Toronto-based Whirlscape attracted plenty of attention when it first debuted its innovative Minuum software keyboard, and sought funding for the project on Indiegogo. Now, the project is moving forward with the launch of the Minuum keyboard beta app for Android, which will give Indiegogo supporters their first chance to actually play with the tech and see what it is they’ve helped pay for.

In the video above, you can see the demo of how the software operates designed to help orient new users. The keyboard layout, as you can see, is squeezed down, but still retains a basic QWERTY layout. It then suggests words, based on typing that’s designed to do as much as it can with incredibly imprecise input. You only have to tap on the basic area, and then you can cycle through suggestions if the first one isn’t correct. There isn’t even a space bar by default; it’s designed to be as minimal as possible. Gestures control cycling between different keyboards, too, including all-caps and numeric input.

Whirlscape raised $87,000 from its Indiegogo campaign, and the beta will go out to its nearly 10,000 supporters today. But those who missed out can also request access to the next phase of testing, by signing up at Minuum.com. The startup is also going to be issuing a “wearable development kit” by the end of the year since it smashed through its funding goal, which will allow people to build versions of Minuum which can theoretically work with devices like Thalmic’s MYO, the Leap Motion Controller and more.

There’s a lot going on with software keyboards recently, which seems to suggest people are looking around for what comes next in mobile input methods. Minuum’s take is unique, so it’ll be interesting to see how its first users respond.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Samsung President Shin Jong Kyun this week to discuss how the two companies might work together to help Facebook reap more revenue from advertising sales targeted at mobile devices, according to Bloomberg. Kyun and Zuckerberg talked about possible partnerships between the two companies at a meeting at Samsung’s Seoul headquarters, which is especially noteworthy given that FB had a recent, very public joint product launch misfire with another handset manufacturer, HTC.

Neither Facebook nor Zuckerberg provided any comment on the purpose of the meetings, according to Bloomberg, but Samsung is already a limited partner of Facebook, presumably, given that Facebook Home supported some Samsung devices at launch, while ignoring handsets like the Nexus 4, which arguably provides the most generic, and most easily modified Android experience. Facebook Home is a launcher that sits on top of Android, and takes over the experience, essentially turning your phone into a Facebook-first device.

Facebook Home is still struggling in the downloads department, with total installs dropping off pretty steadily over the past 30 days. And the HTC First, the first and only smartphone to ship with Home pre-installed, can’t be doing well. Rumors that it would be discontinued by exclusive carrier partner AT&T so far haven’t come true, but European launches have been cancelled, indicating the First isn’t long for this world.

When the First and Home were announced, it seemed likely other OEMs would introduce handsets with Home pre-installed, but now that doesn’t seem nearly as realistic a possibility. Samsung are the big guns, however, so if Facebook is looking for one more kick at the can with Home, Zuckerberg meeting with Samsung to make the ask makes perfect sense. Of course, it’s equally possible that the social network wants to throw Home on the scrap heap and go back to the drawing board with a new partner, which is the far more interesting possibility here. Could we finally see a true Facebook Phone, for instance, with Samsung as a mostly behind the scenes partner? Possible, but hard to know where Zuck’s head at is given previous reversals stemming from flirtations with hardware.

Apple retains the top spot when it comes for uses making actual purchases on their mobile devices, according to a new Forrester report. iOS shoppers are around 30 percent more likely to make a purchase on their device, and about 15 percent more likely to do product research on their smartphones and tablets than Android users, the survey of 58,000 U.S. respondents found.

But despite the discrepancy, companies are still targeting both platforms en masse. The survey also found that 99 percent of ebusiness professionals surveyed during the study intended to launch either a native or hybrid iOS app by the end of 2013, and 96 percent were also targeting the same for Android. Beyond Goole and Apple, however, there’s a very steep drop off in interest, and only larger companies with big budgets are really looking further afield at companies and platforms like BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

That’s because around 41 percent of ebusiness pros have only $500,000 or less to spend on their mobile budgets, and 56 percent have less than $1 million. That money can only go so far, and still pales in comparison to general marketing budgets, and even budgets devoted to general web-facing property. This alone is a prime reason why cross-platform solutions will continue to succeed, even as developers debate the merits of cross-platform technologies like HTML5 vs. native tools.

And while the market appears unified between Apple and Google, that actually belies a fair amount of fragmentation that occupies sufficient developer time and resources within those two larger camps, Forrester points out. Developing for either iOS or Android is a much more resource-intensive affair than it once was, despite efforts made by both companies to encourage users to upgrade and to make it easier to build software compatible across OS versions and device particulars.

