Despite the hype, there is sporadic use of app stores outside the Apple and Android platforms. Our survey of 400+ mobile developers found that only four percent of Java respondents used App Stores as their primary channel to market. Windows Phone and mobile web developers find app stores little more relevant, with fewer than 10 percent of such respondents using one as a primary channel for taking applications to market.

This contrasts completely with platforms that have ‘native’ app stores. Over 95 percent of iPhone respondents use the Apple App Store as their primary channel, while the percentage of Android respondents using Android Market is just below 90.

In terms of the incumbent mobile platforms, around 75 percent of Symbian respondents that use app stores, use the Nokia Ovi Store. The significant number (20-25 percent) of Symbian developers who also use iPhone and Android app stores reveals the brain-drain that is taking place towards these newer platforms. This is a particularly critical migration of developer mindshare, considering that the Symbian platform is the hardest to master. Thus, the size of developer investments on Symbian being written off is substantial.

Besides the growth of apps, app stores are the cornerstone of another major transformation that has taken place in the mobile industry: the mass-market use of mobile as the next marketing channel beyond the Internet. We would argue that it was app stores that triggered the influx of apps – not the open source nature of Android, or the consumer sex appeal of the iPhone.

App stores triggered the sheer growth in app numbers and diversity that led to the cliché, “there’s an app for that”. Another cliché, “the screen is the app,” tells the other half of the story. Combined, the app store and touchscreen were the two essential ingredients behind mobile apps as the next mass-market channel beyond the Internet. These two ingredients inspired just about every media and service company to commission companion or revenue-driven apps as extensions to their traditional online channels. In effect, this phenomenon fueled the app economy, even beyond what app store numbers alone suggest.

Speeding up time to market
App stores have revolutionised time to market for applications. To research exactly how radically the time to market for applications has changed since the introduction of app stores, we analysed two parameters:
- the time to shelf, i.e. how long it takes from submitting an application to that application being available for purchase
- the time to payment, i.e. the length of time between an application being sold and the proceeds reaching the developer’s bank account

Our findings show that app stores have reduced the average time-to-shelf by two thirds: from 68 days across traditional channels, to 22 days via an app store. These traditional channels have been suffering from long, proprietary and fragmented processes of application certification, approval, targeting and pricing, all of which need to be established via one-to-one commercial agreements. Moreover, app stores have reduced the time-to-payment by more than half; from 82 days on average in the case of traditional channels, to 36 days on average with app stores.

Just the Highlights

Disclosure out of the way, here are the latest findings, highlights first:

• 92 countries generated more than 10 million request in May 2010, up from 27 countries in May 2008
• Nokia leads in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe
• Apple leads in North America, Oceania and Western Europe
• In May 2010, smartphones generated 46% of traffic in the AdMob network, up from 22% 2 years ago
• 24% of May's traffic was via Wi-Fi
• Mobile Internet Devices (including the iPad, PSP and iPod Touch) consistently have accounted for 10% of traffic over the past year
• 57% of Apple devices in AdMob's network are outside the U.S.
• Traffic from the Android platform has grown 29% month-over-month since May 2009
• iOS and Android users spend 79 minutes per day using apps
• iOS and Android users download about 9 apps per month

Android Gains Thanks to New Devices

The introduction of numerous Android-based phones has allowed the mobile OS's market share to increase dramatically over the past year, AdMob finds. But what's most interesting is seeing what those gains look like, graphed out.

In this chart, for example, you can see a sharp increase in Android's market share while Apple's iOS market share drops. In February, Apple appears to have a 50% share, but by May, it's down to 40% worldwide.

Amazon just updated the content for the Kindle app running on Apple gear that gives a few books an inject of multimedia. For example, Rich Steves' London Kindle Edition with audio/video features walking tours with Rich doing the narration while Rose's Heavenly Cakes features video tips for... you guessed it, making delicious cake. It's hard to tell if the move is a first step in a wholesale Kindle change or just a toe in the water to gauge interest.

