soul Calibur in my younger days, mostly because it was the only fighting game I was ever good at. My skills seem to have dulled considerably over the intervening years, though the touch controls probably don't help much.
January 18 2012
Screen Shot 2012-01-18 at 3.24.05 PM
FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces. They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they surveyed isn't very statistically useful, but they were able to grab quite a few percentages based on page views of various support questions.
androidvsiosnew
Nielsen just released its latest numbers with regard to new smartphone owners, and it would seem that the iPhone (particularly the 4S) is quite popular among those migrating over to the smartphone segment. In fact, since the iPhone 4S launched in October, the number of recent smartphone buyers who chose the iPhone has reached 44.5 percent, up from just 25 percent in October.
January 11 2012
iphonemu
Apple users probably have more than enough media on their iDevices to keep them entertained on the go, but Sony Network Entertainment President Tim Schaaff thinks there's room for another media service on iOS. According to VentureBeat, the company's Music Unlimited streaming service will land on iOS some time in Q1 2012.
January 07 2012
hell-road
From Vannevar Bush to PageRank, the World Wide Web was built on hypertext, the notion that any morsel of information can link to any other. But that was always only a dream, and a rapidly-dissipating one of late. Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that "Facebook is gaslighting the Web" with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinski complain that Google Plus will "mess up the Internet" for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds "they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.") Google's Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page JavaScript sites breaking the web. Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough -- clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page -- but it's very difficult to reliably link in to an app.
January 02 2012
mobile-web-marketshare-2011
Who's browsing the mobile web the most? Apparently, iPhone and iPad owners are. According to end-of-the-month data from statistics provider NetMarketShare, iOS users ended up with a 52% market share of mobile web browsing in December 2011. More simply put, that means that over half of the mobile web browsing last month took place on an iOS device. Android, meanwhile, had a 16.2% share, behind Java ME at 21.27%, which fell into second place.
December 31 2011
freight
2011 was the year of Android. A little over a year ago Andy Rubin tweeted that 300,000 Android devices were being activated each day. In January we reported that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of US smartphone market share. In June Android's activations-per-day reached 500,000; this month they hit 700,000. That's more than double the rate at which it was spreading when it overtook iOS. By comparison, UBS estimated in December that Apple would sell 30 million iPhones in 4Q 2011. Sounds like a lot, until you realize that Android devices -- almost all of which are phones, as Rubin's numbers don't include Kindle Fires or Nooks -- are being activated at a rate of five million a week, or 65 million in a quarter. In other words, Android phone sales were probably close to double Apple's during the quarter in which Apple's flagship iPhone 4S was released. I expect Apple outsold Android at Christmas, given that they boasted this year's three most wanted gifts, but Android will make up that difference in a few short weeks. How did this happen? Certainly not because Android is better. Almost no one disputes that Apple's user experience is superior. Thanks to Android's horrific fragmentation problems, the Android version that developers write apps for - 2.2, which was released in May 2010 - is distinctly inferior to iOS 5. The iPhone 4S is a fantastic high-end phone, the 4 a terrific mid-level one, and the 3GS still a respectable player in the free-with-contract market. So why has everyone gone Android?
December 23 2011
iPhone Apps
Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too
December 17 2011
GTA Logo
In October of 2001, Rockstar Games dropped a bomb on the gaming world. That bomb was called Grand Theft Auto III. In just one release, Rockstar shifted their flagship 2D series into a 3D world, introduced an enormous chunk of the population to the concept of massive sandbox games, and stirred up the first of many controversies that the company has since become known for. Just over 10 years later, GTA3 is back — but now it's mobile. As of yesterday, it's available for iOS and Android. Same game, same grit, same campy over-the-top action... but in your pocket. So, how has the game held up? How well did it make the jump from controller to touchscreen? Is it worth your $5?
December 13 2011
Little Fighters
Alright, fanboys: get your flamethrowers ready. HTML5 framework development house Sencha has just put a wide array of performance tools to use to answer one of life's geekiest questions: Who's got the better browser, Android 4 or iOS 5? I'd save the answer until the end, but I suppose the headline gives its away: while Android 4's browser is a "major step forward" for the platform, iOS 5's offering still wins out in the end — but just by a hair!
October 13 2011
tahoma
I'm not a homeowner myself, but something tells me that when I do buy a house, I'm going to want something like the TaHomA home automation system to ensure that I can be as lazy as possible. Developed by a company called Somfy, the TaHomA allows you to remotely control multiple supported products throughout the house, from motorized awnings and blinds to lights and thermostats. Oh, and did I mention you can do it all from your iPad?