In some ways, fragmentation is actually a boon to both Apple and Google in terms of helping them maintain their platform advantage. The more resources developers have to devote to catering to those top two platforms, the fewer they have available to spread out on a third or fourth horse, to the continued detriment of smaller players like BlackBerry and Microsoft. It’s easy to paint fragmentation as a problem, and in terms of developer time and spend, it definitely is, but holding on to the market lead may be an unintended consequence for the mobile top dogs.

Microsoft today announced a number of updates to its Azure Mobile Services that include support for Git source control, custom APIs and Android push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging to its mobile backend service. Azure users now also get a free 20MB SQL database for mobile services and web sites for 12 months.

The highlight of today’s update is clearly support for Android push notifications in Azure Mobile Service’s Notification Hubs. The Notifications Hubs, which Microsoft launched earlier this year, previously allowed developers to send push notifications to their apps on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and iOS, but with the help of MS Open Tech, the platform now also supports broadcasting notifications to Android devices via Google Cloud Messaging. With this update, Azure’s Notification Hubs now support all the major smartphone platforms and, according to Microsoft, allow developers to push notifications to millions of devices with low latency.

The other update developers will surely appreciate is the addition of source control integration with Git. As Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie notes, this now allows developers to cone their git repository on a local machine, work on their scripts and then “”easily deploy the mobile service to production using Git.” It’s worth noting that Microsoft also recently added Git support to Visual Studio and its Team Foundation Server and Service.

Developers can also now create and expose custom APIs with Azure Mobile Services. This, Guthrie says, will allow developers to work with data sources other than SQL databases and broker calls to third-party APIs. The custom APIs can be written using Node.js and can use Node’s NPM packages.

The free 20MB SQL database is unlikely to be large enough for a popular mobile app or web site in production, but as Microsoft rightly notes, it should be enough to help developers develop and test their apps.

You can find a full list of today’s updates (and a few code examples) here.

This summer the veteran Symbian platform, which started life back when handhelds weren’t phones but PDAs, will quietly pass into development history. Or at least its primary supporter over the years — Nokia – will cease producing any new handsets running the OS (or so says the FT). Unsurprisingly Nokia is keeping officially schtum this time around. Presumably it’s learnt its lesson after the original burning platform memo, in which it publicly declared its intention to jump ship from Symbian to Windows Phone, ended up burning a huge hole in its coffers as people stopped buying phones running a zombie OS.

It’s technically possible smaller entities might look to keep the Symbian flame alive, as the former Nokians, Jolla, are attempting to do with MeeGo. Symbian does still power a fair amount of phones in China, for instance. But Symbian’s assets have been passed over to Accenture to maintain, and it’s no longer open source, so its days as an active development platform are likely numbered. Regardless, it’s certainly true that Symbian is the platform of a bygone 2G era, when phones were phones first and foremost, not today’s data-gobbling pocket computers.

All of which means that even if Symbian lingers a little longer — Nokia is apparently intending to sell off existing Symbian phone stock, so that may well take some time judging by how sales have dropped drastically (it now sells more Windows Phones than Symbian devices) — its end times are approaching. So what better point to take a look back at the platform that powered so many devices and dominated the mobile landscape for so long.

From PDA Roots To Candybar Phones

Symbian’s origins are firmly routed in the PDA world. It sprang from an OS developed by Psion for its handheld organisers — pictured below is a precursor OS to the one that evolved into Symbian.

In mid 1998 Psion Software became Symbian Ltd — a joint venture between Psion and phone makers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia — and EPOC was renamed the Symbian OS. As befits a joint venture, the OS was splintered into distinct platforms/UIs as each of the various mobile makers put it to work with their own devices.

These included Nokia’s PDA-style Series 80 platform — shown below running on the Nokia 9300 — and the icon-based Series 60 UI platform shown running on the candybar slider Nokia 7650, bottom left, and the N80, bottom right.

Caught Out By Capacitive Touch

Symbian’s clear run extended right through to the mid noughties, as Nokia pumped out a steady stream of candybars, flips phones and other weird/wonderful form-factors from cylinders to spherical squares, all powered by its various flavours of the OS. This was Symbian cooking on gas.

The crunch time for the OS came when Apple’s iPhone arrived in 2007 to usher in the capacitive touchscreen era, putting a new more fluid touch-centric user experience at the fore and elbowing out keypads, Qwertys and fiddly menu systems that relied on wielding a stylus to navigate. The iPhone’s arrival was of course compounded by Android’s debut in 2008. Soon a whole army of touchscreen iPhones and iClones were crowding into a mobile playground that had formerly been Nokia’s and Symbian’s to rule. 

