Tag: smartphone

So you want to build a mobile app? Not all mobile apps are created equally

Most smartphones users I know ditch apps pretty quickly if they don’t work or end up being clunky. So, if your company is considering offering mobile apps to your customers you should be aware of a few things.

Buy a Smartphone. If you don’t already have a smartphone then you should go out and buy one. Then download a number of apps that interest you and try them out and see what you like and what you don’t like. For example, if you do the shopping for your family you might consider trying out a bar code scanner app that lets you compare pricing. Some scanner apps may work faster than others. If you don’t own a smartphone then you won’t be able to understand what a good app is.

Likes and Dislikes. Pay close attention to what you like and don’t like about a particular app. Here are a few questions to take note of:

  • Was it easy to use?
  • Did it hang and/or crash?
  • Did it perform its tasks gracefully?
  • Did it do what you expected?
  • Was it visually appealing?

Become Tech Savvy. Become a bit more tech savvy about things that the phone is doing behind the scene. There are apps that do this for both Android and iPhone that help you monitor what’s going one. Things to look out for:

  • Apps that keep running even after you think you shut them off. These will run the battery down faster.
  • Apps that consume more and more memory over time. Using more memory equals more battery usage and shorter time between charges.
  • Apps that seem to slow your phone down when they run. These apps may be using more CPU than necessary resulting in greater battery usage.
  • Apps that connect to the internet frequently costing you extra data charges. There are apps that let you monitor how much data your phone uses and some apps can help pinpoint which apps use the most data.

Which Phones to Support? Understand what devices to support. If you are building an application for internal use, then you have an easier decision since you hopefully have some control over which devices are being used and how often their software gets updated. If you work in retail, your users may have Androids, Blackberries, iPhones, iPads, Kindle’s, Nook’s and possibly other tablets that get updated whenever and however the customer dictates. My advice is do some research and pick one that is used the most and work on that first.

Release Early and Iterate Often. Technology changes so quickly these days that if your app takes more than 3 – 6 months to build, then the technology will change underneath you. In other words, you might be releasing an application that doesn’t work perfectly with the latest phone operating systems or browsers that your customers are using. When that happens, it will cost you even more time and money to fix the problem and the problem will repeat itself. Be sure to take into account the speed at which technology will change once you begin your software development process.

Go Native, Go Web Browser, or Both? Last, it’s important to understand that there are two common types of mobile applications. Native apps are downloaded from an app store and installed directly on the phone, the other is a web app that runs in the phones web browser. My advice is to research and understand your target market. What do your competitors use? What do your customers prefer? What are the trends in your industry?

If you go with native apps, you’ll need to understand which phones to support and how often you will be updating the app. If you choose web apps you’ll need to know which browsers to support. Also take into consideration which skill sets your development team has and understand if they can tackle the project or if you need outside help.

Update, Update, Update. No matter what you decide, you can’t just deploy an app and think you’re done. If you want to keep your customers happy, you’re going to have to keep updating the app until the product line is discontinued or replaced. And, you have to update it often enough to stay on top of the latest technologies. New smartphone models are being released all the time and they all may have different screen sizes and screen resolutions. An app that looks good at one screen size may look horrible on a tablet or iPad. These things have to be accounted for. And, the smartphones operating system software may be updated three or more times per year offering new functionality and fixing bugs. If your customers download a broken app, or if they see the app that hasn’t been updated in a while and something stops working they may not be your customers for much longer. This is especially true for retail apps where customers make split second decisions whether to stay or walk away and try something else.

Conclusion. I hope you find this list useful and at least give you some ideas to think about before you dive head first into bringing a new mobile application into the world. It can be fun, be there is a lot of hard work involved. But, if you plan it right you’ll be successful and learn alot in the process!

State of the Internet Browser 2012 – consumer browser usage will decrease

Over the next two years I see consumer browser usage decreasing and people will increasingly spend more time using native mobile applications. This has a number of interesting implications.

