I've been looking at various mobile statistics recently and thought I'd put up a quick post on my findings so far.
I started with some work at Kizoom, analysing the traffic we see on our UK Transport services. This then led to my session at BarCampLondon7, in which I presented the session counts for mobile browsers from a sample month (September) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. I've published these results in a DabbleDB database at http://mobilesessions.dabbledb.com/ for your slicing and dicing enjoyment.
I was inspired by Bryan Rieger's article on mobiforge, where he tells developers to "Expect and manage diversity" and links to some great graphs from the deviceatlas data explorer showing how screen sizes differ across device release dates. However, fantastic though deviceatlas is, it doesn't capture the actual usage of the devices on mobile sites -- it just counts one for each device, no matter whether it's a popular Nokia or an almost unused Sagem.
I've tried to rectify this lack of popularity data by publishing the Kizoom sample data. It's not perfect and each year isn't quite the same sample (we've released and withdrawn various services across the time range), but it's a start. I've even tried putting the same data into IBM's manyeyes to get some alternate visualisations.
Some of the trends that I've been seeing coming out of this data are not surprising: the iPhone punches way above its weight in terms of mobile traffic, and screen sizes are getting bigger as the years go on. One trend that is slightly unexpected is the growing popularity of BlackBerry devices over the last few years -- at least it's surprising to me quite how popular they've become (showing third in the brand popularity for 2009 behind Nokia and SonyEricsson, and ahead of Samsung and Apple).
There's been some other data published recently that seems to support the same trends. The September AdMob metrics have recently been released and this month they're highlighting the change in devices from 2007 to 2009 (a popular theme!). Their stats show that the iPhone and iPod Touch are number one and two in the UK -- probably due to in-app ads supplementing the web usage, especially when considering that the HTC Android phones (not nearly as popular a phone as the Nokia N95) also manage slots in the top 10.
Ian Homer of Bemoko pointed out the StatCounter Global Stats site, which has some very nice stats and pretty graphs to go with them. This site provides sliceable worldwide stats from 3 million websites (240 million hits in UK). Since the sites may not be mobile specific, I would expect mobile devices used to browse "the full web" would take precedence over smaller, more phone-focussed devices.
As expected, the iPhone and iPod Touch (or "iTouch") gets the majority of the traffic, with Nokia coming a strong second. NetFront is the browser used by SonyEricsson smartphones (and others) so comes fairly high in the rankings (it seems that StatCounter may have changed how they categorise SonyEricsson browsers in August 2009, as NetFront swaps with SonyEricsson -- this is even more apparent in their Mobile OS stats for the same region).
Once more, BlackBerry devices are making a strong showing in recent months, a gain which shows even stronger when the stats are shown just for the UK.
For the first time, I managed to convince some other Kizoom developers to come along to a weekend developer event. Dan, Matthew, Neo and Joyce joined me for Yahoo!’s Open Hack London 2009, and Neo’s friend San brought a much welcomed Lego Mindstorms set to the party.
And it was a pretty good party (though strictly a geeky one), complete with beer, music, snacks, giant Jenga and scalextric. There was even a fantastic live band (this being a geek party, the band consisted of guitar and Nintendo Gameboy…) and an iPhone orchestra:
But the most fun was the hacking. There were some absolutely stunning hacks produced over the weekend — better than both Hackday 2007 and Over The Air — and the Kizoom team had a great time playing with sticking things together for the hell of it. Mindstorms especially is great for hacks — you can run a Java VM on the programmable brick (see http://www.lejos,org) and then send it Java applets over Bluetooth. You then start attaching motors, microphones, light and distance sensors and building up the model with Lego pieces. Making silly things is fun and easy, and if you want to get serious you can even build a Rubik’s cube solver! We built a robot finger that pressed a button on a keyboard when it hears a loud noise (like playing a bongo drum!).
Aside from having a great time, both learning and building, we were very pleased to win the prize for “Most Awesome Hack”. I’d really like to include a video of our presentation, but that’s not available yet. In the meantime, here’s a few pictures of the various components:
The hacking itself was preceded by a morning of seminars on various Yahoo! and other APIs. I’ve included my notes below on the ones I attended in case anyone finds them useful.
GeoPlanet
Martin Barnes — Data Manager, Yahoo! Geo Technologies, UK (based in Shaftesbury Avenue)
I first learnt about Blueprint at Future of Mobile 2008 back in November last year, and Ricardo’s presentation was similar then. He understands the problems that are faced in mobile development, and Blueprint, like Luca Passani’s WURFL-based WALL, seems like a reasonable way to go forwards. However, it’s all down to the implementation and the edge cases and that’s a lot of hard work.
