Global Nerdy

Ed Bott is that rarest and most curious of creatures — a Windows fan — so it shouldn’t be surprising that when Apple reported that they hit the 40 billion downloads from the App Store, with nearly half of that in 2012, his take-away from the news was that the numbers were good for Apple and less so for developers. At no point does he make any mention of the vast sums of money one can make on the Windows Phone marketplace, because no such opportunities exist. Speaking as a former Windows Phone Champ, I think I can safely say that my one post about ridiculous Windows Phone market share predictions has made more money through Google AdSense than most Windows Phone apps.

In the Wall Street Journal blog Digits, Matthew Lynley says that these 40 billion apps have led to $7 billion in payouts to developers. He also notes that the rate at which developers are being paid is accelerating, from a total of $2.5 billion total in July 2011 to $4 billion in March 2012.

It should be noted that a mere 25 developers accounted for half the revenue in the U.S. App Store (for iPhone apps only) and Google Play in the first 20 days of 2012, according to the analytics firm Canalys.

There’s always a lot of that repeated mantra, “Android is Winning”, but according to Kantar WorldPanel’s data, iOS is leading the pack in smartphone OS sales. For the 12-week period ending November 25th, 2012:

• iOS surpassed the 50% of phones sold, acquiring 53.3% of the market
• Android dropped 10%, down to 41,9%
• Windows Phone held steady at 2.7%

An interesting observation from Kantar:

Of those who purchased an iPhone in November, 27% upgraded from another smartphone OS, 34% upgraded from a previous iPhone and 40% upgraded to their first smartphone.

iOS developer Andrew Rauh has put together a list of things he’s learned as a freelance iOS developer. You should read his article for the details, but here’s a quick summary:

1. Be picky with your clients. 
2. Reuse code.
3. Always ask for at least half the cost of the project up front.
4. Keep communication consistent, but don’t allow clients to be obsessive.
5. Anticipate the worst.

Justin Benson asks an interesting question: Would Instagram make it today, as an iOS-only app? He writes:

Would Instagram make it today purely on an iOS only strategy? One answer is Yes. There are many more iOS devices in play today then when they launched. The potential audience is therefore much larger. So they numbers would indicate it’s more than doable.

Yet what would we think of someone who tried to just support one platform? Would it indicate closed mindedness? Elitism? Out of touch with the broader world? Would it say “These guys just don’t get it!” – even to many iOS users?  Would it make you wonder about just how good a product they can build if those are some of their foundational qualities?

And now, a number of coding links…

• NSLogger: A high perfomance logging utility which displays traces emitted by client applications running on Mac OS X or iOS. It replaces your usual NSLog()-based traces and provides powerful additions like display filtering, image and binary logging, traces buffering, timing information, etc.
• Determining a user’s most important contacts on iOS: “Many iOS apps provide an ‘invite your friends’ feature. From a usability design perspective it is desirable that the app suggests friends that are likely to be invited by the user. This article explains an App Store-legal heuristic that guesses the most important contacts in a user’s address book on iOS. Additionally, it provides an example implementation and a demo application under the MIT license.”
• Mosaic UI: A tiled UI for iOS that does automatic layouts based on the tiles’ sizes.
• Real-time iOS filesystem monitoring: Security Aegis have an article covering the use of filemon.ios to watch applications as they drop files to the app filesystem as well as automate the finding of of all kinds of M1 Insecure data storage vulnerabilities.
• Demystifying iOS application crash logs: An article at the always useful RayWenderlich.com site: “you’ll learn about some common crash log scenarios, as well as how to acquire crash logs from development devices and iTunes Connect. You will learn about symbolication, and tracing back from log to code. You will also debug an application that can crash in certain situations.”

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

Have a great new year! Regular posting will resume on Monday, January 7th.

I had no idea that Edward Tufte’s 1974 classic, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy, was available for download for free on his site. Almost 40 years have passed since it was published, and not only is the math still valid, but in this age of open data, readily-available computing power, tools like the R programming language and a polarized political atmosphere that needs less party line and more data, this book may be even more useful today.

For the moment, it seems that the iPad is the only tablet that matters. While it’s difficult to get a direct measure of the numbers of types of tablets out there, there are a number of ways to approximate those numbers through indirect means.

