The importance of user reviews in the success or failure of your iOS application cannot be overstated. Alongside your application name and icon, it’s one of the most prominent pieces of information visible on the App Store. Having a poor average rating can lead to your app being ignored by prospective users and reduces the likelihood of getting any press reviews.
In February 2011 Google released a tablet-only version of their Android operating system codenamed “Honeycomb”. This included changes to user interface to support large screen devices, and was incompatible with phone-sized devices.
Due to this fragmentation of operating system versions, with a wide range of use-cases for designers to consider and few guidelines to follow, various complex solutions to similar problems have been developed leading to inconsistent user interfaces, a difficult job for developers and most importantly disappointing experiences for users.
Last week Google announced that their platforms app store – Android Market has reached over 10 billion app downloads. An increase in 1 billion in only a month, whereas it took it 22 months to reach the first 1 billion downloads. To celebrate Google are severely discounting a large number of its apps each day down to 10p to celebrate.
This does not suprise me as during our recent App Challenge event, when posed the question, over 70% of the students stated they owned Android devices and planned to target this platform over iOS despite the potential revenue they may be able to achieve. Apple recently stated that they have given over $1 billion dollars back to developers on their platform.
Despite what seems huge growth in Android sales, hitting 46% market penetration, HTC – one of the world’s largest Android device manufacturers announced a 20% drop in sales figures during the last quarter.
Is the demand finally dropping or is the smart phone market simply saturated now and users are getting more app savvy?
To find out how our dedicated team of Android developers can fulfill your app development requirements get in touch.
Recently a client of ours asked if we could add a Facebook Like button to all of the products on their Magento Go site, the idea being that when the button was pressed it would then add the link to that particular product to their Facebook page.
In Magento Community this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, however this particular site is a Magento Go store which doesn’t have the same amount of customisability or extensions. A quick search of the Magento Go documentation brought up a page showing how to add social networking links to Magento Go through a static block, but no reference to what code would be needed to actually connect to Facebook.
![[Magento Go logo]](http://thedistance.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/magento-go1.jpeg "Magento Go")
The last couple of months has been a great time for us with the introduction of a couple of new team members and our official partnership with Magento Go due in no small part to our fantastic and increasingly successful clients, for which we are very grateful.
Elliot Neal
Pete Harris
Anthony Main
Jamie Stead
Ryan Atkins