Samsung is apparently planning to equip it’s developers with the latest technologies. Hence, it is calling all developers to join it in Barcelona on 28 Feb 2012.
Hurry up, limited seats left. you can register at http://developer.samsung.com/mwc2012/registration.do and view the schedule at http://developer.samsung.com/mwc2012/session.do
Happy developing…!!!
When it comes to mobile advertising, it is now difficult to find an ad-free free app on platforms like Android and iOS. For many, this seems to compensate at least somewhat for the loss of sales in “classic” business models.
As for the ad market overall, the folks from the advertising firm inneractive have just sent us the following, pretty interesting diagram:
What do you think?
Samsung has shown an extraordinary amount of diligence when it comes to keeping its SDK up to date – version 2.0.4 has just been released.
In particular, the following has been changed and improved:
This release contains the following resolved issues.
IDE and SDK
IDE
The Stop JavaScript Debugging menu in the JavaScript Debugger does not work properly. When the user clicks this menu, the application exits.
SDK
If the Event Injector sends the ‘USB Remove’ event, the current debugging application is terminated.C++ Framework
Osp::Ads::Controls
The Ad library (libOspAdsControls.so.2.0.3) has a packaging error, which means that the application packages with the Ad library cannot be run by the Test Kit or registered properly in the Samsung Apps Seller Office.
Osp::App
The launch condition registered with the RegisterAppLaunch() method does not fire correctly.
Osp::Locations
Location updates are generated even in the sleep mode.
Osp::Social
Editing a contact through the contact AppControl does not work properly when a contact ID and URL are used as parameters.
The SnsAuthenticator class does not work correctly for bada applications newly registered as Facebook Applications.
Osp::System
The application is automatically registered in the location menu, when it subscribes to setting events.
Osp::Ui
The text color and background color of the tab style footer does not change.
The SetTextAlignment() method of the TextBox, EditField, EditArea, and ExpandableEditArea classes does not work as expected.
If the user-specified color is partially or fully transparent, the color-related methods of all UI controls do not work as expected on WQVGA devices.
If the renderer size and the size of the OverlayRegion instance do not match, a pinkish outline is shown on WQVGA devices.
The translucent properties of the Form indicator, header, and footer do not work as expected on WQVGA UI Builder.Web Framework
General
Auto-selection of the privileged API group in the config.xml file does not work properly on the bada developer site.
Not much to add here – except that, for me, the Auto-Update feature of the bada IDE did not work, requiring a manual update…
Research2guidance, the ever number crunching company has produced it’s latest report concerning development for smartphones.
In 2011 publishers created $US 6.8 billion in application download revenues while app development revenues reached $US 20.5 billion. The development service became a mass market almost 3 times of the size of the application download market today.
The market for mobile application development services, including application creation, management, distribution and extension services, has reached $US 20.5 billion vs. $US 6.8 billion in app downloads in 2011. Thus the development market surpassed the content market by the factor of 3.
Today most app project revenue is generated from “classical” app creation services (concept creation, design and coding). New service types like app libraries, white label solutions and multi platform app development tools have become more and more popular, but do not yet take a major share of the market.
Prices for application development services vary significantly between regions. UK developers charge $US 626 per day whereas competitors from India charge, on average, $US 138 per working day.
App development partners using price as the main criteria for selection will not be lead to an optimal solution as most of the price differences are offset by the additional time needed by offshore app developers.
App developers can get a copy of the 98 page report from http://www.research2guidance.com/the-market-for-mobile-app-development-services-reached-us-20.5-billion-in-2011/
bada 2.0 is a competitive operating system – its feature set is now more or less on level with Symbian and Android.
Version 2.0.3 of the SDK now implements the following new features:
● Support of the official WQVGA resolution
The WQVGA resolution was supported as a beta version in SDK 2.0.2, and it is now supported as an
official resolution in 2.0.3. The official resolutions supported in version 2.0.3 are WVGA, HVGA, and WQVGA.● Additional language support for voice functions (TTS, STT)
Korean and Chinese are supported in addition to the previous 5 languages (English, French, Italian,
German, and Spanish).
– Korean: This language has been added to the SDK. Only the Wave 3 (for all countries) device is supported.
– Simplified Chinese: This language has been added to the SDK.
Simplified Chinese is only supported for devices for the Chinese market.● Support for the Test Kit
The bada Test Kit application on the target device allows you to install multiple applications on the device.
Additionally, the Test Kit supports remote application installation, allowing other developers to test
your application. The Test Kit will be published on Samsung Apps.
For more information, see Test Kit.● Addition of the bada RSS builder
The bada RSS builder template has been added for RSS applications.
