Posts from Android

Roughly six months ago, I put up a blog post suggesting Android was going to be the dominant mobile phone operating system and that developers interested in the largest user bases ought to start developing for it in preference to iOS.

As you might expect, I got a lot of heat from Apple fanboys for that post and one of the strongest points they made was that we had not yet seen the effect of the Verizon iPhone on market share numbers.

Well now we have. iPhone had a fantastic February on the back of a strong launch of the Verizon iPhone. comScore's February mobile numbers are out and here's where things stand in terms of OS market share in the US.

It looks like the Verizon iPhone launch is helping iOS hold its own with 25% of the market. I expect (and hope) that iOS will remain a strong competitor to Android. But as I've been saying for several years now, I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.

A few other points are worth making. The numbers above are for the US. I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world. And most of the growth in smartphones is going to come from the developing world in the next five to ten years.

Finally, the reason for all of this is that Google is not attempting to monetize its mobile OS. It has created a business model for Android that is very attractive for handset manufacturers and allows these OEMs to drive down their costs rapidly while continuing to deliver a top quality smartphone experience. Bill Gurley of Benchmark wrote a great post about Google's mobile strategy earlier this week called "The Freight Train That Is Android". If you want to understand why this is happening, go read it.

UPDATE: This comment thread (almost 600 comments) is probably the most active comment thread in the history of this blog. The comments keep coming in five days later. Because I read and consider replying to every comment on this blog, this thread is creating a fair bit of work for me. And I believe we've had a very good debate about the issues this post raised. So I am closing comments on this post.

I was talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs a few weeks ago, and someone asked me what I thought was new and game changing. I replied mobile notifications. I thought I'd explain why.

I'm talking about android notifications here, not iPhone notifications or anything else. I think notifications is one of the things android has done much better than any other mobile OS and I suspect the way they do it will be eventually copied by the other mobile OS vendors.

Instead of doing a popup alert which interrupts you (iPhone), the android notifications all go into a single inbox that can be quickly viewed by pulling down from the status bar at the top of the main screen. You can get a vibrate or audio alert when a new notification comes in. That is configured by the user. I choose to have some notifications give me vibrating alerts (like communications services such as sms or kik) and leave most others silent. But that is totally up to each and every user.

The reason I think mobile notifications, done right, are a game changer is that notifications become the primary way I use the phone and the apps. I rarely open twitter directly. I see that I have '10 new @mentions" and I click on the notification and go to twitter @mention tab. I see that I have "20 new checkins" and I click on the notification and go to the foursquare friends tab. I see that I have "4 new kik messages" and I click on the notification and go to my kik app.

I think this is a game changer for a few reasons. First, it allows me to use a lot more engagement apps on my phone. I don't need them all on the main page. As long as I am getting notifications when there are new engagements, I don't really care where they are on the phone. Second, I can have as many communications apps as I want. I've currently got sms, kik, skype, beluga, and groupme on my phone. I could have plenty more. I don't need to be loyal to any one communication system, I just need to be loyal to my notification inbox. And finally, the notification screen is the new home screen. When I pull out my phone, it is the first thing I do. I think Android ought to reconsider what the home screen looks like. Why not have it feel like a Twitter timeline, alive and happening, versus a dead desktop style collection of apps?

I haven't done a deep dive on how this all works but I intend to. Can HTML apps use the notification channel? Can developers get access to this notification channel and start to build filters and other obvious applications that we will all want and need when this becomes our primary way we use the mobile device? These are the kinds of questions I want to understand because I think notifications will become the primary way that we consume on the mobile device and may be the reason we move away from downloadable software and back to web based software on our mobile devices.

And that is why I think mobile notifications are one of the biggest game changers to come along in our world recently.

I've been dipping around the edges of this story with recent blog posts, but Seth Weintraub takes it a step further in this post in Fortune. Next year is likely to be the year that smartphones emerge as the default mobile device platform around the world and probably the default internet access device in terms of numbers of users and devices.

Here are some quotes from Seth's post which you should go read:

In 2011, we might see half a billion smartphones sold worldwide.  Smartphones will likely blow by traditional computers next year as the way most of the world gains access to the Internet.

Cheaper hardware will eliminate the need for subsidies and therefore will improve competition between carriers, and spur them to improve their networks.

next year, Broadcom says it will release a follow-up chip that will allow WVGA displays and as much power as today's high-end Smartphones at the same $75-$100 prices.  That Nexus S that costs $530 now off contract will cost just a fraction of that in just one year.

