Mobile App Usage Statistics Shows App Download Numbers Don’t Mean Success
There has been something of an App War in the UK. The App Store versus the Android Market, Windows Phone Marketplace. Each is turning to developers to offer more choice for consumers. As smartphones get faster, allowing a quicker transfer of data, integrating Augmented Reality along with fancy graphics we have developed a habit for downloading games, information or apps just to make our lives easier or just a little bit more fun. But how much do we really love our Apps?
New research suggests while we might rush to download the latest app and play with it for a few days, in fact our love runs cold quickly. The research focussed on users in the US. It showed that 68% of smartphone users only open five or fewer apps a week. 17% don’t use any apps and under half, 42% of Americans have a device that has apps.
They are, the researchers say, merely a novelty that wears off. We delete apps we get bored with, we stop using them and if you use an operating system that shows up the apps you use most frequently, you can scroll through the screens to show the ones that have fallen out of favour. The estimate is that around 80% of apps are eventually deleted, which is why the researchers of this report say measuring downloads of apps is a bad way to measure how popular they might actually be.
The importance for apps to smartphone launches has grown as it is a good way of showcasing a devices capability. Both EA and Gameloft released new apps and games to coincide with the iPhone 4S. Siri was an app itself originally, and the developers were taken over by Apple. But while there is big demand at the launch, users tend to whittle down the apps they use regularly, until there are just a core few they use. The Nokia Lumia 800, the first to use Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, made app integration even easier by adopting social networking platform friendliness, allowing users to see Twitter and Facebook updates as though they were messages. BBM, or Blackberry Messenger is much the same, a feature that has become so integrated into device practice that it is a social networking platform in its own right.
For app developers though, it is not great news. Apps do not make firms a huge amount of money, no matter how much of a push they might get on the AppStore. One UK based developer created a wide range of apps but still saw that arm of their business operate at a loss. A good profile raiser, but not a sound business model.
But is it so bad that we use and lose apps? One of the best things about our smartphones is the ability to mould them and personalise them. Keeping it fresh with new apps makes it easier for us to explore new games and new places. We might get excited about a tourism app while in a new city, but never use it again when we get home, but instead of seeing apps as a long term download, should we just see them as a short term fancy, a fling rather than a marriage? With so many millions of apps to choose from it would be impossible for anyone who sample even half over the course of a smartphone’s lifetime. More choice makes it easier for us to pick and choose, as difficult as that may before developers who want us to keep hold of them forever.
Low Battery On Android Phone? Tips To Increase Android Battery Life
People who have an Android phone and are suffering from some serious battery issues, here are some simple manual as well as automatic tweaks that will help you keep your phone charged for a longer time and make the best possible use of your battery life.
There are end number of things that eat up your battery power and most of the times they are things that most mobile users are not aware of at all. This article contains all the possible solutions to safeguard your battery life, so i highly recommend that you go through each of these features, settings and customizations that are mentioned ahead in this article.
List of battery power consuming features :
Your phone contains end number of features and settings that consume your battery power without you even realizing it or you were maybe aware of certain features but didn’t realize they used battery power to a great extent.
To get an idea about this navigate to Settings > About > Phone > Battery >Battery Use, which will tell you the entire story.
Settings that are most likely draining your battery power :
The Screen :
Your screen consumes the most battery life especially if its the new Super Amoled or Super LCD display. To minimise the screens battery usage, turn down the brightness. Although your phone is on “Auto” brightness mode which works in most cases, but still might be using more battery than you expect.
You can go to Settings > Display > Brightness, uncheck the “Automatic Brightness” option and manually enter approximately 10%. It may become a little harder for you to see under direct sunlight, but this wont be the case elsewhere.
Another option is to put the power control widget on your home screen which will help you toggling between low and high brightness modes in a much convenient manner. To do so, press and hold an empty section on the screen, select Widgets and select the Power Control option.
Alternatively, you could also lower down the screen timeout from 1 minute to around 15 - 30 seconds by going to Settings > Display. This will aid you in saving battery life as well.
Cellular and Data Connection :
It doesnt matter whether your using a high end 4G phone or a regular 3G device, your cellular and battery connections will eat up your battery big time even if your phone is in a dormant state.
Your data connection can be turned on and off by making use of APNDroid 2.0 or by making use of these Quick Settings. If you just intend to talk, text and send mails then EDGE or 1x is more than required. Data can be turned back on when you are browsing and require extra speed.
Wi-Fi :
When there are Wi-Fi networks in your surroundings, use them. It will automatically turn off your data connection and use Wi-Fi instead which will be a battery life saviour.