Unlike Symbian, these incoming platforms were starting fresh — designed for the Internet era, not the quaint pocket PDA. They didn’t carry legacy baggage. Their only heritage was connected computing. They were built with the touchscreen at their centre, and they offered a perfect platform for delivering apps. Of course Symbian could run apps too, but all the various flavours of the OS meant its app ecosystem was far more fragmented than its rivals. And although Symbian’s PDA roots incorporated touchscreen tech this older generation of resistive screen tech — which went hand in glove with fiddly drop-down menus designed to be pecked at with a stylus — bore no relation to modern touchscreens that focused on fingers and true touch computing.

All these factors gave Android and iOS a huge advantage over the decade-old Symbian platform. Symbian was stuck in its own folder-strewn rut, desperately needing to evolve to compete in the slick new mobile world order. Add to that, Android was free for mobile makers to use vs Symbian’s licensing fee model. Symbian was being outgunned and outpriced. A crushing combination for any long-in-the-tooth technology.

Last ditch efforts to spur Symbian on

Nokia, the main Symbian user ergo the company with the most to lose as the OS fell behind, made the decision to open source Symbian in 2008 to try to accelerate its evolution to compete with its younger and more agile rivals. A rebooted version of Symbian designed for a touchscreen era was to be created by merging various platform strands — including S60 and technology from UIQ and MOAP(S) — to be pooled into a new unified touch-focused platform.

The first touch-enabled release of the new OS, Symbian^1 (or Symbian S60 v5) — is shown below running on the first device to carry it, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, released at the end of 2008.

But the usability gap between Symbian^1 and its upstart rivals remained a gulf. It wasn’t until Symbian^3 (demoed below in a Nokia promo video) that a more fully-featured touch-centric experience started to emerge. Although, at this point, development work was already pushing into 2010 meaning Symbian continued falling further behind.

Symbian^3 added multiple homescreens with support for widgets, faster graphics and scrolling, pinch to zoom, visual multitasking with app previews and switching, among other new features. But this was still playing catch up with Android and iOS. Too little, too late remained Symbian’s problem, as its two rivals streaked ahead with their own platform evolutions and went on to sew up the smartphone market between them.

In a last ditch attempt to fix Symbian fast, Nokia took development back in house. Two more versions of the OS followed, Symbian Anna, which brought browser speed and text input improvements and ushered in a new rounded icon-based UI. Followed by a final update: Symbian Belle.

Belle added additional modernising touches such as more customisable widgets, extra homescreens, a pull down status screen for accessing settings and viewing missed missives, notifications on the lockscreen, and support for NFC. The problem was Android already had all those things.

The old folder based menu hierarchy that Symbian had carried with it from its PDA days had finally been entirely flattened. But it had taken far too long to level the playing field. Symbian’s work was almost done.

At the start of this year Nokia confirmed that the Symbian-based 808 PureView – announced in 2012 with much fanfare thanks to its 41MP camera sensor — would be the last device it makes on the Symbian platform. This summer it’s also going to stop producing even the remaining few Symbian devices in its portfolio.

After some 15 years, many of them as the leader of its field, it’s the end of the line for this venerable technology stack.

Symbian’s development challenges

Lee Williams, formerly the executive director of the Symbian Foundation — the entity created to oversee the open sourced Symbian in 2008 — takes the view that while the PDA heritage of Symbian was initially off-putting, the platform’s robust underlying architecture and flexibility gave it the ability to power through its legacy past. After all, they were the key strengths that had allowed it to travel so far and find its way on to so many devices for so many years in the first place.

“I remember Symbian as that upstart competitor in the GEOS/BeOS/Palm days. I was at Be at the time, and we discounted the system due to it’s role as Psion software with a stodgy approach to usability and programmability.  By the time I got to Palm, and we were wrestling with how best to provide a multicore platform for smartphones, we started to realise that Symbian had some real potential. Namely, the right architecture for a broad range of devices and a robust programming model for applications,” he tells TechCrunch.

Williams’ take on Symbian’s demise is therefore not that the technology itself was the problem, but rather that Symbian spread itself too thin: it was beholden to too many other partners who all wanted a piece of the pie and that meant fragmentation, development retardation and a fatal inability to innovate quickly enough when others were flying forward.