To be clear, that sub $100 price is not the cost of materials, it is the suggested retail price after the manufacturers (and carriers) have taken their profits.

if you thought Android going from 30,000 activations a day to 300,000 activations/day was impressive, 2011 might be an even bigger growth year for Android.

If you haven't put all the pieces of the story together, let me do it for you. Smartphones prices are about to plunge and the result will be hundreds of millions of people all over the world starting to use them. And many of these devices will be running Android, not iOS. And wireless data prices will likely come down too.

That's a big macro theme that entrepreneurs and VCs need to get in front of. We are working on it and you should be too.

Last week I got a Nexus S to replace the Nexus One that I have been using for the past year. I love my Nexus One and was hesitant to replace it but the Nexus S looks like the exact same phone, just better, so I went for it.

As I was installing the basic apps (Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Kik, Tumblr, GetGlue, Yelp, Flickster, etc) on the phone last week, I tweeted that I love the new Twitter Android client on the Nexus S. I got a bunch of replies asking for a review of the Nexus S. So here it goes:

The physical in-hand experience is not much different but slightly better than the Nexus One. The phone is plastic instead of metal (which I like surprisingly), the screen is crisp and bright, the phone is very light, and feels great in the hand. The case is very slightly curved and this makes a small but noticeable improvement in the in-hand experience. 

The camera is terrific. The Android 2.3 build comes with new and improved camera software. I am still figuring out all the features but it can do a lot more. The Nexus S has a back and front camera. It’s fun to take pictures that include the photographer in them and the front camera makes that so much easier. I am on my way to a family vacation and I didn’t bring another camera so all my pictures will be taken with the Nexus S camera. I’m not the least bit concerned about that.

It is still a bit too early for me to talk about battery life. I always carry a spare battery for my Nexus One and once or twice a week I had to do a swap intraday. I don’t have a spare for the Nexus S with me on this trip so that will be a big test of its battery life. But so far in the few days I’ve been using it, I’ve not run out of battery so I am cautiously optimistic. 

The Nexus S is fast, significantly faster than the Nexus One. I feel the speed most in the browser, but I also feel it loading and running apps and generally moving around the phone. I am really enjoying using this phone and I think it has a lot to do with the speed.

I don’t notice any difference in voice utility or quality between the Nexus One and the Nexus S. I don’t use voice that much anyway, but when I do, it works fine. I am running the Nexus S on T-Mobile, which is the wireless carrier I’ve used for almost fifteen years, and the T-Mobile voice service is not Verizon quality. But I have lived with it and the Nexus S does just fine voice calling for me on T-Mobile.

The touch keypad is a significant improvement over the Nexus One. The four main buttons at the bottom of the phone are also a major improvement over the Nexus One. The haptic feedback works better on the Nexus S. These issues, keypad, buttons, and haptic feedback are probably my biggest beefs with the Nexus One and they really fixed them on the Nexus S.

The Android software keeps getting better and better. It is not as simple and easy to use as iOS. But once I figured out the quirks in the UI, I’ve come to like it very much. The Android app ecosystem has developed very nicely in the past year and most apps I want to use are now available on Android. Purchasing apps on the Android is not as simple as iOS, but I’ve got my credentials stored with Google and once you do that, it’s not a terrible experience.

All in all, the Nexus S is as close to an iPhone experience on Android as you can get. And the phone can be used on any GSM network you want. I just popped in my T-Mobile SIM card and I was off to the races. I also like that all I needed to do to get mail and calendar and contacts working was login with my gmail credentials. It all happens over the air. There is no need to sync an Android phone with a computer. It’s mobile to cloud and bypasses the PC altogether. That feels like how phones should work these days.

If you can deal with a touchscreen phone and are looking for an alternative to iPhone, then I think the Nexus S is an ideal phone for you. It sure is for me.

It's the theme of the weekend. What looks great today may suck tomorrow.

Case in point, Blackberry and their parent company RIM. I was at dinner a few weeks ago with old friends. Both of them carry Blackberrys and they love them. I predicted that they would be using a new device shortly and that RIM would be in deep financial trouble within a few years. They were surpriseed to hear such a negative point of view.

But as this excellent analysis of RIM's business suggests, the present and the future look very different for RIM. The charts in this post come from the post I just linked to. You should read it.

If you look at RIM's financials, everything looks rosy:

Not only are revenues and profits at an all time high, but so are subscribers:

But subscriber growth has peaked:

And may be headed into decline:

It is often the case that on the surface companies can appear to be in great shape. If you just focus on the financial results, you can miss the underlying symptoms of future problems. I've made that mistake many times, hopefully enough times that I will make it less in the future.

