ODIN: The Next Alternative to UDID? →

Kim-Mai Cutler in TechCrunch, with a story on how mobile ad networks are scrambling to create a standardized alternative to UDID. Six mobile companies are working on something called ODIN. More on ODIN here, but the service uses MAC addresses, though it hashes them. Here’s why it’s important:

If the mobile advertising industry and developers don’t find an alternative soon, it could become much harder to run targeted advertising campaigns and revenues could decline for many app makers.

ODIN says that about 60 percent of mobile ad revenue comes from this type of performance-based advertising. If you factor in cost-per-install or cost-per-action campaigns, which are based on when a consumer downloads an app or takes an action in an app, ODIN says that the app ecosystem could miss out on about $2.6 to $3 million dollars per day in ad revenue.

That’s about a billion dollars a year in lost revenue if they can’t come up with a solution. But the big, unanswered question is if Apple allows this sort of cross-application tracking behavior to continue. With all the privacy fiascos recently it seems like a risk worth measuring.

'Android Economics' →

Horace Dediu:

This shows a positive trend for Google: revenues per smartphone per year is increasing. However, the growth is coming from non-Android devices which means mostly iOS. Revenues per device for Android is probably declining.

The Ground Beneath Apple's Walled Garden →

My latest argument about the inherent risks in developing for iOS and that Apple can do little to mitigate those risks is up at TechCrunch.

This was an interesting experience; I had thought my defense of Apple’s practices were fairly clear, yet I was attacked by some for trying to manufacture another Applegate-type controversy, which I assure you was the farthest thing from the truth. That bothered me enough to compel me to add some clarifications to the piece after it ran to answer some of those charges.

'App Rejections Are a Lousy Way to Communicate Policy Changes' →

Chris Adamson on the recent rejection of apps accessing UDIDs by Apple:

Apple has developed a reputation for capriciousness in its app review process, and a cavalier attitude towards its developer partners. It’s not undeserved. As Erica Sadun once cleverly put it, “Apple is our abusive boyfriend.”

(via John Gruber)

The Future of Nintendo in the World of Apple →

Tim Cook mentioned video game consoles twice in the new iPad keynote. It wasn’t an accident. And as Horace Dediu points out, the future for console makers is on shaky ground:

The data points a bleak picture for Nintendo. The Wii was a success due to its competitiveness vs. non-consumption of gaming. But another low end disruption took hold in 2007. Good enough games on phones and mobile computers are taking consumption away from dedicated consoles, both fixed and mobile.

Also:

The lesson here is that a company that disrupts does not necessarily survive. Long term survival depends on the ability for serial disruption. Serial disruption is an uncomfortable state for an organization to exist in. As the story above shows, disruptions are usually enabled by “desperate” necessity. Desperation is not something management is trained to aspire for.

Angry Birds Space, Now Not Available for Microsoft Windows Phone 7 →

UPDATE: Rovio now says Angry Birds Space is coming to Windows Phone 7. That Nokia’s stock has dipped and gained on this news shows just how important Angry Birds has become to validating your platform.

This isn’t a great sign for Windows Phone 7. Jon Erlichman and Diana ben-Aaron in Bloomberg:

“We’re the No. 1 app in the Windows Phone app store, but it’s a big undertaking to support it, and you have to completely rewrite the application,” Peter Vesterbacka, chief marketing officer of the game’s maker, Rovio Entertainment Oy, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Rovio, which yesterday started selling the game for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and handsets running Google Inc.’s Android platform, has no plans to release “Angry Birds Space” on Windows Phone, he said.

Apparently being the best-selling app on the Windows Phone platform doesn’t actually translate into profits. It’s tempting to use Rovio’s publishing strategy as a quick diagnostic for a platform’s health. The original Angry Birds was published on over 15 platforms. That number dropped to seven for Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio. And Angry Birds Space, though young, has only been published for four: iOS, Android, OS X and Windows.

What should developers make of this, as well?

“If you look at activations, Apple’s iOS and Android are clearly bigger than any other platform,” he said. “We want to be on all screens, but we have to consider the cost of supplying the smaller platforms. With Windows Phone it’s a lot of work to technically support it.”