This infographic was commissioned by Courrier Japon Magazine in Tokyo and is based on the article "The iPad Changes Everything" originally published by Fortune Magazine. It illustrates the introduction of the iPad and how many devices in different markets are now finding themselves in direction competion to the power of the iPad and the Apps Store. All data was researched by myself, and the graphic was later split onto two pages to better fit the flow of the article.

Google's mobile OS has climbed rapidly over the prior months, having gone from around 5% in January 2009 to 20% in May 2010, stealing away market share from other mobile OS's, most notably Apple's, whose iOS dropped from 75% share to 59% during that same time frame.

Also of note, these numbers were calculated prior to the EVO's launch, the highly anticipated "4G" Android smartphone which sold out within days of its launch. Adding that into the fold, the next Quantcast report will likely offer even more gains for Android at iOS's expense.

Apple has just announced that sales of its tablet computer iPad have now topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. That’s a whole lot of iPads in under two months, and the company only started shipping units to customers in countries outside the United States last weekend.

Lies, damned lies and statistics: You can play games with numbers, and recently the game has been to show Android phones are beating the iPhone in the U.S. Now new data proves that in the rest of the world, Google's still chasing Apple.

The new figures come from Gartner as part of a bigger survey of global mobile phone use patterns. This has two headline figures that are news all by themselves: Globally the entire mobile market grew by 17% in the first quarter of 2010, a strong indicator that the world's economy is definitely on the mend. But the smartphone market grew even faster, from 13.6% of total sales in Q1 2009 to 17.3% in Q1 2010--a 27% growth rate, which is yet another sign that while the dumbphone still owns the market, the future is in smartphones.

The only way your ads can have any impact is if they convince people to stop buying Apple products. But that won’t happen either. The side-effect of making quality products is that people want them. They want them even in some cases if they don’t like you, or agree with certain actions. And the fact of the matter is that despite these ads, most people won’t have any idea what all of this is about — nor would they care if they did. They’ll just buy what they consider to be a quality product.

So that leaves your only real hope: the government (ugh). And you’re trying to make that happen. But again, that’s not going to work. While Apple may control a significant percentage of the mindshare in the market right now, they do not control a majority of the actual market share in computers or smart phones. They do in MP3 players, but that is a dying industry. As for the iPad, tablet computers are much too new of a category for the government to even think about regulating at this point.

So where does that leave you? Well, to be frank, shit out of luck.

On one hand, there’s an urge to feel bad for you. You really are getting screwed here. On the other hand, you really did it to yourselves.

When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, lightweight version of Flash for mobile devices, I bet that Apple would have almost been forced to use it. They offered it on their desktop browsers after all, and this new device was supposed to be putting the Internet in your pocket. It was no sure thing that this device would succeed at the time, and giving it every chance to (by including something like Flash) would have made sense. But there was no version of Flash ready that would run on the device (presumably without massive performance/battery hits). In fact, only now, three full years later, is a version of Flash running on mainstream mobile devices being shown off.

You gave Jobs three years worth of solid data (massive iPhone sales) to prove he didn’t need you. And now he’s using that knowledge in the iPad, the device which may or may not be the first step in the future of computing. And now others are rallying to his side because he grabbed the position of power.

Hahahah.. great article..

“It occupies too much territory already covered by smartphones, PCs, laptops and traditional media”, says the report, concluding that most consumers are unable “to find enough rational argument to justify taking the plunge.”

But over time that could change.

Part of the problem, the report notes, is that the amount of hype that the iPad garnered before and at launch doesn’t match up with expectations. Mainstream users were expecting a revolution when all they see is incremental change.

A second group, however, described as the “impulsive minority” say they don’t need it but simply have to have it. For them “it’s not about function, compatibility or improvement but about raw appeal, its sheer magic.”

The report quite rightly concedes that these early adopters may well show the way, and that over time the iPad could make more sense to mainstream users.

Google’s Android OS surpassed Apple in US smartphone market share during the first quarter of 2010. According to the NPD Group, Google now enjoys 28 percent of the smartphone market, earning the company the second-place spot behind Research in Motion (36 percent) and pushing Apple to third place (21 percent).