An interesting marketing stunt performed by Microsoft's marketing at CES - betting people $100 that they won't be as fast on their phone compared to Windows Phone to perform some task like posting information to social networks, checking weather, finding a place to eat etc...
To top that, everyone who got smoked got a brand new Windows Phone. Microsoft you are moving in the right direction!
An interesting infographic from the mobile advertising provider and mediation company - InnerActive was produced encompassing the timeline between the last year's MWC in Barcelona and this year's MWC.
Just noticed a nice update on developer facing Android Market panel. Now the developer can see the device user and the app version on each comment on Android Market. Which is a very nice addition to quite barren otherwise control panel. This will help to pinpoint problems more easily for the developers.
Another things that I would personally (and probably many of other Android developer as well) like to see are:
Andriod OS version
Possibility to answer to the comment - let the developer answer and send the answer to the user's email automatically
NOTE: To be able to install Developer Tools from the App Store, you need to delete Install XCode from your /Applications folder something like this should work:
sudo rm -Rf /Applications/Install Xcode.app
Then once you download the Xcode from the App Store, it is not installed yet. You need to go to the same place /Application/Install Xcode.app and run the installer.
Last year I've put some stats for BB OS distribution here: [link id='540']
Beginning 2012 I was wondering what is the OS distribution now with the BB OS 7.0 devices in the wild and especially since I wanted to do updates only for the devices running BB OS 5.0 and up.
So the distribution looks like this:
Making devices that run OS below 5.0 to be about 5-6% of all the devices. Of course this data is based on the users who use this specific app, but I am almost positive that this is pretty close to the generalized numbers.
Here's the chart of smartphones market share according to market research firm NPD
Quite interesting trend can be seen by the end of the year with huge spike in iOS sales. This of course can be attributed to the iPhone 4S and the holiday season. Apple products are still considered luxury and make great gifts as opposed to say Android which is considered more of a necessity.
UPDATE: Additional source (showing the same trend though) from Nielsen ***Note the shift in timeline. Otherwise the graphs correlate.
The most interesgint points that we saw are that 56% of the users can purchase apps via carrier billing which is amazing number for a young platform. Android did not have carrier billing for at least a year into its existence if not two years. Which was a significant barrier for selling paid apps since billing mechanism was not oiled like on Apple's iOS platform where all the users have iTunes setup with their billing information.
Surprising enough the Games category is not as huge as we'd expect it to be. Taking a little smaller percentage than the Entertainment apps in the app to category distribution. But in the paid apps category Games are far ahead of any other category in purchases which of course should not be surprising, although this trend is not so prominent on other platforms.
Overall it seems pretty good info and quite useful for developers. Enjoy!