Quite a few people used Blueprint in their hacks, but didn’t actually demo on mobile phones (other than iPhones…). Dale Lane actually tried to make it work on Windows Mobile & Android G1 and had a horrible experience. When he visited his Blueprint site from his Windows Mobile browser, he actually got a message telling him to download Opera instead! That kind of ruins the point of a cross-browser system…
Yahoo!’s recent announcement that they’re killing all non-iPhone mobile native app development may point to Blueprint for mobile web getting stronger within Yahoo! But the promised native clients for BlackBerry and J2ME may now be dead in the water.
Anyway, here’s my notes from the session at Hackday:
Now gone to v1.1
Yahoo Mobile used to be text only, now graphics and styles etc.
can’t get away with things looking black and white any more…
I went to the launch of O2 Litmus on Friday — in the form of a hack day at the O2. It was interesting to see an operator directly running a hack day. Usually they’re involved as the supporting acts in a semi-official way, like Vodafone Betavine supporting OverTheAir. The guys at O2 did a reasonable job — finding people via twitter and other events and providing solid wifi and lots of power supplies. They didn’t leave quite enough time for the hacking though, allowing too much time for O2 Litmus partners to advertise their wares in the morning.
O2 Litmus itself seems like a good proposition in business terms — the same 30/70 revenue split as the Apple App Store; a system to let developers test apps with early adopters before releasing them into the wild; and money coming through to developers just 5 weeks after purchases. O2 are also trying to support app development through their partners, providing testing and business development support.
There are a couple of pieces missing, however. One great advantage of the Apple App Store is the ease of download — one click and the app automatically downloads to your iPhone and appears in your home screen. This is much harder for general phones at large — not only do you have to make sure you’ve got the right build for your phone (a problem that Apple has avoided for now by just having one platform), but you then have to figure out your phone’s weird and wonderful download experience. Do I really want to install something that my phone tells me could be a security risk? Do I want to install it in Games or Applications? And now it’s downloaded, where did it go? (Nokia Series 60, I’m talking to you here…)
At the moment, O2 Litmus requires a separate application and description for each build, with no provision for combining builds with automatic detection, and no support for external hosting either. I suggested that they consider allowing URLs for downloads and they seemed interested — this also opens the door to web apps instead of downloadable apps. They might also consider partnering with one of the companies who make a point of providing effective provisioning systems — like Paxmodept, GetJar or even ourselves.
The other piece that is missing is direct access to the store from the phone. O2 say they will email their early adopters in a few weeks to get them involved in the web site, but even those who do will not have the ability to see what their friends are doing and download the same thing. Spreading applications virally requires immediate access to the app as and when you see someone else using it. Miss the moment and the viral effect dies. The iPhone provides the App Store on the device itself to help with this — it’s not the easiest solution but at least it’s possible. Since J2ME apps make sharing apps intentionally hard (security to stop people sharing paid-for games…), O2 need to provide some access to Litmus from their phones.
As I mentioned above, the hacking competition itself was a little rushed — we only had about 3 hours to get something ready. As a result most of the entries were screenshot prototypes and sometimes not even that. I started putting together a simple J2ME version of our iPhone MyRail Lite app but NetBeans wasn’t behaving itself. Instead I made a paper prototype integrating MyRail Lite with twitter so that you can meet friends on the train and as they arrive:
Share your train journeys on twitter with myRail Lite on iPhone. Click the Tweet button on your departure, select your destination and carriage and it will send a tweet for you. Also see which train your friends are on and track them as they go.
The idea caught the attention of the judges (I imagine it was the idea rather than my sketched interface!) and I won second prize — 30 hours on DeviceAnywhere.
Here’s my full notes from the day if you want a bit more detail:
Why Litmus?
Came to the conclusion about a year ago that O2 is quite difficult to do business with…
Just like the other network operators! Except O2 hasn’t had a developer program recently.