What you need to do is peer into the future and try to figure out what is going to happen next. In RIM's case, I sense that a "platform collapse", as the author of the blog post calls it, is a real possibility in the next year or two.

RIM's stock is trading at a PE of just under 12, almost identical to Microsoft's. It seems like the market is well aware that the growth era is over and is counting on a long period of flat growth but strong profits for years to come. A platform collapse is not baked into the market's multiple.

The big platforms out there, Apple, Android, RIM, Facebook, Twitter, etc are powerful but fragile. They need to keep innovating and providing users AND developers real value. As myspace has shown, when platforms stagnate they can easily fall apart and the decline can be fast and devastating.

I think the assumption that tech platforms can stop growing but remain great businesses is flawed in most cases. Maybe RIM can pull it off. Their strong enterprise franchise may make it possible to execute the long fade, but it is also possible that it won't. If you are an investor or manager in a large tech platform, dont' get caught up in the present. Think hard about the future and where the platform is going. That's where the value is.

I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.

There still are issues. When I went to show one of the HTML5 mobile apps later, my mobile data connection wasn't there and I couldn't load it in my Android browser. But a friend told me you could cache all the elements, including the database, on the phone and deliver an offline experience in HTML5 in the browser.

I've always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I've accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years.

I'm not sure it's five years anymore.

I wrote a post called Mobile First Web Second a few months ago. In it made this point:

The thing I like about these kinds of apps is they are with you all the time and can be used in moments of downtime. As such they lead to higher levels of engagement. But because they are also web apps and connected to a web scale network, they can offer a lot of value that mobile only apps cannot.

Since writing that post, I keep coming back to this theme again and again. I think it is a critical element for success in today's web startup environment.

We had a dinner party the other night at our home. A friend asked me what the inspiration for the most recent AVC redesign was. I told her that I wanted AVC to feel like a mobile web site. I told her that I love how web pages look on the iPad and I wanted AVC to look great on an iPad.

I was meeting with the team from one of our portfolio companies a few weeks ago and we were talking about a redesign of their new web service. I had told them I thought the initial design was too busy and too complicated to work well in the market. They showed me the iPhone app they were planning to release soon. I said "just do that on the web." And happily they told me they were thinking the same thing.

Using the mobile web as a constraint to think about web design is growing in popularity. I see it in my own efforts and the efforts of our portfolio companies. When users spend more time accessing your service over a mobile device, they are going to get used to that UI/UX. When you ask them to navigate a substantially busier and more complex UI/UX when they log onto the web, you are likely to keep them on the mobile app and off the web app.

I'm starting to think a unifying vision for all apps should start with the mobile app, not the web app. And so it may also be mobile first web second in designing web apps these days.

Building web apps is not getting easier. The fragmentation of operating systems and browsers is getting worse, not better.

Here's a chart of the past thirty days of activity at AVC.com:

No OS/browser combo has more than 17% share. And there are five with more than 10% share. iPhone is about 6% and iPad is about 4%. If you go down to the next ten combos, you find a number of Android and Blackberry combinations.

Mobile OS/browser combos in total add up to about 15% of all visits and that number is up from less than 5% a year ago.

Add in the need to build mobile apps for iOS, Android, and possibly Blackberry and you've got quite a difficult environment for developers these days.

When I first installed the Twitter for Android app, I checked auto update. That apparently is not a default setting for apps on Android. I don't even know if the iPhone has an auto update feature because I don't use an iPhone. But in any case, sometime in the past ten days Twitter updated its Android app. I hadn't been paying attention and did not know that. One morning I opened Twitter on my phone, like I normally do, and the app was different and better. It was like using a  web app. New features, faster, cleaner. It was a great experience and I tweeted about it.

One of the things I love about web apps is they get better all the time without any need to update the software on the user's end. You can approximate that experience by enabling auto update on your mobile apps (at least I know you can do that on Android).

Since I had that experience with Twitter for Android, I've gone back and enabled auto update on all my Android apps. And the experience is fantastic.

I understand why this is not a default feature. If you are on an expensive mobile data plan or if you are roaming, auto updating over mobile data could be expensive. Some people might want to do all of their updating over wifi.

But I do think Android should make it an option for a user to set the default at the OS level and not at the individual app level. Because if you have a mobile data plan that allows affordable over the air auto updating, it's a materially better user experience.

Over time, with the improvments that are coming with HTML5 and improvements that will come in the mobile operating systems, mobile apps will feel more and more like web apps. Until we get there, auto updating is a great way to get that feel with downloadable software.