Most independent development projects have limited resources and traditionally, the choice of a target platform for an application factors in user adoption, tool availability etc. Typical mobile application development business cases account for added variables such as operator support, distribution reach etc. Here are some reasons on why prioritizing application development for Android might benefit developers.

1. As I tweeted earlier this month, NPD released a research report that found devices running Android accounted for 28 percent of the units sold to U.S. consumers in the first quarter of 2010. Although Apple challenged their findings, recent announcements at Google I/O 2010 also validates Android overtaking iPhone usage. Key numbers from the presentation:
   • 100,000 Activations a day as of February 2010 vs. Apple’s 94.5K sales (not necessarily activations) as reported in Apple’s First Quarter financial results
   • 60+ Compatible Devices from 21 OEMs in 48 countries on 59 Carriers
2. The upcoming release of Android OS – 2.2 (Code named Froyo) can make it a more attractive OS for most users including some iPhone fans. For the most part, the new features blows the iPhone OS 4.0 features (at least those that were offered via the sneak preview). Here are some of the top Froyo features:
   
   • Ability to turn the host device into a Wi-Fi Hotspot. You don’t need to carry around a mi-fi anymore when you travel.
   • I am not a big fan of Flash technology for a variety of reasons including Adobe’s lack of support for 64 bit browsers (on mainstream OSs) and instead insisting that users run 32bit browsers on their 64 bit OS on machines they dearly paid for a 64 bit processor. However, its a necessity to access content on many popular sites and suffice it to say Android 2.2 supports flash – no workaround needed.
   • Full Dalvik JIT (Just in Time) Compiler support increasing application speeds by up to 450% in some cases
   • Support for moving and running applications to and from SD cards
   • OTA (Over the Air) Music Sync – iTunes should have been able to sync wirelessly to your iPhone OS device  long ago. Apple definitely had all the technology components. But it looks like Google users may get to enjoy it first.
   • A Camera API that supports real camera features (focal length, exposure, zoom level, view angle etc.)

   Want to have a hands-on preview of Android 2.2? If you have a Nexus One, you might be in luck. While Google does not support this update officially, a discussion thread in the XDA Developer forum might help. Warning: Use at your own risk. Applying this update can make your device inoperable under certain circumstances.

3. The latest update to Apple’s Developer agreement (especially section 3.3.x) bans the distribution of Apps developed using 3^rd party tools such as Titanium and Unity 3D. Most developers are also familiar with the incredible length of time needed for Apple team to review and approve / reject an app – even if it was just a minor update to a previously approved app.Google/Android places no limits on how you sell or distribute your app – be it a native or web app. Choices for distribution range from Google marketplace to your own web site and everything in between if you so chose [Granted, the OEM or Carrier can limit this choice if they want to]. This combined with the ability to auto-update individual apps takes away some of the pains related to keeping your app competitive in the iPhone APP marketplace.
4. Extended Enterprise support facilitates easier enterprise adoption and extends Android reach some more. Android 2.2 offers enterprise features such as extended device management and security (Updates, Remote Wipe, Security policies) along with a host of MS-Exchange features such as GAL (Global Address List) look up and calendars.
5. Avalanche of MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) from China mainly geared towards Asian markets along with the rumored TEGRA based devices from NVIDIA and DELL should give the iPAD a run for its money in the Tablet market. More importantly, the way these devices are priced in Asia could fuel their widespread adoption in emerging markets as a cheap PC alternative. We could see  sales figures for these devices overtaking iPAD in sales by a wide margin by next year.

The last couple of days saw the entire Farscan team busy working on our newest App for the iPhone (details soon). The whole experience of spending hours with users testing the apps made me realize how many core features we often take for granted in other products/OSs we’re still missing in my favorite gadget of all time – the iPhone.

It was interesting that there was an app/hack for most of these missing features. Still, it will be interesting to see how Apple will monetize these features when they will eventually make their way to an iPhone near you.

Multitasking

We know the iPhone already does it. It does run native apps like the iPod and email app in the background while you do other things. Coming from a mobile device background, I can understand that Apple is probably concerned about the enormous battery and CPU drain multi-tasking could result in, in addition to application stability problems.