October 12 2011
iMessage
I'm not generally one to predict the death of things. I've rarely been known to herald a shiny new Device X as a "Device Y Killer!", and I'm a firm believer that Facebook is doing a perfectly good job of being "the new Facebook". Pundits love to make these crazy claims because they're easily forgotten and rarely does anyone call them out for being wrong after a few years have passed. With that said: October 12th, 2011. Mark it down, and come back and yell at me in a few years if I'm wrong. Today is the day SMS begins to die.
September 14 2011
Suicides
In the video game world, little can do more to send your sales soaring than being banned in one way or another. Be it because a country's government got upset over how their people were depicted (a la Modern Warfare in Saudi Arabia) or because the developers slipped in a naughty little easter egg thereby triggering a recall (like Grand Theft Auto San Andreas' infamous Hot Coffee scene), that little bit of taboo can be all it takes to rule the charts for weeks. That is, unless you're selling your game exclusively on the iOS App Store, in which case you're totally boned... unless your goal was to spread a message, in which case it's back to being the best thing you could have hoped for. Such is the case for Phone Story, a blatantly anti-iPhone game that managed to wiggle its way into the App Store for a whole seven hours before someone pulled the plug. Why, you ask? Amongst other things, making a mini-game out of the Foxconn factory suicides.
August 12 2011
w3i-games
Monetization and distribution network for app developers, W3i, is today announcing a program specifically for iOS Game Developers. The new service, now in beta, is simply being called "Games Platform," the company says. And its goal will be to solve the challenges facing game developers such as server set-up, maintenance, security, storefronts and analytics.
August 01 2011
The Smartphone Salad Days Are Over
Horace Dediu notes that Nokia and RIM are on a precipitous decline and that it is now, in short, a two horse race: Apple v. Android. The age of the smartphone – an era where anyone with a keyboard and some apps could make it in the world marketplace – is over.
I’d call this, now, the Age of Fragmentation – new devices are overlapping each other from both sides of the fence as users wait for new iPhones and swear that the next HTC, Samsung, or Motorola Android phone will be better than an undifferentiated predecessor. As a result, sales are fairly solid for each of those manufacturers but not amazing and the manufacturers who aren’t part of the game are losing market share.
We also see from this chart that HTC will soon be the brand to beat these days and that Samsung, though powerful, is already on par with Apple in smartphone sales. Remember that Samsung no longer announces handset sales so this could be the last time we see real data on smartphones with this sort of specificity.
In general, there are two players, and, barring amazing performance by Windows Phone, not much will change in the next year or so.
July 28 2011
Nielsen: Android Takes Top OS Spot, Apple Tops Manufacturers
Nielsen comes bearing good news today for devotees of the little green robot: as of this past June, Android has claimed the top spot in the U.S. smartphone OS market. Figures have it as comprising a full 39% of the market, with its closest competitor Apple a distant second at 28%. Oh, and let’s not forget the BlackBerry OS, which is currently dragging its feet at 20%. Bringing up the rear are Windows Phone 7 at 9%, which is a bit of an accomplishment considering the major head start its competitors enjoyed, and WebOS and Symbian (both at 2%).
This strikes me as a bit puzzling, given what seems like the abject lack of Nokia smartphones stateside. The E71x debuted on AT&T two years ago with little fanfare, and even the newish Nokia Astound seems to have been dropped from T-Mobile’s online store. Of course the situation is still in flux; with HP hoping the TouchPad will leverage sales of the Veer 4G and the forthcoming Pre 3, we will likely see a boost in rank next time round. Still, they need to make their next steps very, very carefully.
On the hardware front, Apple makes it known that they’re not ones to settle for second. They have managed to land themselves the title of top manufacturer — an easy victory, to be fair. Considering the top OS finds its way to devices made by HTC, Motorola, and Samsung, Apple was a lock from the beginning. RIM surprisingly finds itself tied with HTC for manufacturing 20% of the smartphones in people’s pockets, which we could probably chalk up to corporate support balancing out HTC consumer advertising campaigns.
These results are all well and good, and I’m sure they’ll be quoted for quite some time, but they come right on the cusp of change. I’m interested to see how the landscape changes once heavy hitters like the Galaxy S II line and the iPhone 4S/5/whatever are released, and we’ll be sure to let you know as it happens.
