AndroidZ.info Android Mobile from A to Z

Google have posted recent blog about programming of live wallpapers for Android 2.1 which was first released on their flagship device Nexus One just recently and already got an upgraded OS to include multitouch by the way.

It has useful information in case you are interested in developing a live wallpaper for Android. Expect many live wallpapers to be on the market very soon. Although we doubt that most of them would be high quality since not many developers will try to sell them (who’s gonna buy a wallpaper even it it’s $0.99) so we expect most of the live wallpapers would be free and thus somewhat unpolished. But we’ll see about that. Post your thought about future of live wallpapers in the comments!

It is true that we have experienced many issues lately with the content being unavailable. We got a lot of emails and comments on the market. Some comments claim that we are not listening and do not know what is happening. This is not true. We always listen and always answer the emails that we get from you.

We issued the following emails to everyone who wrote us about the problem as an explanation:

Hi and thanks for reporting this issue.

I already saw this issue and it has been taken care of. The application should function normally now.

We had problems lately with the content sometimes being unavailable. We actually had 2 separate problems:

1. T-Mobile’s servers did not want to “talk” to our hosting provider this is when we had continuous outage of almost 2 days trying to work it out with T-Mobile and our hosting provider.

2. At certain points our servers were just getting overloaded. We gradually upgraded our server but the problem kept coming back. Tonight we were supposed to be moved to a much better servers. The time that the server is inaccessible was supposed to be a few minutes, but the people that host our servers screwed up and it wasn’t until I saw the problem and let them know that it was fixed.

We are very dissatisfied with our hosting company due to those recent problems and will be looking to move our servers somewhere else in the near future. We do not want to do anything  impulsive right now as to prevent any additional downtime but we promise we will work to prevent such issues in the future as much as possible.

We do our best to bring you the best horoscope app on the Android Market. I personally had many stressful days and sleepless nights during those past 2 weeks when we had this problem where our servers would overload. As a result of those recent problems, we have seen many negative ratings on the market. Of course it is completely users’ right to rate the application low, but many of the comments were “I love this application but it doesn’t work…” “My favorite app…” with 1 star rating. We are sad to see that trend. If you have ranked the application low due to those problem, please reconsider this. We really work hard to bring you this great content in a free application.

Luckily we seen complete opposite to that as well – people saying how much they love the application and wishing that it would be back soon with great ratings.

Anyhow, we thank you for your understanding and continuous support.

Regards,
Max.

Unfortunately application description space on the market is very limited in space so we can not use it to keep you updated and comments are not useful in particular since the are quickly pushed down for other people. We are now on twitter and you can follow us there @DHAndroid for Android or @DHBlackBerry for Blackberry updates.

Twitter links:

***NOTE the Android and BlackBerry logos are the property of their respective owners.

Google is really pushing the Nexus One hard. Check out how the homepage is looking. Yes – they advertise it right on the homepage!

Google Nexus one phone promotion on Google homepage

I have been spotting a LOT (and I mean really a L-O-T) AdSense advertisements for Nexus one on the web in random places. What does it mean – google pushing Nexus One so hard? Is it one of the deal sides with HTC that Google will push the device really hard to promote the sales and therefore revenue for HTC? Or is it more strategic decision and Google is trying to set standard for Android phone just as iPhone had set standard for smartphones already? While it is probably a combination of many factors – it would be extremely interesting to know what are the major driving factors behind this huge promotion machinery.

Today Quattro Wireless officially announced that Apple has acquired it. The details are not clear yet, but it seems that the price tag was $275 million. With about $30 million in funding, this is yet another impressive exit for an advertising mediation agency!

Andy Miller – Vice President of Mobile Advertising have sent this email this morning:

We are thrilled to let you know that Apple has acquired Quattro. We want to share with you our excitement about this news and what it means for our customers.
We have built our business by enabling advertisers to reach the right consumers across the mobile web and in applications. We remain focused on delivering more engaging, relevant and useful ads to mobile devices, and improving the measurement and execution of digital campaigns. Together with Apple, we look forward to developing exciting new opportunities in the future that will benefit our customers.

Waltham, Mass.-based Quattro has raised close to $30 million from two main venture investors–Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners. Founded several years ago, its clients include Ford (F), Disney (DIS) and the National Football League

You probably remember the recent Google purchase – AdMob. AdMob is considered the largest mobile advertising network. Purchase of Quattro Wireless by Apple seems to be a fire back to Google, but is it really? It is rumored that Apple was actually first to bid on AdMob, but was upper handed by Google at the eleventh hour.

This deal goes through just hours from Google announcing its new phone developed with HTC – Nexus One, which will go on sale through Google website for rumored $530 as well as subsidized by T-Mobile for $180 for 2 year personal contract (no family/prepaid or other plans…. ehh…)

Those are definitely interesting times. Mobile advertising is buzzing.