“When I landed on the board at Symbian U.K. Limited, and then took the reigns as the head of the Foundation, the platform appeared to be the preeminent system for the mobile age. What was ironic, was that its strengths ended up being the soul of its demise. The broad level of Operator/OEM support and the extensive range of technology and device types couldn’t help but make the platform difficult to market and ultimately difficult for others to accept as a good solution for the marketplace,” he says. “Ultimately, politics and perception killed what is arguably still the world’s best operating system for our era of seamlessly connected and extensible products.”

That’s the view from the top. But what about the view from the development trenches? Roopesh Chander, a Qt developer who dabbled with writing Symbian apps after Nokia added support for the cross-platform development framework to Symbian in 2011 — having found Symbian C++ “too arbitrary” and “complex”  – argues that in the post-iPhone years, Symbian struggled simply because it remained dated vs the competition.

Even though Nokia improved the development environment for Symbian by adding support for Qt — meaning developers no longer needed to struggle with Symbian C++’s random API call names and requirements for even simple things to have low level setting up of memory and stacks – the platform itself continued to show its age. And that ultimately dragged down the more modern-looking apps now being developed for it. In short, Symbian Belle was great but years too late.

“Though the apps started looking nice and modern [after Nokia added Qt support], the OS itself (Symbian^3 and Symbian Anna) was still looking dated,” says Chander. “For example, though running on a touchscreen, they had two text buttons in the bottom taskbar, a legacy from the buttoned phones. When the phone orientation changed, weird things happened on the screen before the screen settled in the new orientation. If you wanted to type in portrait mode, you had to make do with a telephone keypad (that has 2 and ABC on the same button). Stuff like these made it quite bad at a time when iPhone and Android were shipping much much better touch-centric user interfaces on their phones.

“Nokia fixed most of those problems with Symbian Belle, but it was too late (and Belle merely brought it to the level of the competition, didn’t elevate it to a higher level),” he adds. ”The pinnacle of Symbian was obviously the Nokia 808 PureView, and I think even that can just about compete with the UX in iPhone/Android (not considering the number of apps and the ecosystem). So, I think Symbian didn’t make it because it couldn’t adapt to the touch-centric UX quick enough. If it had shipped Belle two years earlier, it could have garnered the app ecosystem that Android now enjoys.”

And with an insider’s view, Martin Jakl, a former employee of Symbian Ltd and also subsequently Nokia briefly when the latter took over the running of the OS, believes it was public perception that killed Symbian — the perception that the OS was bad because of an outdated UI sitting on top, holding it back. “At the OS layer Symbian was (and most likely still is) the best mobile OS. But of course what users see is the UI and if UI sucks, general public will not like the OS. And to my mind that’s exactly what happened,” he tells TechCrunch. “Splitting the OS and UI was perhaps the greatest managerial mistakes Symbian did (but not the only one, mismanagement was in general the biggest problem of Symbian).”

“The entire S60 UI – in my mind this was the single biggest problem with Symbian — the UI was getting dated and Nokia’s was too risk aware to change it. When they decided to update UI in S^3, they took a couple of wrong design decisions (work on future S^4 which was scrapped) but finally arriving with the right approach to new UI. That’s today’s Belle UI based around Qt abd QML. But by then it was late,” he adds.

Jakl says Symbian’s great strengths as an OS were its kernel, which supported highly complex real-time system apps, and networking stack, which unlike the competition was written for mobile so was built for switching between radio technologies. Symbian also had platform security implemented in the kernel, making it robust in a way he argues Android is not. “It was virtually impossible to hack the system. Look at Android even today, it struggles with a load of malware, etc. This would not have happened to Symbian,” he says. But despite these native strength at the OS level, failure to unify and evolve the UI fast enough killed Symbian — by pushing mobile users into the arms of rivals who focused on usability first.

As is often the case with dominant technologies, not changing fast enough got the better of Symbian. Whether the platform proving itself a laggard was down to complacency and leadership mis-management, the complexities of its legacy baggage including an outdated UI, industry politics or a combination of all those things is hard to say. Regardless of the specific combination of reasons, the cautionary outcome remains the same: innovate or die.

Android has convincingly overtaken Apple as the most popular OS in the smartphone industry both in terms of sales and overall penetration. But when it comes to how much wireless devices are actually used on cellular networks, those who own Apple handsets are disproportionately the biggest users of apps and the mobile web — possibly a sign of why developers continue to make iOS a major focus, but also possibly one reason why Apple is also changing in its newest version of its mobile OS, iOS7, how apps use mobile data.