(Mild) Anarchy in the App Store →

A good overview by Adam Satariano and Douglas MacMillan in Bloomberg Businessweek on the various ills of the iOS App Store:

For Apple, monitoring the App Store is like playing Whac-A-Mole. It also changed its policies in 2011 to stop Tapjoy, which was manipulating the leader board by offering prizes to users, including game currency, in return for downloading apps developed by Tapjoy clients. In response to Apple’s policy switch, Tapjoy started directing app users to a website outside Apple’s control where it could continue paying incentives for downloads. In a separate incident in February, Apple ejected a batch of copycat apps it had previously approved. The apps had names that were slight variations of popular titles such as Angry Birds and Temple Run, meant to confuse people into buying the ersatz games.

The story also this little nugget about the Path brouhaha:

…Path co-founder Dave Morin got hauled into Apple’s headquarters to be grilled by Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and other executives, according to people familiar with the meeting but not authorized by Apple to discuss it.

You don’t fuck with a golden goose.

That Mobile HTML5-Only Strategy Should Work Out Real Well →

Dean Takahashi, Venture Beat:

The platforms that run HTML5 faster are likely to have an advantage in running a whole new wave of applications and games. So Spaceport.io, the cross-platform mobile game development tool maker, ran a study to find out whether iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) is faster than Android at running HTML5 games. Hands-down, iOS won.

If you’re developing an HTML5 game that performs well only in iOS, why not just develop it as a native app?

I haven’t educated myself enough about this, but stories like this and the overall performance of Android phones make me wonder if there was a choice made by someone at Google sometime while developing Android’s stack that ended up hobbling Android, something similar to the choices made by the webOS team. Perhaps Google, like HP, thought the hardware would catch up faster than it did?

Yesterday’s iPad Event Was Only Half The Story →

My latest argument is up at TechCrunch, in which I try to convince you that WWDC is ultimately of more significance than the iPad events. A peek:

It’s not that specs aren’t important. With all consumer devices, the whole is more than the sum of their parts. But specs are tactical decisions in order to execute a larger strategy. Let me ask you this: what were the specs of your computer when you first fired up a web browser? What was ultimately important about that experience?

Is Mobile Ad Traffic a Good Indicator for Developers? →

Ingrid Lunden in TechCrunch on recent figures by JumpTap on how the Kindle now delivers 33% of their mobile ad traffic for tablets:

This is a key point, because it indicates that those who are buying the Kindle Fire are also buying into the whole service-led proposition behind it: content is something that Apple has, up to now, been able to say that it does better than any other Android tablet maker, but Amazon’s mix of its appstore apps, plus offerings of streamed content and more besides appears to be giving that idea a run for its money. That also indicates to developers that this is a potentially strong platform to develop for.

That’s one way of looking at it. I tend to see this another way: this is actually a cautionary sign for developers — it can indicate an unwillingness on the part of Kindle Fire customers to pay for apps. Paid apps usually don’t have ads.

Apple Rejects Seth Godin's Book for Links Inside the Book →

This is somewhat bizarre. Seth Godin’s new essay, Stop Stealing Dreams, was rejected from the iBookstore because it has Amazon links to physical books in the bibliography. Godin:

I think that Amazon and Apple and B&N need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what’s inside the book shouldn’t be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace. If it’s legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to. A small bookstore doesn’t have that obligation, but if they’re seeking to be the one and only, if they have a big share of the market, then they do, particularly if they’re integrating the device into the store. I also think that if any of these companies publish a book, they ought to think really hard before they refuse to let the others sell it.

This is the first I’ve heard of this happening for physical content.

It's Not About Who Stole From Whom →

This article by Timothy B. Lee in Ars Technica illustrates how many of the innovations we credit the iPhone for existed previously. The iPhone obviously synthesized many of those ideas and modified them in a way that made them successful. But the problem with arguing about intellectual theft is that it brings morality into it and usually descends into fanboyism. Many people genuinely don’t understand the difference between what Samsung is doing now and what Apple has been doing forever. If you can’t see it, I don’t know how to convince you of it. But the real problem right now, as Lee points out, are the the chilling effects the current rash of lawsuits have on smaller companies:

But firms without billions may not be so lucky. The failure of Apple’s original look and feel lawsuit cleared the way for smaller firms (like Jobs’s own NeXT) to compete in the desktop computing market. In contrast, if a firm today has a great idea for a mobile OS but lacks thousands of patents or the billions of dollars it takes to acquire them, it will likely be defenseless against angry patent lawyers. Apple’s demand that companies “stop using our ideas” will have real teeth.

