The Android Market has hit 10 billion downloads and to celebrate Google is making apps available for a dime. The Market's editors have chosen 10 apps to put on sale for $0.10 and several of them have graced ReadWriteWeb's mobile apps of the month columns in 2011.
There is something appealing about a discounted app made available for cheap or for free. Amazon does it every day in its Appstore and downloads of paid apps available for free tend to skyrocket more than a if the app was available for free anyway. Everybody loves a deal. Check out the list of 10-cent apps below.
When you're holiday shopping this year, there's little doubt that Amazon would prefer that you buy that copy of the Steve Jobs biography or Snuggie on their site, rather than in an actual store. That's why the e-commerce giant offers things like free shipping and a mobile app that lets you scan barcodes and compare prices.
In many cases, the price Amazon pulls up on its Price Check app for iOS is going to smaller than the one stuck to the item you're holding in your hand. They know this, and so to further encourage you to buy from them, Amazon is offering a 5% discount on items purchased via the Price Check app.
HTML5 is fundamentally changing the way developers approach the Web. Whether it is for desktop browsers or mobile, the language and standards of the future are not some distant point on the horizon. It is right now.
In the mobile realm, the debate rages on: Web or Native? The difference between the two is beginning to blur as HTML5 standards evolve. We examine what happened in HTML5 in this year in our third installment of 2011's top trends. Check out the rest of the series, starting with John Paul Titlow's music trends and Alicia Eler's mobile commerce trends.
One of the most basic tasks a smartphone can perform is the reading and writing of email. Research In Motion built an empire off of this function with its BlackBerry platform. Yet, the concept of mobile email might need to be redefined. Currently, a mobile inbox does not look all that different from a regular inbox. IBM Research studied how users interact with mobile email and is developing a whole new client based off triage and capturing user intentions.
What's an Android user to do about this not-so-shocking fact? Rejoice?
A new report from ComScore tries to make it look like 10% of iPhone users is a huge marketshare when, really, it's not. For the three month period ending October 2011, reports showed that 234 million Americans ages 13-and-older used mobile devices. Apple has bumped its way up to number four, trailing behind Samsung, LG and Motorola. It did pass up RIM.
What might actually be more significant than the amount of mobile subscribers achieved by Apple is that of the five brands listed in this report, Apple is the only one that has actually gained more subscribers over the past three months alone. And just to be clear, this data was collected before the launch of the iPhone4S.
A new study from research2guidance shows that the market for apps is continually moving toward segmentation and niche stores. The Apple app store, which launched in July 2008, has contributed significantly to the rise of niche apps. The study defines three types of niche stores: Platform-oriented (apps for a specific OS platform such as AndroidPIT or Crackberry a.k.a. BlackBerry), target group-oriented (apps for a segment of users, such as business, adults, kids) and carve outs (mobile network operator with its own app store in the Android Market or something like "@work" by Apple).
Facebook has made an important new hire, bringing in a head of mobile developer relations to help steer the company's mobile ecosystem in what is sure to be a huge growth period over the next several years. James Pearce, formerly in charge of developer relations at Sencha, has accepted the job and leaving the framework company today, according to post on his personal blog.
Bringing in a person like Pearce is a very clear indication of where Facebook would like to go with its mobile platform. To understand where Facebook wants to go you have to know where it, and Pearce, have been.
It's no secret that mobile commerce has exploded this year. People are glued to their mobile devices, period. With a shift toward mobile and tablet commerce, we anticipate that these two types of devices will continue to play an increasingly important role in the marketplace. 2011 has been a good year for mobile and tablet, and we've identified seven key trends that will continue evolving as this space widens and expands. Let's get into it.
Oh, and if you want to check out our other top trends lists, take a peek at our founder Richard MacManus' top social web products, Jon Mitchell's top web-based consumer products, Dan Rowinski's top mobile products and John Paul Titlow's top five online music trends.
The latest data on browser trends from Sitepoint show that more people browse the Web on smartphones than use Internet Explorer 6 and 7 combined. Those two old clunkers have been the bugbears of Web developers for years, requiring sites to degrade as nicely as possible to that least common denominator of browsers. But it's a new world now; 6.95% of Web activity in November 2011 was on mobile browsers, and only 6.49% was on IE 6 or 7.
As Richard MacManus pointed out this week, there are lots of interesting trends in Web browsing lately. Another big story is that Google's Chrome (our consumer product of the year) has eclipsed Mozilla Firefox as the number 2 browser for the first time. But the shift from desktop to mobile is the real trend. The days of developing for the worst desktop browser are drawing to an end, and having the best possible mobile site has become a priority.
Somewhere along the complex supply chain of the mobile world's chips, antennas, touchscreens, operating systems and inter-linked celular networks traveling around the globe - someone has been caught capturing and transmitting more of your data than you'd probably like. There are probably any number of parties doing something similar but mobile usage data capture service Carrier IQ has been found to have code installed, with the phone companies' blessing, on millions of phones without the knowledge of consumers.
We're all awash in a sea of data, we have been for some time, but as we meet that data we learn that it is made of people. We've met the data tsunami and it is us. That's bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable. If a future based on that data unfolds in the wrong way, it could end up a major hindrance to the quality of human life.
