Category: Android

Short term value, long term damage in the mobile App Stores

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Lex Friedman: It’s no shocker that free apps are vastly more popular than paid apps; everyone likes getting something for nothing. But it is surprising that folks consider a $3 app expensive, and a $10 app downright exorbitant. I know people who play the same iOS game every single day, but choose to stick with the free version—despite its constant, intrusive ads—rather than pony up $5 just once to go ad-free forever… I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but it strikes me that too many iOS device owners fail to act in their own best interests—both in the immediate

BBC Trust decide BBC’s mobile iPlayer was not biased because it focused on iOS

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The internal inquiry say everything okay, and blames it all on Android fragmentation. While the BBC must do all that is reasonably practicable to ensure that viewers can access its on-demand content in a range of convenient and cost-effective ways, this did not necessarily mean that it would always be expected to launch new features on different platforms simultaneously. Nothing to see here, carry on, please stop pestering our mobile developers who can’t handle the multiple variants issue. At least the BBC Trust promise to watch the mobile app during 2013… Which is nice of them.

Google have framed the Glass debate around acceptance

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In all the fury over the privacy of Google Glass, we might have missed the bigger truth… Google has made society accept Glass without ever asking society. It’s far easier to ask a child if they will be taking their toy bear to bed or their toy cat to bed, than asking if they are going to go to bed. By framing the choice as after the bedtime decision, it’s accepted far more easily that the day is over and sleep is needed… Every time another round of controversy flares up, the Glass team should embrace, engage and address all of

I’m keeping an eye on the Android powered Fairphone

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It’s a €350 Android phone, with a 4.3 inch screen a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, 16MB of on-board storage, and 1 MB of Ram. pretty middle of the road specs for an Android 4.2 device. But it’s a ‘fair’ phone… The first-ever Fairphone combines social values with smart, radically open design that considers the full lifecycle of the product. Worker welfare initiatives and conflict-free minerals put people first every step of the way. Transparency is paramount, from materials and production to pricing. One to keep an eye on, not for pricing and tech, but to see if people will go

How much of a win for Microsoft is Android?

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For the sake of discussion, let’s use $3 per device as our figure. This number is an estimate, but given all information in the market it’s our best guesstimate. We can now do the math: 860 million Android devices in 2013, of which 65% pay Microsoft a fee, and that fee being $3 leaves Microsoft with $1.677 billion in Android revenue this year. That works out to just over $400 million per quarter, which fits with our earlier statements of Android patent revenue being in the low hundreds of millions. The Next Web looks at just how much Android is