There’s a growing number of devices that aren’t officially sanctioned by Google. What are the implications for developers such as myself?

First of all, sanctioned devices, called ‘Google Experience’ devices, have passed Google’s compatibility test suite. This allows them to run Google’s apps such as Gmail, Maps, and Market or as Google call them ‘Google Experience Phones’.

Non Google experience devices include…

• Smartphones and tablets created by smaller OEMs who don’t want the extra implied costs 
• Tablets created by corporations, such as Amazon with it’s Fire, who want to try to control content on the device.
• Specialised devices such as Casio’s VX-100 Android EPoS System and Parrot’s Asteroid 

This is just the start. There are also set top boxes, vehicle entertainment systems and many more traditionally embedded systems that are moving over to Android. I am also seeing a greater number of enquiries for Android captive (kiosk) solutions. There’s a long tail of devices with new opportunities.

At first this looks good for the Android developer. However, with this new opportunity comes more pain. I have previously written about the limitations of developing for Kindle Fire and developing on non-Google experience devices.

A recent complication is the introduction of some very compelling tablets from China. For example, you can already get a $100 7" capacitive-screen ICS tablet. The very latest ones are using a MIPS Ingenic processor which means that consumer apps that use native code (the NDK) won’t work. However, for developers such as myself thinking about using such tablets for custom client solutions, there’s an add-on (or rather superset) of the NDK provided by MIPS.

As an aside, some non-trivial apps end up using the NDK either to allow porting of existing code or to bypass Android’s Java low heap size. This means, for example, it’s not possible to load full size images or large memory objects in Java. NDK code does not have this restriction.

There’s a thought provoking post at Mashable on "5 Flaws in Your Mobile Marketing Strategy". It talks of the following flaws in current apps…

• De-Emphasizing the Unique Nature of the Medium
• Treating Connected Consumers as Stationary Targets
• Ignoring the Power of Contextual Relevance
• Employing Old World, Unidirectional Strategies
• Not Offering Value in Exchange for Value

These are the flaws from a marketing viewpoint but what about the technical side? How can brands create apps that are more than, what might as well be, on a web site?

One way of looking at this is to explore what’s available, technically, and see how you might weave it into your app to make it more compelling. Phone capabilities include communication (phone calls, text messages, email), contacts, Bluetooth, location, sound, motion, WiFi, camera and alarms. Think how you might use these in your app screens to either trigger things or to provide additional input to, or output from, your app. Triggers also need not necessarily be in your app screens but instead might cause notifications that cause the user to use your app more often.

I came across an interesting paper on Falling Asleep with Angry Birds, Facebook and Kindle – A Large Scale Study on Mobile Application Usage (pdf). It describes a study of 4,125 users, between August 16th 2010 and January 25th 2011. The main conclusion of the study is that mobile device users spend almost an hour a day using apps but spend less than 72 seconds with an app at a time. Here are some further insights…

• Mobile phones are still used mostly for communication (text and voice)
• Some apps have intense spikes in relative usage (e.g. music and social apps)
• Other apps are more broadly employed throughout the day
• When people actively use their devices they spend less time with each app
• Short sessions with only one app are much more frequent than longer sessions with two or more apps
• When people are traveling they are more likely to use multimedia apps and they are surprisingly less likely to use travel apps

Another thought I have is whether all this equally applies to tablet apps. Unlike smartphones, tablet apps are great for applications such as news reading where an app session can potentially be a long time. In general, it’s easier to read information on the tablet and there might be more inclination to linger and view more. If so, this might have design implications for smartphone as opposed to tablet apps.

One of the problems with having a blog is having enough to write about. When short for something to write about I tend to search for new recent news articles that either inspire me to write or can be used as a basis for something on which I can comment.

For years, I used the Delicious subscribe facility that gave me inspiration via the many uncovered articles on mobile. Delicious was great because it had the right type of more technical user while Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit seemed to have less useful more consumer oriented topics. When Delicious was sold by Yahoo, the new owners removed the subscribe facility and I moved to mainly using Twitter. The problem with Twitter has been too much noise and duplication. This has led me to write my own article discovery app.

News Hound runs on Android 3.1 and later tablets. You enter the topics and it goes away and does lots of heuristic based stuff to get quality articles. While I initially used it for uncovering content for blog articles I now also find it useful to isolate the very latest news articles when something newsworthy happens.

Bloggers and people posting regularly on social medial sites should find the app useful. I suspect it could also be used by companies or organisations to discover where they have been very recently mentioned or by anyone to learn the very latest on whatever their passion might be.

Once you have discovered articles you can view within the app or, for more control, in the tablet web browser. You can also share article links to Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Email etc. News Hound is free and available on the Android Market.

MindShift is reporting an explosive growth in education apps and presents some insights and recommendations for developers. However, the MindShift article only considers education apps for children. The education market is much larger and includes apps for all ages and abilities.

I believe the greatest opportunties are in higher education, particularly on tablets, where B2B rather than B2C might be more financially viable for developers. Tony Bates has some interesting thoughts on his blog where he thinks tablets will "become a regular component of teaching and learning in many institutions". Tony goes on to explain how tablets are more flexible, convenient and mobile than laptops, how tablet prices will continue to fall and how textbooks will increasingly become digital.

Tony also advises us to "build on the unique affordances of tablets, rather than merely moving material to a tablet". I tend to agree. It would be a waste if m-learning followed branded apps in offering static content that might as well have been placed on a web site.