The facts. As a web application developer I pay close attention to browser and browser-related technology usage statistics and trends. Like most people, I judge statistics based on my own experience and the experience of my co-workers, family and peers.  Here are some trends which I’ve been keeping an eye on:

  • Smartphones are rapidly replacing non-smart phones around the world.
  • The number of specialized smartphone applications is continuing to expand.*
  • The number of games for smartphones continues to grow rapidly.**
  • The amount of time people spend on their smartphone, whether it’s playing games or using specialized applications, is increasing.

Also based on my personal experience are the following additional observations that further tilt the balance in favor of native applications:

  • Performance. Native smartphone applications, when built correctly, almost always outperform web applications: I’m referring to actions such as page refresh, general drawing capabilities and to a lesser degree but still a factor is the look-and-feel. This is a general fact of application technology: compiled applications perform faster than interpreted applications. For the most part, once I’ve used a native application, such as Southwest Airlines check-in app, I loathe having to use their web page. It just seems so clunky and slow in comparison.
  • Games. Ah yes, we can’t forget game performance as well as their look-and-feel. Why would I want a mobile browser-based game? What’s the point of building a high-performance, beautiful user interface game in a browser? See my previous bullet’s comment about compiled application performance. Yes, yes, yes I know that HTML 5 is making big strides, but we are talking mobile applications and the technology as it exist today. You can’t tell your customers that they’ll have to wait another year for better game performance, because by then your favorite browser will have such and such HTML 5 functionality figured out. Your competitors would jump right in, tweak their native app and leave you in the dust!

A Corollary. If you generally agree with my bullets above, the perhaps you’ll agree that the corollary is this trend:

  • Consumers are spending less time on desktop and laptop machines “browsing the web” and more time using their smart phones.

In addition to the reasons I already listed, there are many reasons for this. I suspect the top reasons are because it’s so easy to use your smartphone, and it’s right by your side all the time even when you aren’t home. You most likely have seen people with their heads down playing with their smartphones during business meetings, while eating, while standing in line, while watching TV and even during sports events.

What about the Browser Vendors? These trends have interesting implications for browser vendors. They have to be aware of what’s going on. It’s possible that this is one of the many factors behind their massive push to add HTML 5 capabilities in an attempt to stave off what I’m going to call “user erosion”, as consumers spend less time using web browsers.

But, there are some facts to consider related to building applications that run in the browser:

  • Still functionality problems between different browsers. While the latest generation of browsers are the closest they have ever been to parity, in terms of JavaScript and HTML functionality, web developers are still hacking code to make certain things work equally across all browsers. These “hacks” cost extra time and money to code and maintain and the functionality differences between browsers cause customer frustration when things look different or don’t work as expected. This is especially true in large, retail-type consumer apps were you have little control over what browser your customers choose to use.
  • Faster but fast enough? Today’s browsers have the fastest parsers ever, but it’s a fact that they still aren’t as fast as native code, and they never will be. For the geeks reading this, browsers incur a CPU cost associated with parsing and then executing interpreted code. Smart engineers are going to continue to close the gap, but compiled code will always be faster and more powerful than code running in a browser. Period.
  • Memory usage. Browsers tend to be what we call “leaky”. The longer you use one without restarting it the more memory it will consume. I believe this is less of a problem in mobile browsers where windows get closed a lot more frequently than desktop/laptop browsers. However, it’s still an important consider this in mobile phones where more memory usage equals less battery life. Native apps can definitely leak memory, but they are also starting from a smaller initial footprint, and there are much better tools available for finding native app memory leaks. For browser apps, you also have the browser’s memory usage in addition to your application’s memory usage.
  • Security. Security is getting better for web browsers. But…it’s still easier to build a highly secure native app today than it is to build a secure web app. Also, for better or for worse, I suggest that many consumers perceive native apps to be more secure than web apps. Do you want to do your mobile banking over a web app or a native app? And whether a perception is right or wrong sometimes is irrelevant because it always strongly affects people’s behavior.