However, when you don’t have any Wi-Fi networks in your area, your battery will be drained by constantly making search for available networks to connect to, so its better to turn Wi-Fi off from your Power Control widget when your not in such locations.
Bluetooth :
Keeping bluetooth on when not required again consumes a lot of battery like Wi-Fi does, so just turn off bluetooth entirely when your not using any bluetooth headset or transferring any files to and fro from your computer. You can do this from the Power Control widget.
GPS :
GPS again drains a lot of battery when your using it for Google maps or turn-by-turn navigation and if you make use of location services provided by Twitter, Facebook or other social applications then GPS will be used on a more regular basis. GPS controls can also be toggled through the Power Control widget.
Automation of these Settings :
All the above mentioned settings can be toggled through the Power Control widget as per the requirements but that would be too irritating and difficult at times.
Fortunately, all these settings can be automated through an application called the Tasker. With this application you can automate pretty much everything that you desire like GPS, Bluetooth and Data settings.
Use of Juice Defender to scale back data usage :
Juice Defender again automates all the work for you, although you can change some of its settings if you wish to do so. It manages your data connection in a very smart way by turning it off and reconnecting it after every 15 – 30 minutes to check if there are any new mails, Twitter notifications and other alerts to download.
Other Alternatives :
Tweak and Uninstall Data intensive applications :
If you have any applications that you are not making use of, then please uninstall them as there are many applications that try to connect to the internet without even you realizing it and so its best to remove them completely. Also get rid of widgets that grab data constantly like the Facebook widgets or the weather widgets to name a few or change their settings so that they update their data every half an hour or on an hourly basis.
Turn Off the Eye Candy :
Eye candy features like screen animations and live wallpapers can be pretty CPU intensive. If you look forward to save your battery then turning them off is a wise choice although you may loose the flashy and animated look but this solution is ideal if nothing works for you even after performing other tweaks.
Save the phone from getting heated up :
Extreme heat will always kill your battery so don’t leave it in a hot place, get it out of your pocket whenever you can and keep it as cool as possible during the summer.
Stop using a Task Killer :
Task killers are more harmful then helpful and affect you battery to a great extent. You don’t need task killers if you have uninstalled your applications correctly or are not using them when not required. So my advise will be not to use a task killer as its not required at all.
Underclock / Undervolt your device :
You don’t really need all the CPU power always, you can reduce the clock speed or even create custom profiles using the SetCPU application that will turn it away when your phone is sleeping. You can create profiles that underclock your phone as and when the battery keeps going down.
You can also make use of the Kernel Manager application that will help in reducing the voltage thus giving you a better battery life.
Getting a Secondary Battery :
The last option is to get another battery for your phone. Most high end phones now a days have a pretty much useless battery life so you can just get yourself a second battery and keep it safe in any place till your current battery gets exhausted.
Having an extended battery is another option which is heavier then the standard battery but will guarantee you a better battery life. Lastly, make sure that you are buying original OEM battery as the cheap ones will cause a lot of problems, so make sure that you buy a high quality battery for your phone.
Google Translate App For Android Now In Conversation Mode
Have you ever felt the need to ask for directions in a foreign country where nobody speaks in your tongue? Google has just introduced an interesting new ‘Conversation Mode‘ on their Translate app for Android that will make such conversations simple.
Using the conversation mode, users can speak in their native tongue that will then be translated and read out aloud in the chosen language. The app will further take voice inputs from the person you are speaking with and translate it back in your native tongue.
The feature is still in the alpha mode and only available with English-Spanish mode for the moment. However, expect all the bugs and the number of supported languages to increase soon enough.
Apart from being used as an ‘interpreter‘, this feature also has several other use-cases. Writes one commenter on the Google blog,
“This could be an awesome tool for deaf people. As someone who is deaf and speaks/lipreads, I’ve long dreamed of having a handheld device that would convert all spoken conversations around me into text.
I just tried this in English to English mode with one person, and it worked! The only issue is that it’s not continuous; you have to keep hitting the “reply” button to keep the conversation going.”
MyBackUp – An Android App To Backup And Restore Rooted Phones
Users looking to root their Android phones will frequently encounter instructions to backup and restore their phone contents. While these steps are not too difficult at the outset, it can be scary particularly if you are not a geek. A recently launched Android application makes this process easy.
MyBackUp is a free to download app that comes with a 30-day trial period. Using the application, the user may backup content from applications, contacts, bookmarks, SMS messages, music playlists and a host of other content from their phone to their SD card or to the company’s online servers. Data stored on the company server can also be accessed by logging online to the developers’ website.
Once the trial period is over, users will need to purchase a full version of the app at a price of $4.99. If you have a rooted phone, you can check out the app by using the QR code below.
