According to app analytics firm Flurry, which tracks app usage on a staggering 300,000 apps on over a billion active mobile devices, we spend an average of 158 minutes each and every day on our smartphones and tablets. Two hours and seven minutes of that is in an app, and only 31 minutes is in a browser, surfing the old-school web.

If you think apps are so popular because they’re replacing people’s utility tools (clocks, alarms, calendars), news sources or other helpful facets of life that used to be segmented, think again. It’s games. We’re spending most of our time with these mini supercomputers playing games. Of the 80% of our time we spend with native apps, 32% is spent gaming and 18% is spent with the Facebook app (not social network apps, just Facebook).

It’s a good time to be a mobile app tester.

While the adoption of mobile commerce is growing rapidly, many developers have overlooked testing their apps. In fact, according to Mobile Commerce Daily’s Chantal Tode:

“…problems during the payment process have forced 66 percent to abandon their transactions, according to a new report from Jumio.

The ’2013 Mobile Commerce Insights’ study also found that 47 percent failed to complete a purchase because the checkout process took too long. The findings point to the need for retailers to pay more attention to streamlining the mobile checkout process or else risk losing a growing set of consumers interested in mobile commerce.

‘At the top of list is that 41 percent of consumers failed to complete a purchase because it was too difficult to enter credit card information,’ said Marc Barach, chief strategy and marketing officer at Jumio, Palo Alto, CA.”

Slow load times and poor usability are problems that real world expert-sourced testing prior to launch can eliminate. But the problems don’t end there. Tode also adds:

“Other key findings from the report include that 41 percent said the checkout process was too difficult on their device, and 23 percent said they failed to complete a purchase because it would not go through.

A majority of respondents – 51 percent – said they failed to complete an attempted purchase on a mobile device because they did not feel comfortable entering their credit card information.”

This data suggests that retailers are missing the mark due to a lack of functional and security testing.  For retailers who claim the cost of testing outside the lab is too high, the cost of lost sales and revenue from letting these bugs go unnoticed could be double, triple or much more.

This week, the company’s execs have been making a lot of noise about big things coming from the once king, now slightly back-of-the-race mobile player. So how will BlackBerry reclaim its spot on top?

Wednesday morning at a BlackBerry keynote, CEO, Thorsten Heins shared his new strategy and his prediction for company’s future. As covered by AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski:

“‘Drilling down from desktop experiences and trying to fit them in the mobile space just doesn’t work,’ Heins said. ‘People don’t want the desktop experience in a mobile device. Mobile devices need a mobile experience. Putting the desktop paradigm on them doesn’t work. Our only focus is mobile. We are the original mobile-first company.’

So that’s the big pitch. And now that Heins has made it, BlackBerry has to begin the difficult work of delivering on it. A daunting task when Apple and Google continue to so thoroughly dominate the mobile computing space. But BlackBerry has managed to hang on this long after the upheaval of 2012. Who’s to say it won’t scramble back.

‘Some people told me last year that BlackBerry World would be the company’s last conference and my first and last time on the stage,’ Heins said. ‘Well, I’m happy to say they were wrong. Not only are we still here, we are firing on all cylinders and we are definitely in the race.’”

 This ‘watch out, world’ attitude comes just a day after a whole lineup of BlackBerry news. Roger Chen of CNet explains:

“There was the device announcement in the form of the budget-friendly BlackBerry Q5. There was the updated BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10.1 for the business-minded. There was the milestone of 120,000 apps available in BlackBerry World. Most surprising was the company’s decision to open up BlackBerry Messenger to multiple platforms, starting with iOS and Android.

All of those announcements are meant to convey a sense of building momentum at BlackBerry. Indeed, over the last several months, the company has launched a brand new platform, worked to repair its wounded reputation, and fleshed out its product portfolio to three products.”

Looks like BlackBerry is making some rapid changes. While BlackBerry might have some major catching up to do, they certainly have the potential to make a big come back. So what will BlackBerry’s comeback mean for developers? For one, that’s another OS for developers to make a top priority, further adding to the massive app testing matrix. As BlackBerry continues to grow and release new features, in-the-wild testing will become a necessary part of developers’ QA strategies.

What do you think – will BlackBerry reclaim its glory? Let us know in the comments section.

• 27% of business travelers have changed their airline preference based on mobile usability
• 54% use mobile wallet apps or payment systems
• 33% use a tablet instead of a laptop for presentations
• Smartphones have replaced some everyday objects such as newspapers (37%), day planners (46%), cameras (54%) and alarm clocks (56%)
• 81% play mobile games at least once a week
• 44% use finance apps at least once a day
• 80% use sports apps once a week
• 44% use shopping apps once or more a day

As covered by Brian Hall of ReadWrite Mobile, ITU says that nearly all of the population has a mobile device:

“According to the ITU’s “facts and figures” publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population – including an 89% penetration rate in “developing countries,” which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

In other words, nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone – or will have one soon enough.

The ITU report also notes that “mobile broadband” subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 – when the iPhone was first introduced – to 2.1 billion in 2013 – an annual growth rate of 40%.