It enables developers to develop RSS applications more easily.● Debug library for target devices
The debug library for target devices is distributed with some updates. With this updated version,
you can use the step-into option while debugging applications on a target device, and the issue
where variables were not read properly has been resolved. For more information, see Debug Library.● Function improvements and error corrections
– Some errors in the Potential Bug Checker have been corrected and the performance has been improved.
– The Ad library has been enhanced by removing limitations of the previous library.● Some classes (regarding APIs and event listeners) have been deprecated:
Osp::Social::Services::BuddyService
Osp::Social::Services::PrivacyManager
Osp::Social::Services::ProfileService
Osp::Locations::RemoteLocationProvider
Osp::Locations::RemoteLandmarkStore
The full release notes can be found at the URL below:
http://static.bada.com/releasenotes/2.0.3.html
Rumors about non-payment of developers my MobiHand’s have made circles in the BlackBerry market for some time – reminding veterans of the Palm ESD which also almost went belly-up and repaid the developers over a few years.
A recent CrackBerry forum post purpoted to be coming from MobiHand now reads as following – emphasis added by yours truly
To help you folks avoid further misunderstanding on a couple of issues, here is some information about recent topics we’ve seen discussed on these forums. First, MobiHand continues to provide customer service in the same manner as in past. In the few cases of activation code problems that have actually been referred to us, the cause has been the removal, by the applicable developer, of the linkage between our systems and the developer’s systems, which is needed to generate codes based on the application’s DRM model. We encourage developers to continue to provide service and enable us to provide service to our mutual customers. We are late on some payments, but we are working to resolve that and it is not appropriate or helpful to the situation for any of us to hurt or scare our customers.
Another issue recently raised has been “refunds” recorded on the system over the last few days. Almost all of these are not voluntary refunds to customers. These are “chargebacks” (forced refunds) imposed by the credit card companies when the original purchase was made by a user not authorized to use the credit card. Unfortunately, these fraud events are common in online commerce, especially for sales of items that don’t need to be shipped to a real physical address. We use several techniques to detect and reject many fraud orders, but some get through undetected. We historically experience fraud rates lower than industry averages and much less than 1% of sales. The experience rates for different products often vary as the fraudsters sometimes seem to target specific products. These chargebacks come from the credit card companies day by day, normally several weeks or months after the original sale (after the cardholders have examined their credit card statements) and we normally record them in big batches. The items recorded in the last few days represent an accumulation of chargebacks over about two months. We are simply completing the accounting after not recording them for some time.
We ask developers in this forum to understand that MobiHand continues to work hard to provide services, get all of you paid and generate growing revenues. If something is not perfect, please do not interpret it to mean that we have given up or do not intend to get it right. Most developers with questions and concerns have addressed them directly to us in a businesslike manner, using the help tool inside their MobiHand account, and most concerns are resolved to their satisfaction with the one exception being late payments. We appreciate that most developers are not using payment delays as a reason to create more problems by inconveniencing customers or encouraging panic by the developer community. You should also know that MobiHand is not some giant corporate monster — it is a small technology company with real people who have provided outstanding service to customers, developers and website stores for seven years. As usual, businesses go through easy times and difficult times and the only way we know to get through difficulties is to continue to work. MobiHand is continuing to provide services and intends to pay every single dollar owed to every single developer and we have several initiatives underway that we believe will enable that.
Finally, please understand that we don’t read these forums everyday, we don’t intend to become regular participants and, if we are silent about issues, it is not because we don’t care. We are simply focused on running our business. Instead of engaging in debates, we are trying to serve the developer community and our mutual customers.
Thanks.
As of this writing, not much more is known…
P.S. To clarify some accusations levied against Tamoggemon Limited by a hysteric developer who will remain unnamed: we have not made any revenue off MobiHand for ages. We stand in no commercial relationship to MobiHand whatsoever.
In the past, our business applications have fared extraordinarily well in India – Nokia is a large brand there, and business apps are extremely popular in this market.
Mobile Business Briefing now has the following bit of advice courtesy of Reliance:
…combined circulations of all of the English-language newspapers does not approach that of the single most popular local-language title,…
Feel like localizing? Let us know!
When it comes to promoting mobile applications, there is little which helps more than a nice discount campaign. Tieing these in with festive seasons can make sense – if only there were a calendar of all “rebate fiests”.
Tucows, a once-large ESD has now sent out the following in an email:
“Cyber Monday has become a very big deal to online merchants. How big? U.S.
consumers last year spent $846 million dollars on Cyber Monday”–Ian Paul, PCWorld
–pcworld
So, to make this clear especially for our non-US readers:
Black Friday is on November 25, 2011.