Concluding Remarks

Consumer-based companies are going to make important strategic choices based on information similar to what I’ve written above. My guess is that the most successful businesses will be the ones that adapt to what their customers want and if your customers are spending less time “on the web” then you should seriously consider adapting. Just to be clear, I’m definitely not saying that browsers are going away. No one has as crystal ball, and new technology is being created all the time. However, the momentum and sheer size of these trends, with hundreds of millions of people buying and using smart phones worldwide, makes it well worth studying its potential impact on your business.

References:

Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear View Mirror
Mobile Apps vs. the Web – Which is Better For Business?
Gartner Report on Smart Phone Sales in 3rd Quarter 2011

* Companies are building specialized apps that essentially replace the need for customers to visit their web site. However, these apps offer much more control and typically provide a more consistent user experience that the web. Southwest Airlines, for example offers three types of mobile apps in addition to a mobile web site: https://www.southwest.com/html/air/products/mobile.html.

** Books and games, respectively have consistently been the top two categories for the most popular apps, for example: https://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/07/06/ipad-app-store-breakdown-top-apps-categories-chart/

Major public web sites miss the mark on using advanced web technology

As a developer I notice things about web sites that the average person wouldn’t think twice about. I also know that the level of technology that’s available to build user interfaces is well beyond what we had in the early 2000’s. And, the ability to build amazing, user-centric interfaces is as easy as ever. But, I’m always perplexed that most major web sites today incorporate very little of this technology in their full functionality web pages.

So, I’ve been doing an informal survey for the past month and my list includes major news sites, airline web sites and retailers. The vast majority of them aren’t much easier to use than they were five years ago with a great a selection of hyperlinks, tabs and full page refreshes. For the fun of it I decided to travel back in time using an internet time machine call the Wayback Machine and compare some of these sites to their predecessors. I challenge you to do the same.

I have a few suspicions as to why this is happening, or not happening as the case may be. First, plug-in based technology such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight typically require some amount of time to load the initial payload into the browser. Sometimes you can create highly optimized or lazy-load packages, but it challenging. It’s rare to find one of these apps that load in the sub-second timeframe required in today’s hyper-competitive environment. The general impression is that the longer your page takes to load, the fewer the visitors you will have. So most major websites code is mostly made up of HTML, JavaScript, jQuery and CSS which most browsers have gotten really, really good at parsing extremely fast.

Second, it’s challenging to build Flex and Silverlight websites so that web crawlers can read text-based content. This seems fairly academic. If you can’t effectively index the content of your site, then potential visitors can’t search it via external search engines such as Bing and Google. Period.

These two items alone may explain why visually spectacular interfaces are limited to small portions of most public websites such as video plug-ins, or just specific sections of a much larger website. Where these more advanced interfaces typically reside are in back office applications where functionality trumps the need for millisecond application load times. There are some very cool exceptions for consumer apps such as the end-user experiences shown Mini Cooper’s build your own car online website. Yet, unfortunately for us as consumers, these are few and far between as consumer companies cater to the vast hunger for ever faster page load times.

The good news for advanced web technology in consumer apps is I’m seeing a large opening with mobile deployments. The plug-in technologies now have the capability to allow you to deliver visually enticing experiences across a wide array of devices. And this can be done, for the most part, without the tedium of worrying about all the vast nuances of different browser types and versions. Plus there is a bonus: the application is manually loaded and ready to go on your device minus the on-device load time when you turn on the app. I’m seeing some really innovative uses of the technology in what I call focused solutions, or applications built for a very specific purpose. Unfortunately most are in commercial beta and I can’t link to them. But, you’ll see them soon in an online marketplace right at your fingertips.

References:

Mobile Development with Adobe Flex 4.5

Silverlight for Windows Phone

Flex.org Showcase

Study: Consumers abandon slow loading websites (April 2010)

Let’s make the web faster (Google, May 2010)