While larger still in the developed world, since 2010, mobile broadband adoption has grown fastest in developing countries – with rates hitting 82% in Africa and 55% in the Arab states.”

This is great news for developers, but it also means releasing apps internationally will become increasingly important. With a growing number of countries adopting mobile, there is huge potential for an international app presence. Testing for localization issues and knowing how your app performs in different parts of the world will be very important for developers. Every country’s language, culture and standards are different – so it’s nearly impossible to know if your app translates correctly inside the lab. You could spoof an IP address, but you still likely won’t have access to the contextual knowledge to verify content accuracy.

Despite the challenges, one thing is for sure; the opportunity for developers through mobile has grown considerably – and it will continue.

Looking for resources on Localization Testing? Download this free whitepaper.

A Dr. Dobb’s article defines disposable apps as apps that “are intended to exist only as temporary pieces of software devoted to (for example) a four-day IT show such as IBM Impact, a new car launch, or some other short term special event.” You’ve likely seen these time sensitive apps at conferences, events or, more generally, during the most recent presidential election.

The question is, are disposable apps worth it?

There are plenty of companies out there that specialize in making quick-turn-around mobile apps and crowdsourced, in-the-wild testing can help you fit a lot of comprehensive testing into a limited schedule. But overall, creating a worthwhile app still takes time. The question organizations and companies need to ask themselves is, “Is the effort worth it?” A Read Write article points out that the return on investment for disposable mobile apps is often nonexistent.

Today, many businesses create apps for a variety of occasions, including one-time events like conferences and product announcements. But for most businesses, building these apps is a process that can take several months. At Demo Mobile 2013, Raw Engineering CEO Neha Sampat showcased an app her team built in a week.

“The life of an app used by enterprises is sometimes as short as a month,” said Sampat. “If it takes you three to four months to build an app you’re only going to use for a month leading up to an event or a conference or an announcement, there’s no [return on investment] there.”

Maybe it is worth it from a brand perspective. People are interacting with your brand in a way that they’re comfortable with and that lets you capture data. But first, your app has to make it into the app stores (in time for the event, might I add) and be found by users. Google Play and Apple’s App Store both reportedly have more than 700,000 apps. That’s a lot of noise to contend with. Even with exact app titles it can sometimes be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. If your app gets buried, or you don’t spend extra time, resources and possibly money promoting its existence, no one will ever know about it.

Now what if you’re the consumer? You hear about this app at an event you’re attending. You search the app store and find it among the 700,00 other apps. You download it to get all the great, pertinent information during the event. Then what? It’s this “then what” phase that Carin van Vuuren, CMO of Usablenet, has a problem with. From DigiDay:

“If you’re creating an app for every single campaign, then you’re not fully leveraging browser-based devices,” said Carin van Vuuren, CMO of Usablenet, an app and mobile website developer. “The companies that do this are likely not investing into a multichannel infrastructure and are using apps as a placeholder for that. It’s like app spam. It drives me crazy when I go to an event and they’re asking me to download the app. I’m not going to use this when I leave here, so why would I download it? So it clutters my phone? Send me to a URL. With HTML5, app-like experiences are very possible on the mobile Web.”

Ultimately, it’s not that hard to uninstall an app when you’re done with it. As long as a disposable app is free it’s possible that the benefits of having the app outweigh that minor inconvenience for consumers. There’s also far less chance of accidentally closing and losing the app than with a mobile website – which adds a level of convince.

It really comes down to whether or not brands feel disposable mobile apps with a built-in shelf life are worth the effort and expense of creation. As long as consumers continue using them, brands will keep producing them. So the power is in your hands, users. Do you think disposable apps are a good thing or do you find them annoying?

1. There are a number of alternative messaging tools out there – hundreds even
2. The messaging services are now widely available via mobile apps, sometimes exclusively

TechCrunch provided a great summary of some of they key players entering the mobile messaging space. Aside the high-level view, the article identifies some of the key strengths and weaknesses of the respective apps – something that developers and testers should take note of.

Here is a quick excerpt:

Little by little, these mobile messaging apps are eating away at the mindshare of grand web-based social networks, even as they recreate their own social content platforms online to extend and bolster their mobile offerings. Facebook was slow to recognise the threat but has since countered with its own Messenger app, and additional offerings like SnapChat-rival Poke. How seriously Facebook is taking the mobile messaging app threat now is evident in its most recent mobile effort:  Facebook Home – an Android launcher that seeks to elbow its way past rival apps by foregrounding Facebook’s own chat channel atop other apps.

But Home may already be too little, too late. With limited availability, the launcher can’t yet reach very far – it’s had only around one million downloads to-date — and will likely never make it onto iOS. There’s no word on active users of Home but the launcher has failed to impress those who are downloading it, with only a two-star rating on Google Play so far. Facebook’s strategy of trying to stop the runaway mobile messaging train by standing on the train tracks looks like a pretty forlorn hope. A better bet is for it to drive usage of its own mobile messaging apps – but that’s where the geographical variation of messaging platforms poses a huge challenge.