Alternate Solution: This remains one of the few reasons why I would jailbreak an iPhone today. The ‘backgrounder’ app on Cydia is a dream come true, especially if you use applications like Pandora and want to listen to it while doing something else.

Dashboard on Springboard

I want to see some useful info as soon as I take my iPhone out of my pocket or bring it out of an idle state. Give me some plugins or tiny apps for the home screen that will show me my next meeting / calendar events, time, weather, an RSS headline or two, or whatever else I want to see at a glance without launching having to switch between a dozen apps. This has been a standard feature on Windows mobile from PocketPC days and is available on newer mobile OSs including Android. Push notifications don’t really cut it for these types of uses.

Alternate Solution A friend of mine is working on an app that does exactly that. It shows a customizable number of calendar events, emails, text messages, weather and time in home and visiting city along with RSS headlines and meta information from whatever song is being played. Until then, this is another reason for jailbreaking. There are quite a large number of enterprising users who have created themes using Winterboard & LockInfo – apps available through Cydia (An application installation platform that is hosted by 3rd parties to provide app store like capabilities for Jailbroken iPhones). Most of the dbar based themes for Winterboard fit the bill quite nicely.

Wireless Sync

For an ultimate wireless device, it is quite surprising that the iPhone doesn’t support even rudimentary Bluetooth data profiles such as OBEX (A bluetooth profile that facilitates data transfer with other data capable devices). Even the venerable Motorola RAZR supports OBEX. While iPhone OS 3.0 added support for iPhone to iPhone Bluetooth transfers, I have no idea why Apple chose to go a proprietary route to do so and not support connecting to any non-iPhone devices (like your desktop PC.

Considering that Microsoft’s Zune already syncs over Wi-Fi out of the box and the ‘Remote’ app for iPhone does a wonderful job of remote controlling iTunes on your desktop, I am sure Apple is not far behind on supporting wireless iTunes Sync.

Alternate Solution: If you are a Microsoft Exchange user and your Exchange infrastructure is configured for Over the Air sync, most of the information in outlook can be synced. Apple of course also offers its fee-based subscription service Mobile-Me that will do the same thing. But, if you want to sync with your desktop at home and want more than your contacts, calendar and email (say like your apps, podcasts, playlists, etc.) you are out of luck. However, if you just wanted to transfer some files wirelessly, you can use tools that are available on the app store such as file ninja or Air Sharing (http://avatron.com/apps/air-sharing/). If you are the adventurous type and have a jailbroken iPhone, you can try tinkering with iSync (http://code.google.com/p/iphone-isync/) – a project with code hosted at Google Code, that unfortunately doesn’t show any signs of life these days.

Enhanced Digital Camera

At a 3MP resolution, the 3GS has a higher resolution than my first digital camera. But, it has the features of a pin hole camera at best. How about throwing in some more pizzazz into that camera app? Features like a burst mode for taking multiple shots with a single click should not be that hard to implement.  Again, even basic camera phones from Motorola and Samsung does these. Add some zoom controls and some color balancing presets and you have the beginnings of a usable camera application.  Even a digital zoom would work in some cases. I would rather have these features in the camera app rather than having to cut, paste and edit it in another application.

I love using the iPhone camera for other geeky things that use the camera. For example, to quickly snap business cards at trade fairs (I send it to a service that neatly converts all of those images into actual text in a contacts database). Another app I have started using religiously is ShopSavvy . This app allows scanning in product barcodes to check product reviews and compare prices across the internet. I have been known to check Amazon book reviews through ShopSavvy while browsing books at Barnes & Nobles.

But the lack of a flash makes these tasks a pain – especially trying to scan in a barcode using ShopSavvy . We all know that majority of the flashes on camera phone are useless. But even a low cost white LED that many manufacturers pass of as a flash would have been quite useful for any close up photography tasks like those I mentioned.

Alternate Solution: Luckily, the app store has a ton of 3^rd party camera apps. Some that helps with low-light photography and some that has quite an extensive array of digital features. Just search for the keyword ‘Camera’.