From one of the discussions titled very similar, came this (in our opinion) very insightful comment by Alex Pakka

BlackBerry will have a major chunk of the corporate market for a while. The simple fact is, no one can come close to the infrastructure and this level of relationship with each individual carrier that fast. No matter how much money one has. BlackBerry is more than just a device, it is middle tier + device + push/security/IT policies etc. It might not hold up to the latest and greatest consumer devices in flashiness, but as a corporate workhorse it will stay for the foreseeable future. No other smart phone can deliver intranet access from around the globe as effectively and securely. I would bet on RIM still holding 40% of the corporate smart phone market in North America in 5 years. Most probably RIM will also have strategic partnerships in the infrastructure/middle tier areas with IBM, Oracle and SAP.

iPhone will come up with new ultra cool devices for mac-oriented people (of which we will see more). I would not dismiss Apple’s innovative edge just yet and consumers will like it a lot. At least 30% of consumer smart phone market will be firmly in Apple’s hands.

Android will target the middle ground between biz and consumers, maybe prosumers are the target. I don’t see any possibility for Androids to escape fragmenting into loosely coupled eco-systems, around large manufacturers. The capabilities and proprietary OS extensions will be so different, that many software vendors will give up on a single piece running everywhere (which will be feasible with RIM and Apple). But Android should be the most flexible one for fancy things involving clouds, LBS and social networks.

Nokia will go with maemo, but I guess it will split the market with Android by delivering more robust, but heavier devices. And Android will do with flashy lighter ones (offloading things to the cloud too). Symbian will propbably stay, but not in the smart phone market. At least not in the the high-end. All others seem to be marginalized.

Software will shift to widgets and HTML 5.0 for sure. But the process is going to be fairly slow – in 5 years it will be an achievement of the industry if half of the mobile software is widget-style.

We agree with this almost entirely and think this is a great summary of what might happen in the future. 5 years is a long time in technology and is even more so in the rapid moving mobile technology, so many surprises are possible in the future and no one, we believe can predict now what will happen close enough.

Yes, that’s right! DailyHoroscope (currently #9 most popular application on the Android Market in US) is #1 most popular application on QVGA devices. This is the new HTC Tattoo device with QVGA screen size.

DailyHoroscope On QVGA Market

We have written previously that it was number 4 in UK. I have been told that it is #5-6 most popular application in Israel. These local markets have a different set of applications. My guess is that UK phones don’t have “My T-mobile” app which is currently #1 in US, and probably some others like Pandora, which has a history of banning users from outside US.

The long experienced pain of hard application discovery will be hopefully partially solved with the new update to the Android Market in Android firmware 1.6 codenamed Donut. The new market app looks completely different and somewhat user friendly. It is not clear however why there is a need to wait until new firmware update and not release the new market app as a separate over the air update or if the OTA update is not possible, it can be offered as an optional upgrade for people that are interested in getting it earlier.

Anyway, enjoy the video showcasing the updates to the market application.

It hasn’t even been a month since initial application release and already traffic is pouring from across the world. We’ve earned our bragging rights. DailyHoroscope is a really popular application. For a while it was in top #10 AppWorld downloaded applications and right now remains on #3 spot in Entertainment category. Exciting!

How do we know? In reality, RIM provides a minimal amount of information about your application installations. We had to resort to other solutions. Main lesson learnt: analytics tools like Flurry or Localitics are invaluable for tracking application usage and seeing how users actually use your application. Both are easy to integrate into your application. Heads up to those guys, keep up the good work!

Today Flurry is reporting a spike in sessions and  finally we have at least one user on each continent. Most of the traffic, as expected, is from North America. It’s roughly 15:1 ratio of users in North America vs everywhere else. With the recent announcement of AppWorld deployment outside of United States we expect this ratio to be affected, but not by much.

Anxious to see what the next month will be like…

Also, exciting to hear some of the user feedback. Really cool suggestions coming in and frankly sometimes we can barely keep up with the emails. I guess that’s what you get with BlackBerry users: lots of emails. If you are a DailyHoroscope user and have something to say just post a comment here.

Nokia has denied any rumors about working on Android phone. As long as the Symbian foundation exists, it is unlikely that Nokia will produce Android phone, as that will look like a capitulation from Nokia.

T-Mobile will be shipping the G2 device named MyTouch to customers that pre-order between July 8-28 by August 3-d. The phone is not likely to hit retail until at least a few days later.

Sony Ericson is rumored to have Android phone code named Rachel based on the very sexy Experia model. It is rumored to have 1Ghz Qualcomm SnapDragon processor and 8.2 MP camera.

Sprint leads the way with a first precedent for US carriers and opens up an  initial set of free REST services for developers  at their new developer sandbox to play with.  Now developers can access location, simple presence, and send SMS messages to Sprint handsets without requiring any software to be installed on the device.

A couple programmers have announced that they have hacked Android OS to run on x86 hardware in a LiveCD version. The version was reportedly ported form an Asus Eee 701 netbook computed that was running Android OS.

Dell is very likely to be entering into the smartphone market. Dell is considering this market as a way to improve profitability by stepping into a market that is growing well despite the poor economy unlike the global slump in PC sales.

I just wrote about how I am impressed by the Palm Pre (and yeah I am mainly impressed by Palm Pre’s UI) and I am concentrating lately on UI design, so I am simply living the UI design lately and I was so much more impressed by palm than iPhone. But I still have a very warm place in heart for Android and the question is  – where comes Android. And apparently there are some good news for Android. Some VERY good news for Android. Sony Ericson’s Rachel UI is looking great as well. Here’s a video of a sneak preview:

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I am still under the magic of Pre’s cards though – it’s just so slick and cool, you can’t ignore it