According to figures out from Actix, a specialist in mobile traffic analysis, combined traffic from the iPhone 4, 4S and 5 makes up just under 54% of all 3G traffic on the networks that it monitors. If you add in traffic from iPad tablets, which came in at 6th and 7th positions, that figure goes up to almost 59%.

The company, a specialist in optimizing wireless network performance on congested routes, tells me it collected the data over the past six months from “mature” carriers that it works with (it has operations in over 100 countries) and used data from the busiest hour on the network. The data is anonymized.

Android, in contrast, has three devices in the top-10, all Galaxy S devices, but none the newest S4. Together the Galaxy S, S2 and S3 make up just under 18% of 3G data traffic. The list is rounded out with BlackBerry handsets (again, older models), which make up just over 3% of traffic. Nokia and other handset makers are not part of the equation at all.

The data stands in contrast to how devices actually around the world. Phones running Google’s OS are taking about 64% of new sales; while in countries like the U.S. they are accounting for about 53% of all existing smartphone ownership.

What to make of these conclusions? Actix doesn’t specify whether the high rankings of Apple devices are directly related to their users being such avid consumers of apps and mobile data, although recent evidence from companies like Flurry, which measures app usage and analytics across both platforms, seems to point to this fact.

Still, the fact remains that some of this usage might not always be welcomed by users, for example when it relates to certain apps’ automatic data polling, which can be a drain not just on your battery but also your monthly mobile data allowance.

Apple will be addressing this in one way in the latest version of iOS. Users will be able to decide how much of that activity they would like to run over non-WiFi connections, by offering an option for users to turn off cellular data not just for the whole device, but for each individual app. The feature, as you can see from this illustration, also specifies how much data each app is using up.

Tablets: Actix says that this is the first time that tablets have broken into the top-ten list of most popular devices on 3G networks that it helps manage. As they entered the top 10, the iPhone 3GS and the 9700 from BlackBerry dropped out.

Most tablets are equipped only with WiFi connectivity, and while figures from a year ago indicated that tablets were accounting for very little traffic on 3G networks, it appears that this may be changing.

Actix says that traffic from tablets, and specifically iPad devices, increased four-fold in the last six months. When compared against the longer tail of smartphone usage, these tablets typically consumed three times as much mobile data. That’s because we know that tablets, with their bigger screens, are natural places to consume data-heavy services like video on the go, so it makes sense that as more of these with 3G and 4G connectivity enter the user base, the more likely it is that they will have an impact on data networks.

“The easy availability of iPads with a mobile network contract is now impacting growth in data demand on the mobile networks as users demand a connection wherever they are and whatever the device,” said Neil Coleman, marketing director of Actix, in a statement. “This is the second phase in the mobile data revolution started by the iPhone in 2007.”

While Actix is perhaps more interested in how to tackle this problem for mobile carriers, for users this could see a bigger focus on special tariffs for tablet devices, and the rising popularity will also have a knock-on effect of more apps and other content getting created specifically for the medium, maybe even with a focus on how to do it in the most data-efficient way.

That’s because this appears to be trend that is only going to grow.

The analyst firm Canalys counts tablets as “PCs” in their calculations, and in some figures it released yesterday, the company noted  that of the 493 million PCs that will be shipped this year, 183 million of them will be tablets, with the rest split between desktop PCs (105 million) and notebooks (2015 million). By 2017, that balance will shift massively in favor of the more mobile, lighter and often less expensive tablet, with 456 million shipped compared to only 86 million desktop PCs, and 172 million notebooks. While WiFi will certainly continue to a mainstay in those devices, it’s inevitable cellular use will also ride the wave.

Image: @javi on Twitter

Apple demonstrated that it will keep its iron grip on iOS 7, despite Tim Cook saying it’s time for Apple to start opening up. Rather than debut new opportunities for developers, Apple squelched them at WWDC by building its own substitutes for widgets, phone modifications, and whole categories of existing apps.

Long ago, Apple declared war on inconsistency. When critics say ‘closed’, Apple hears dependable. Buy an iPhone or MacBook Pro and Apple wants your experience to be reliably great. It will do what it takes to protect that reputation. That means keeping its software largely unaltered by third-party developers. Apple’s homemade apps and operating system infrastructure might not be the best, especially compared to Google’s, but they’re easy and simple and usually get the job done.

Hardcore users and third-party developers are the casualties of this war. And WWDC was a battle lost for them. Considering it’s supposed to be a developers conference, Monday’s event was all about Apple. So much so it may have left a sinking feeling in the stomachs of those hopeful to build helpful experiences for users…as well as those who already had.