Video Streaming

Although, most operators want more and more consumers to get on to 3G and 4G networks to increase their ARPU (Average Revenue per User) by showing data rich applications such as video-phones, past experience with wireless operators have shown me their less than stellar enthusiasm when it comes to bandwidth hungry applications that can run on their networks.

However, considering the increasing number of iTouch users (See my previous post: ‘Is iPod touch a better model for next gen devices?‘), why couldn’t Apple drop a video phone app? Even with a single camera, it would have been nice to occasionally do a video pod cast or at least share what I was watching with some one that’s elsewhere.

Alternate Solution: Until we have an iPhone or iTouch or iPad with a camera that can face the user, a true video phone may be out of reach.  Till then, apps such as fRING does wonders to share what you are watching live with another person.

Development Platform

Most of you will probably know my biggest gripe with the iPhone – The lack of a non-Mac development environment! When we wanted to create our first iPhone App, I was surprised to find that none of our development partners in Asia or Eastern Europe had any iPhone development talent on their technical teams. Apparently, Macs are expensive and out of reach for most of the developer community. It has been almost 3 years and Apple apparently still has no interest in introducing an SDK for anything other than the Macs.

Want to double or quadruple the number of iPhone Apps in the App Store? Launch an SDK with an emulator that runs on Windows or Linux. The merchandising capabilities of the App Store and success stories of current iPhone app developers will be more than enough to drive masses of free lance developers to write apps for the iPhone. The success of e-lance and Amazon’s Turk further validates this.

History shows that application availability is what can make or kill an OS or a platform in the long run. I am sure if Apple doesn’t plug this gaping hole in their iPhone strategy, either Microsoft or Google will be more than happy to leverage the abundance of technical talent in emerging markets to build up an application library that can rival iPhone’s. They already have the tools. All they are missing is a bit of reach. Wake up Apple!

With CES in Las Vegas and new client projects that we picked up in December, I hardly had any time for reading these last few weeks. From the little that I managed to read and watch on the run, here are some of my favorites so far:

1. Question: If product managers are CEOs of their products, why aren’t more of them CEOs?? Ask a Good Product Manager Blog has some interesting insights.

2. In the market for an E-Book reader? Ars Technica posts a CES preview: three e-readers to watch in 2010. Looks like the Sprint Skiff will be at a store near us soon, while The Plastic Logic’s QUE looks like a great technology that still needs some major marketing muscle. Brainstorm Tech has a video report with CNNMoney contributor Jonathan Blum reporting on e-readers at CES.

3. Wreak havoc or fine tune your windows 7 with the newly discovered GodMode(s). These CNET posts explain how to enable the undocumented developer features in Windows 7 and even Vista. Warning: Use these at your own risk. Try them out on a test system first.

4. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has an excellent post compiled from user responses on features most users would like to see for iPhone 4.0. Some of these wouldn’t be a bad idea for other smartphone OSs as well. Features like a system wide ignore option for device orientation status should be a no-brainer on any device with an accelerometer. My #1 feature request for iPhone? Release an SDK for Windows already!

5. Dave McLure had posted his presentation ‘Start up metrics for Pirates‘ on his blog  “Master of 500 Hats” that I missed somehow. Glad I caught it again (Thanks Luke)

A recent report from Flurry has some eye opening data showing an emerging trend among mobile device users. Flurry tracked over 15 million end user sessions across different applications to estimate nearly 49% of users use an iPod Touch for social gaming as opposed to 43% on the iPhone (with about 1% on Android).

Flurry also estimated that nearly 40% of the 58 million iPhone devices sold worldwide through Sep 2009 are iPod touch devices.

As can be seen from the charts below, Flurry’s findings indicate the growth of social media and social gaming usage [Online games that leverage social media aspects such as your friend’s list on Myspace/Facebook] among iPod Touch device users.

Does this present an opportunity for Google and its partners for a non-carrier focused device? Such a device will be far cheaper and have a larger channel / retail presence. A device like that could also be introduced to the market quicker than an operator focused device as it would not have to deal with the extensive testing required for use on carrier networks. Considering the success of competitive devices like Amazon’s Kindle, it’s a surprise to me that none of Google’s partners have come out with a device like this, yet.

Read more about this report at Flurry’s Blog