Indirect Metric #1: Ad Impressions

The iPad family of tablets account for the vast majority of ad impressions seen on tablets in North America. According to the December 2012 Tablet Market Update put out by the online advertising network Chitika, for every 100 iPad impressions, the other tablets combined have less than 15. Here’s how those less-than-15 impressions break down:

These numbers come from a sample of “tens of millions” of impressions from Chitika’s ad network seen U.S. and Canadian tablet users from December 8th through 14th, 2012. For every 100 iPad impressions for the aforementioned user base during the aforementioned period, other tablets produced the following numbers of impressions:

Tablet	Number of impressions per 100 iPad impressions
Amazon Kindle Fire	4.88
Samsung Galaxy Tablets	3.04
Google Nexus Tablets	1.22
Asus Transformer	0.93
Barnes & Noble Nook	0.91
Acer Iconia	0.76
Toshiba Thrive	0.60
Motorola Xoom	0.59
Other Android Tablets	0.45
Microsoft Surface	0.22
HP Touchpad	0.18
Unidentifiable Android	0.17

Chitika’s numbers seem to indicate that the iPad family of tablets generate over 87% of U.S. and Canadian tablet web traffic. While this is a slight decrease — it was over 88% a month ago — it looks as though Apple will continue to dominate web traffic for the foreseeable future.

Indirect Metric #2: First Tweets

Here’s a graphic created by one A. X. Ian, who goes by @axian on Twitter, showing the results of his search for the phrase “First tweet from” followed by iPad, Kindle, Nexus and Surface:

Ian’s search was performed on Christmas Day, from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST, which he describes as “plenty of time for lots of people to open their presents”. Here’s his count of tweets at the end of the 24-hour sampling period:

Tablet	Number of “First time on this tablet” tweets
Apple iPad	1,795
Amazon Kindle	250
Google Nexus	100
Microsoft Surface	36

Indirect Metric #3: Store Wars

The scene in the video above — recorded at Lone Tree, Colorado’s Park Meadows Mall on Black Friday — seems to be playing across the U.S. and Canada, wherever Apple and Microsoft stores are in the same mall. This pretty much captures what’s happening in CTS’ home town of Toronto, where there are both an Apple Store and a Microsoft Store in Yorkdale Mall, as well as in Century City Mall in Los Angeles:

Meanwhile, in China and Hong Kong, Business Insider reports that there’s an “insatiable demand” for the iPad Mini.

Indirect Metric #4: Go on a Flight and Look Around

I fly about once a month, and both in the lounge and on the plane, I see more and more tablets. Some people do their work, some read, and some bring them as their own personal in-lounge/in-flight entertainment units. No matter what they’re using their tablets for, the one thing that binds them together is that by and large, they’re iPads.

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

Before we get back to the serious business of mobile industry statistics, let’s have a little fun. We’ll share some photos of mobile products that we at CTS most emphatically do not recommend:

The “iPhone8”: Somehow, we suspect that this isn’t an official Apple product — in fact, it’s not even a phone. Looking at this photo, one can almost hear the lawyers in Cupertino sharpening their knives.

iArm: It probably creates more problems that it purports to solve, but it’s nowhere near as bad an idea as…

iDrive: We have trouble imagining someone giving this as a gift and thinking “Yes. This will end well.”

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

Data in this graph does not include traffic from WiFi, Mobile WiMax or DVB-H.

The graph above comes from Ericsson’s Mobility Report for November 2012 [312MB PDF] and shows the total quarterly mobile voice and data traffic, both up (data sent from the mobile device) and down (data sent to the mobile device), from the start of 2007 to the third quarter of 2012. While mobile voice traffic — represented by the orange bars in the graph above — climbs at a slow, steady and linear rate, mobile data traffic — the red bars — is rocketing at a rate closer to exponential.

The traffic is expressed in petabytes. For those not familiar with that unit of measure, a petabyte is…

• one quadrillion, or 10^12 bytes or
• 1,000 terabytes or
• 1,000,000 gigabytes or
• the total combined storage capacity of almost 16,000 64GB phones or 32,000 32GB phones or 64,000 16GB phones.

As you can see from the graph, we’re not all that far off from having to measure quarterly traffic in exabytes (one quintillion, or 10^15 bytes).

To get a better sense of how just how much data this is, I’ll give you some comparisons, courtesy of the blog High Scalability:

Petabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 Bytes)

• 1 Petabyte: 5 years of EOS data (at 46 mbps)
• 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries
• 20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995
• 200 Petabytes: All printed material or production of digital magnetic tape in 1995

Exabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 Bytes)

• 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
• From Wikipedia:
  • The world’s technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007. This is equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), roughly 4 CD-ROM per person of 1993, 12 CD-ROM per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CD-ROM per person in 2007. Piling up the imagined 404 billion CD-ROM from 2007 would create a stack from the earth to the moon and a quarter of this distance beyond (with 1.2 mm thickness per CD).
  • The world’s technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993, 1,200 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000, and 1,900 in 2007.
  • According to the CSIRO, in the next decade, astronomers expect to be processing 10 petabytes of data every hour from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.[11] The array is thus expected to generate approximately one exabyte every four days of operation. According to IBM, the new SKA telescope initiative will generate over an exabyte of data every day. IBM is designing hardware to process this information.

 

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

 

As the saying goes, there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Click the comic to see it on its original page.