Cyber Monday is on November 28, 2011.
Why not let us know about your promotions?
It looks like the release of bada 2.0 is coming closer and closer – Samsung has just updated the theme designer software.
The release announcement below lists the new features:
Not much to add here…
When it comes to advertising services for mobile apps, the market has now matured enough for aggregators to show up. Samsung has recently launched one of its own, which has worked very very well in my tests so far.
An email from the company now contains the following gem for early adopters:
Samsung AdHub is a digital advertising service from Samsung Electronics that supports in-application advertising for bada and Android developers. If you are looking for revenue streams beyond just application sales, this is the answer. This new ad service for mobile, and tablet PC app developers is the perfect opp-ortunity to diversify your business model.
Samsung AdHub has partnered with leading ad networks in the industry to serve ads into your applications. Developers can maximize their fill rates and revenue by accessing our large advertiser pool ag-gregated from our partner ad networks. Select the ad network of your choice, design how you want ads to be displayed in your application, and earn optimized ad revenue for your applications.
To mark the launch of Samsung AdHub, For a limited period of time (from Oct.10th, 2011 until the end of Dec. 2011) Samsung AdHub is raising our publisher revenue share from 60% to 80%.
Not much to add here…except that bada and Android developers alike have little to loose…
In the past, various companies have held all kinds of competition. Nokia is famous for them – and is similarily famous for the kind of apps (usually university-developed) which win the competition.
Samsung now tries out an innovative new approach where the most-downloaded apps get the loot:
Find out more via the URL below:
http://developer.bada.com/events/bada2.0-Power-App-Race?rlWlfcp=duq&isReturn=Y
So far, debugging an application on-device was impossible with the leaked bada ROMs – the application installed, but failed to launch.
To my pleasure, when starting the IDE today, I saw this:
I then proceeded to testing with my Samsung Wave II, and can confirm that one can now deploy applications onto devices running the leaked ROM images of bada 2.0. Emulator, no more!
Even though the slides for the Qt on Android talk have been uploaded quite some time ago, we haven’t had access to the video so far.
The WHYMCA team has now provided us with the video below. Feel free to take a look at it if you want a quick introduction to both Qt and Necessitas (aka Qt for Android):
QT for Android from WhyMCA on Vimeo.
Inner-active, the industry’s premier mobile ad mediation provider with over 100 ad networks and local agencies available at the click of a button, has released an infographic with and insight on “in app advertisement size and position”.
The infographic shows how, when and where to place an ad to make maximum profit.
We all have played Bejeweled, Final Fantasy and Pac man at one time or the other. These games are the jewels of different platform, from arcade to console. But most of you reading this article might have played the same games on your smartphone or tablet.
Jason Kapalka, founder of PopCap Games, in his keynote at the PLANET OF THE APPS EUROPE 2011, shared some inevitable pitfalls developers overlook. According to Jason
…there are two main reasons to develop an app based on an existing title: to benefit from an existing fan base and brand recognition; or as a development shortcut based on existing programming work.
PopCap’s Bejeweled was identified as a case of the former, while its Plants vs Zombies falls into the latter category.
It has to feel instantly good. There is no learning curve,”
If we’d released the first version of Plants vs Zombies we tried, with its original controls, I don’t think it would have been played by anybody, because they would have rapidly found it to be difficult and frustrating.
He also added that
….consider device screen size as the most important factor, rather than being distracted by rapidly increasing screen resolutions.
Regardless of resolution, there is only so much screen a user can see or touch when playing a game – you need to look at the worse case scenario…
Consider Pac man, the retro game that changed the world was never imagined without a joy stick. That was how it was developed, keeping the joystick in mind. The same user experience can not be duplicated on the modern devices which are distancing themselves from buttons, let alone joysticks.
The mantra for smartphone success is that the game should be short and not long. Citing the example of Final Fantasy, he explained
Final Fantasy is a great game, but it didn’t do particularly well on the iPhone largely because it was just not the sort of game that people with iPhones wanted. They didn’t want to sit down for a 40-hour role-play, they wanted something they could play in one minute intervals.
The emphasis should be put on reinventing rather than porting. He also warned developers of the tablet trap due to two reasons:
…smartphone market has the real volumes…
…A smartphone game can become a tablet game, but a tablet game cannot become a smartphone game
The real example provided by him was when they decided to deliver the same user experience across all mobile devices for Bejeweled and Bejeweled Blitz, which is available via Facebook and mobile devices. According to him,
it was a real pain in the ass to keep things in sync
That pretty much explains it.
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