What exactly has led to the plethora of 7 inch tablets now flooding the market?
First it was just the Nexus 7, but we’re now seeing a strong lean towards these smaller tablets as a target for clients. Is it the price? Is it the spec? What, in short, do they have over their larger brothers?
(more…)
When you hear the phrase ‘mcommerce’ or ‘mobile commerce’, what does it conjure up for you? A simple app that gives a customer access to a retail outlet at their fingertips? Or something more?
At The Distance, we see something much more – the potential for mcommerce is huge. And it’s much more than creating a browse and buy app.
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.
Having our office on the University of York campus has been beneficial from the outset. It has provided us with the opportunity to interact with a wealth of other small businesses and projects.
In order to encourage growth into the emerging mobile industry we are coordinating with the University careers department to run The App Challenge event.
Anthony Main
Ryan Atkins
Pete Harris