DroidStreamer Android App To Stream Videos On Android Phones Released
A new application on the Android market makes it pretty simple to search and stream video content from across the web from one place. Called DroidStreamer, the application gathers content from a number of legitimate sources including YouTube and presents them from one place so that users need not scour the internet to catch their favorite videos.
Do note that the content aggregation does not seem to be automatic and the developers are expected to manually update new content. This can cause delay as the application gathers more content. Anyway, for now the Droid Streamer Pro app is still in beta and hence you can excuse the bugs.
TV Shows currently accessible over Droid Streamer include The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park and Scrubs while movies in the collection include Avatar, Terminator 1,2,3 and Iron Man 1,2.
You can download the app by searching for ‘Droid Streamer‘ on the Android market or use the QR code below. Do note that this is a free to download app.
VLC Media Player For Android Launching Soon
The VLC media player has, for a long time, been one of the most popular applications for viewing media files. This is given the fact that it supports almost every media format. Now, it is being learnt that a VLC media player app for Android could be rolling out soon.
According to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, a VLC developer, it is just a matter of weeks before the application is released on the Android platform. The development work is noted to have been in progress for a long time. Although initial work was hampered due to software limitations on the Android front, work seems to have picked up pace once an updated version of the Android NDK was released earlier this month.
Kempft has indicated that most of the VLC libraries have already been ported to Android and that specific device issues could be the only reason that could delay the launch further. Let’s hope a public release happens very soon.
Sony PlayStation App For iPhone & Android Announced
Sony has announced that an official PlayStation app will soon make its way to the iOS and Android platforms. Writing about this on the PlayStation blog, Emmanuel Orssaud, Portal Manager at Sony, has said that the first iteration of the application will only be available in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and The Netherlands. A second version that will support the rest of Europe is also noted to be on its way.
The PlayStation app will let users check on their friends’ activities, read and discover the latest games, news and hardware and keep a tab on their PSN trophies. The application shall be free to download.
While this application is sure to let gamers keep a tab on theirs and their friends’ activities, it will not be a useful gaming device. That gap, it has been speculated, will be fulfilled by a PlayStation phone. Reports have suggested that this new Android based smartphone – complete with gaming controls – shall be announced sometime in the first quarter of next year. If you are a hardcore PS gamer, keep your fingers crossed until then.
Android App Refund Window Reduced To 15 Minutes
This is something that is likely to tick you off if you are an Android user. Google has announced a few significant changes to their Android marketplace. While most of the changes – like an increase in the size-cap of .APK files and the launch of a carousel on the market place home are positive changes, a new policy to restrict the refund window on paid apps is likely to irk many.
According to the latest update, Android users will now only get 15 minutes from the time of purchase to try an app before deciding to ask for a refund. This is drastically lower than the 24 hour window that existed until now. Why’s that? Eric Chu from the Android Developer Ecosystem explains,
“Since most users who request a refund do so within minutes of purchase, we will reduce the refund window on Market to 15 minutes. This change will be largely transparent to buyers, but will help developers manage their businesses more effectively.”
While a 24 hour window is agreeably too large for trying an app out, a 15 minute window does not help either. It makes sense to give the users at least an hour or two before shutting the refund window. What do you think?
Skype Video Calling For Android & iPhone Coming Next Month?
As of now, the only mobile phone that can make video calls over Skype is the Nokia N900. If you are the owner of an iPhone, Android or any other smartphone, you are unfortunately out of luck since Skype video calling is still not available on these devices.
That could possibly change soon. According to reports, Skype has called up for a media gathering on January 6, 2011 on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show. Speculations are rife that Skype could be announcing a new mobile application for a number of platforms like the iOS and Android that will come equipped with video calling functionalities.
To be fair, there is nothing explicitly mentioned in the invitation itself and this is just a speculation based on the invitation list that includes blogs focusing on Android platform. So if anything, at least something big for Android is on the cards. So keep watching out.
NOOKcolor App Development – New SDK Released
Barnes & Noble has announced the roll out of the SDK for the recently launched NOOKcolor eReader. The launch will mean developers can now start building applications specifically for the eReader. Interestingly, though the eReader has been built over the Android framework, it will not be possible for Android app developers to directly port their apps over the new platform. Instead, we hear that there will still be a significant amount of work required to make the apps NOOKcolor-compatible.
Nevertheless, with the device being rooted recently, a number of users should now be looking at NOOKcolor as a cheaper alternative for tablet. This increased interest should get more developers doing the extra work to bring applications for the platform.
We look forward to this spurt in activity on the Nook ecosystem. If you are a developer, you can find all the needed SDK tools here.