Different messaging apps are doing well in different geographies. There’s huge and growing mobile messaging variation, as more and more companies wise up to the opportunity and launch their own messaging attacks. A recent example is the Bharti/Softbank telco joint venure messaging app, Hike, that has grabbed more than five million users since launching in December. Another contender is U.S. startup just.me, which launched its messaging play last month in 155 countries and 32 languages. Add to that Google looks to be readying a new unified messaging play of its own, codenamed Babel.

Read the Rest >>>

A question posed on Quora reads “What should beginner programmers know about software testing?” Eleven people have responded and answers so far include:

“Even if you have a QA  team, it’s your job to test your code. And by test, I mean really test: not just smoke test, test for code coverage, test psychotic edge cases, stress test, load test, test everything.  Testing your own code is one way to avoid having fires lit under your ass, which is surely a more comfortable way to go through life.” – Andrew Warinner

“It’s not optional” – K. Scott Helms

“Coming up with test cases before you write your code (test driven development) is a powerful paradigm for producing quality during software development.  Write the tests, called unit tests, using one of the available tools like JUnit, NUnit, etc.  Get the edge cases, test the happy path and the not happy paths.  What should your code do if someone passes in a null value as a parameter?   This will make you think about Exceptions before you write your code so that you will develop a exception strategy instead of going back and retrofitting code with no thought about a strategy.   Make sure that you run and pass the tests every time you build your code.” – Jack Menendez

“First of all you need to accept the fact that your code contains defects.
That’s always true. But that doesn’t always mean that you’ve messed up. Sometimes defects come from business requirements or some 3rd party libraries, etc. So – don’t treat defects like something personal. Try to work in combination with testers. If you believe that something needs to be checked – you can always ask test team to do that. Usually we (testers) appreciate such testing thoughts a lot, especially if these thoughts have some difficult technical reason and we most probably would miss that.” – Artyom Silivonchik

The response with the most votes comes from Eric Pepke and it’s one you’ll all likely agree with:

“What you should know is that testers are your friends. They’ll find out things that you didn’t. Learn to love it and take delight in fixing bugs.”

What would you tell a brand new programmer? Let us know in the comments or answer on Quora >>>

Over the years, app developers have had to continuously adapt their processes to the ever-changing mobile experience. But the evolution isn’t expected to stop. More changes are coming that will in turn create many new challenges – and problems – for developers.

Jeffrey Hammond of Information Week recently highlighted a few challenges dev teams should prepare for:

1. Context.
2. Device Proliferation.
3. Voice, Prioritized Over Touch.
4. Heads-Up Interfaces.
5. Bigger – And Smaller – Touch Devices, And Adaptive UIs.
6. Mobile Apps Become Pluggable Mobile.
7. Wearables, Connectables And Local Networks.
8. Hybrid Application Model.
9. Cloud-Powered Development.

See the full list here>>

So… what do Hammond’s challenges really mean for app developers? For starters, wearables, connectables and heads-up interfaces mean learning how to develop apps for an entirely new interface.

As Hammond says, “We’ll have to adapt to peripheral cues such as reminders and alerts that don’t block the user’s vision. We’ll also need to integrate tactile and aural feedback such as voice commands and vibrating sensors that alert users they need to take action.” Changes like this mean learning from the ground up. There will be no best practices; bugs, glitches and errors will appear in entirely different – and unexpected – ways. Not to mention the overall development process will become that much more complex.

This is why QA will be so important. In the lab or automated testing won’t be enough for these new generation of apps. Developer will need to draw on leading testing services to ensure their apps work on these new devices in the wild, under real world conditions. Voice over touch, adaptive UIs and device proliferation will also prompt real world QA, but in-app crash reporting and other QA tools can provide better feedback so developers can improve their apps to successfully fit the changing landscape.

Are there any other major changes you think are coming to the mobile landscape? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Trulia saw their user base shifting from web to mobile – so they shifted right along with them and created mobile apps. When you need to make sure your app works just about anywhere in the country, under all sorts of circumstances (I’ve used Trulia while driving through parts of Maine) how do you test it? Here’s what Trulia was up against and what they decided to do, according to a report from analyst firm IDC:

To test these applications across an extensive geography and broad spectrum of devices, operating systems, and carriers, Trulia chose to go beyond the confines of its testing lab and adopt a “crowdsourcing” model to achieve in-the-wild testing. This model leverages a community of testers with different backgrounds, skills, and testing specialties to put applications through their paces under real-world conditions.

Can you guess who they went with?

After evaluating various crowdsourcing companies, Trulia chose uTest to test its mobile applications.

According to the IDC Spotlight: Trulia ROI, Trulia saw some very specific, very impressive results when working with uTest:

• ROI of 280%
• Seeing payback in 7.2 months
• Reducing testing costs by 95%
• Increased customer base by 10%-15%

Read the full IDC Spotlight: Trulia ROI >>>

What’s the ROI of your mobile app testing?