Enabling O2 customer base to test apps and feedback
Developers can test apps and get feedback
Can control how many customers can download it and test it out
Developers can also put apps on sale directly
O2 take 30% cut of sales — exactly the same as the Apple App Store
Plans to incentive customers to get involved
Any customer that has tested your app will get the app for free when you go commercial
So controlling numbers of testers is crucial
O2 Marketing will monitor forums & feedback and launch popular apps into main customer base
Money comes through to developers after five weeks
Litmus Tools
O2 APIs
Connection Status API
Location API
Supporting services:
DeviceAnywhere — remote device testing
Rackspace — hosting
Segala — expert testing
Mobile Social Networks — Ewan Spence
Poking from your mobile
Involved in running Wubud — still in stealth mode
100% focus on mobile, but with web client too, linking to other social networks
Still has his Source O2 badge from O2’s previous developer outreach programme
Expert member of MIDP3 group
Chief app architect for Motorola in 90s
What should you build?
Open APIs
Involve a community to build weight & momentum
Provide service & support
Mobile UX: should exploit context
Use microformats — if there isn’t a suitable one then invent one!
Jitterbug — successful phone for old people in US
Social Business Model: share ideas with frenemies
Share the risk
Exploit mashups
Create or be part of an ecosystem, so that even if people click out of your app, they haven’t left the ecosystem and are therefore more likely to come back
Paul’s 9 year-old son is an iPhone developer :-)
Growth areas:
Enterprise social software
Services to support SOHO users
Inspiring New Ways of Design and Development — Anthony Ribot
As usual, Anthony gave a good presentation on mobile design. The Ribot guys were on a lucky streak on Friday, winning both a Sony Ericsson C905 in the raffle and coming first in the hacking competition with a proposed mashup of dopplr and your phone address book — find out who’s in town and then call them straight away. Well done guys!
The user-centred developer is a new type of role that should exist
Should develop with the user in mind
Not a role for every developer
Clients from web medium come with a long list of 15 features
We tell them we’ll only implement the top 3 items, or even just the top 1
Data-snacking is the most common experience on mobile
30-60 seconds experience — small snippets of info
Important to re-use the learnt behaviours of the device
Makes the first experience of the app that much better
Mobile not about making things smaller!
Must take in context of use and figure out what the user actually wants to do
e.g. working around the 3G icon on Nokia devices — Opera Mini indents the page title
Try and make the experience support reward-based design
e.g. Opera Mini (again) — right arrow does clever things based on context
Dealing with diversity
Use statistics (e.g. admob) to work out top 5 handsets for your target audience
Use rapid prototyping
The sooner you can get something tangible in your users’ hands, the better
Paper prototyping is good, but having something real is so much better
Finding that there’s less application stuff and more motion
Harder to describe in paper prototypes and screenshots
Tools available:
Flash (lite v3)
XHTML + CSS
Nokia Web Runtime
Silverlight (coming to Windows Mobile early next year, Symbian & Apple targeted too)
Dashcode
Partner adverts
We then had presentations from Rackspace, NAVTEQ, DeviceAnywhere, Mob4Hire and Segala.com. These were interesting in parts, but generally not much more than we could have got from flyers — a bit of a waste of time when the audience was mainly developers. We know what hosting is, thank you.
Rackspace — Matt ???
2600 employees (40-50 in London)
growing about 50% year on year
have “positive churn” (1.5%)
24/7 live “fanatical” support
NAVTEQ — Tony Hand & Mimmis Olsson
80 new devices launched with GPS in H1 2008
74m GPS phone devices sold in EMEA next year
55m smart phones, others feature phones
NAVTEQ Network for Developers
Online developer community
Includes sample map data
NAVTEQ Connections Web Portal
matchmaking, promotion
6th year of NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge
2009 prizes include cash, tool & data licenses and handsets
O2 segments:
Ambitious Status Seekers
Frenetic Families
Fun Loving Socialisers
DeviceAnywhere — Leila Modarres
We use DeviceAnywhere for testing our JavaME apps (such as the National Express East Coast Timetable to Mobile) and find it very effective. I didn't take many notes on this session as I already know how it works. Go see their site if you want further details.
Screens only turn on when the device is in use
Will hand out 30 free hours today
I won them!
Mob4hire — Paul Poutanen
Mobile developers can leverage the value of existing handsets to test for other developers
Earn money on mob4hire…
Developers can use Litmus system to take advantage of 25,000 early adopter customer base on mob4hire
Roadmap:
Certified testers
Remote emulation — competing with deviceanywhere (using LogMeIn)
I make things for mobile, web, voice and LEGO; create all sorts of stuff at Tesco Labs using agile development in any language that fits; run a CodeClub for kids in St Albans.
I blog about mobile stuff, Mac stuff (especially Time Machine), agile stuff and the events I attend.
I post at @adamcohenrose@mastodon.social — follow me!