Is Meg Whitman Nuts? →

If you’re looking at the current landscape of mobile devices there are basically two major players. One is, very definitely, pursuing a closed-source strategy. A strategy that is about total control of the experience. One central device controlled by one manufacturer.

The other is taking the opposite route. Be open, for a given definition of open. Get your OS into the hands of everybody other there. Give it away. Many many devices made by many many manufacturers. Flood the market.

Both strategies have led to pretty good market share numbers. Only one has translated into actually making money.

If you’re trying to enter the already solidifying mobile market, you’ve got to choose between those options. And Meg Whitman apparently decided to go with the one that doesn’t make money. As Julie Bort reports in Business Insider, Whitman’s been talking about the need for another open-source OS to combat Apple and Google:

“It will take 2-5 years to fully play out, but I believe the industry really needs another operating system,” she said.

Why? Even though Apple is on fire, she said, it’s closed.

Android is open but fragmented. And Google can’t be trusted, she seems to think. Whitman suggested that Android may wind up closed one day thanks to Google’s Motorola purchase.

Uhbuwha?

I seriously thought that HP decided they were embarrassed about the whole Palm debacle, open-sourced webOS to generate some good will and decided to never talk about it again.

Nope. It looks like Meg Whitman’s tying her whole strategy around it. And in a way that makes zero sense.

Forget that webOS seems to be flawed from a technical standpoint. Whitman seems to think that webOS will avoid the fragmentation issues of Android. How does that work exactly? It’s open-source but only allowed to run on HP devices? It’s open-sourced but other manufacturers can’t modify it?

And how do you make money off it? It’s open-source but other manufacturers can’t use it? They can’t fork it and sell it as their own and compete with your product?

Does Meg Whitman even understand what open-source means? Does she know that the grand total of big, HP-sized companies that have made real cash from an open-sourced project is somewhere between zilch and zero?

If this is going to actually be HP’s strategy, this is Whitman revealing that she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. This is Whitman revealing that she can’t figure out how to compete. This is Whitman revealing that she’s got no ideas.

webOS tried to go toe-to-toe with iOS before and got spanked out of the market. It was still a good OS and still a decent strategy but Whitman apparently decided it was too humiliating to try that again. So now she’s going down a path already treaded by Google. It may taken them 2-5 years, but I’m sure Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are going to wait.

iOS Beating Android on Click-Through Rates →

This is rich. Google can’t even compete with Apple when it comes to designing a device that encourages users to click on ads. You know, the whole point of Android in the first place. As Dan Rowinski reports on ReadWriteWeb:

For instance, iOS continues to see better click-through rates on mobile ads than Android. Jumptap also notes that click-through rates are higher for users with the newer versions of the platform, with .91% clicking through on iOS 5 against .74% for iOS 4. On the other hand, Android sees a .69% click-through rate for devices running some version of Android 2.x (which, for all intents and purposes, is the only metric that matters right now).

I really wanted Android to succeed at some point — I still do — but Google’s fumbling on Android is incredibly disheartening. That they can’t even execute on their primary strategy as well as Apple, which could ultimately give a shit about mobile advertising, is just another sign that Android is off-track.

Maybe We Shouldn't Count on Credits to Diversify Facebook's Revenue Stream →

Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Facebook on how some developers haven’t been thrilled with Facebook Credits:

“We thought that conversions would go up and be around 15 or 20 percent,” said Kevin Chou, the chief executive of Kabam, a social gaming company that targets a more hardcore demographic, at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco. “But it turned out to be around 5 to 10 percent, meaning that we’re taking a 20 percent net tax.”

Guess where unhappy devs are going:

“Facebook credits is a wash for us,” he said. “It increased the conversion rate but we actually saw a gradual decrease in average revenue per paying user. It’s hard to know why.” Funzio has since moved its focus to iOS, where it has launched Crime City and Modern War, both titles that reached the top of the grossing charts.