July 27 2011
Qualcomm’s Awesome Augmented Reality SDK Now Available For iOS
Back around July of last year, Qualcomm launched a software development kit for building Augmented Reality apps on Android. The idea was to allow Android developers to build all sorts of crazy AR stuff (like games and apps that render things in live 3D on top of a view pulled in through your device’s camera) without having to reinvent the wheel by coding up their own visual-recognition system. It is, for lack of a better word, awesome.
And now it’s available for iOS.
For those unfamiliar with Augmented Reality — or for those who just want to see something cool — check out this demo video I shot a year or so back:
Sometime in the past few hours, Qualcomm quietly rolled a beta release of the iOS-compatible SDK into their developer center. This came as a bit of a shock; Qualcomm had previously expressed that, while an iOS port would come sooner or later, their main focus was building this platform for devices running their Snapdragon chips (read: not Apple devices).
And yet, here we are. This first release of the SDK supports the iPhone 4, iPad 2, and fourth generation iPod Touch — none of which have Snapdragon CPUs in them. Furthermore, this release supports Unity (a WYSIWYG-style rapid game development tool) right off the bat, whereas the Android release didn’t get Unity support until a few months. Developers can also work in straight in Xcode if they so choose.
This platform lowers the “You must be this crazy of a developer to ride this ride” bar considerably, so expect an onslaught of Augmented Reality apps in the App Store before too long.
(Full disclosure: Qualcomm held a development contest focused on this platform last year. I entered on a whim, but placed just outside of the ranks that walked away with prizes. Probably didn’t need to be disclosed, but transparency for the win.)
Facebook Will Bring Credits To Mobile Browsers
Over a month ago, we first reported on Project Spartan, Facebook’s secret plan to bring applications to the mobile web via HTML5. Facebook is working with teams of third-party developers that they call their “Spartans” and hope to unveil the project later this summer. As we noted, the key to all of this is really Credits. Right now, Facebook has no way to make money on any of the mobile platforms out there. With Credits bought and sold through the web browser, they’ll have a way. It’s that simple.
That’s why it’s surprising to see Bloomberg report today that “Facebook May Bring Credits to Mobile Browsers“. Um, of course they will. Not only did we report it last month, in a follow-up story, I included a screenshot of the implementation. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s real. No anonymous sources needed.
Either Bloomberg missed that report (to be fair, it was buried in a couple thousands words bashing Facebook PR — more on that in a second) or they weren’t convinced. Either way, I’ll go ahead and include the shot again.
This is also odd since Bloomberg did try to give us some credit for something. Sort of. Half-way down the page we get this throw-away line: “The TechCrunch blog previously reported on Facebook’s HTML5 efforts.” No link, of course. Typically old media jackassery on the web.
Moving on, the real story here remains the one we originally reported: Facebook is attempting to come up with their own way to circumvent Apple’s App Store and Google’s Market, to maintain control of the applications within the Facebook ecosystem.
There are mixed signals out there right now as to whether or not Apple may actually be helping Facebook with this effort in some regard. Because many applications (and most games) on Facebook’s platform right now require Flash, they do not work on devices like the iPhone and iPad. If Facebook could get these working through HTML5, it would be another huge blow to Adobe’s platform — which Apple must love. There is some talk that Apple may be interested in seeing this happen within Facebook’s own iPhone app, and their soon-to-be-unveiled iPad app.
But again, the key for Facebook is Credits. And that’s where things could get very complicated with Apple. If Facebook tries to circumvent the App Store to sell credits, Apple is clearly not going to want that in any native app (unless some sort of deal is struck, which seems unlikely at this point). But Facebook can get around this by going web-only with the functionality.
When we initially reported this, Facebook threw a hissy-fit and tried to spin the press in opposition to our story. This led to the second story where I revealed more about Project Spartan, including the picture of Credits running in a test version of a Spartan app.
Interestingly enough, Bloomberg today comes to the same conclusion I did (a conclusion shared by those actually working on Spartan apps, by the way). “Facebook is seeking to build a software community that rivals Apple’s,” Bloomberg notes, pointing out that Facebook would like a piece of the growing mobile app revenue pie that Apple is seeing.
Let’s see if Facebook PR throws another hissy fit over what is common sense. Facebook wants and needs to make money. Apple wants and needs to make money. Apple owns a mobile platform to do so. Facebook does not. At some point, this will become an issue. A big one.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