Native Features Box Out Developers

At WWDC, Apple debuted iOS 7, calling it the biggest change to its mobile operating system since its launch in 2007. But what stayed the same was Apple’s disregard for customizability.

In iOS 7, you still won’t be able to modify your lock or home screen with widgets, shortcuts, or launchers. Those tools allow Android holders to make their devices uniquely their own. Real-time feeds of information surface data from within apps so you don’t have to open them. Shortcuts let users jump straight to important parts of the OS or quickly toggle settings. Launchers let you choose from custom themes and employ different gesture controls for navigation.

None of those things are coming to iOS. It’s still a one-size-fits-all operating system. Developers hoping to port their customization apps to iOS are likely out of luck for at least another year.

Instead, Apple built several of the most important shortcuts into a single panel called Control Center. A swipe up reveals a number of crucial switches and sliders you used to have to dig out of different tabs of the Settings menu. There’s airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, rotation lock, Airdrop, and Airplay. Maybe most beneficial will be the brightness slider, which is critical to adjust as you move between direct sunlight and dark night so you don’t drain your battery. There’s also instant access to the music controls, which could combine nicely with the new iTunes Radio.

But there was one little icon in Control Center that surely struck fear in the hearts of quite a few developers. A flashlight. In a pinch, your mobile phone can help you find things in the dark by turning and leaving the camera’s flash on.

Until now, Apple left it up to scrappy developers to offer apps that do this. There are over 1,000 flashlight apps in the App Store, 50 in our own CrunchBase, and even one that’s venture funded. They’re all in trouble now. Why download or waste home screen space on an app when you can use Apple’s native version with just a swipe up and a tap? Sure, these apps probably didn’t take long to develop, and maybe their makers should have predicted Apple might launch its own flashlight, but still, they deserve a little sympathy.

Finally, the most direct example of Apple’s quest to stay closed is what it did with call and text blocking. Everyone uses the phone and SMS apps in their iPhone, but you can’t do much to customize them. Compare that with Android, which lets downloaded apps like Mr Number drastically modify the phone to allow for blocking of whole area codes of numbers, options to send specific numbers to voicemail, and even crowdsourced address books so nearly every incoming call comes with a name attached.

Apple could have opened up developer hooks so iOS apps could have similar abilities to modify the phone app. But Apple isn’t built on “open.” So instead, it announced at WWDC that iOS 7 will support basic blocking for calls, texts and FaceTime from specific numbers.

That takes the wind out of any Android phone modification app hoping to port to iOS. And with the expectation that Apple will keep improving these phone privacy features, it will be hard for any new developers to eke out enough value in the space to gain traction.

Skeuomorphism Off, Training Wheels On

iOS is falling behind. While many say the iPhone/iPad software is less advanced than the newest builds of Android, it’s how it treats users that isn’t aging well. We’ve become more tech literate, and especially more mobile literate in the six years since iOS launched. Yet the operating system still acts like we have no idea what we want.

That hand-holding is starting to drag us down. Apple saw that in its mobile design scheme. iOS 7 shed its predecessor’s skeuomorphism, dropping antiquated metaphors that made its calendar app resemble a physical paper planner many young users would hardly recognize.

Now it’s time to let the functionality of iOS grow up, too. There must be a way for Apple to offer the same reliability that’s made it a household name, but still offer flexibility to developers and power users. For example, a series of stern prompts could warn people that they are going to change their operating system by installing and activating certain apps. Apple could even prompt people at regular intervals to confirm their modifications, allowing them a quick way to uninstall these customization apps to make sure no one gets stuck with an unwanted foreign experience.

iOS was a marvelous introduction to smartphones for millions of people, and it will continue to be. But if Apple wants to satisfy us all and compete with the ever-evolving Android, it needs to let iOS mature. We certainly have.

[Image Credit]

Vine has already clarified just how quickly its userbase is growing, with the announcement that the app had hit 13 million downloads by the time Twitter launched it on Android. This was all just a week ago. Today, however, we’ve learned that Vine has climbed to the top of the charts on Android as the top social app and the No. 4 free app on Google Play. Instagram is No. 5.

For those of you who don’t like smartphones, GIFs or general merriment, Vine is a new app released by Twitter in January of this year. The app works a bit like an Instagram for video, letting you shoot creatively edited, six-second looping videos to share with your friends on social networks, etc.

The app has seen some incredible growth in the short time it’s been available, hitting No. 1 on App Store charts in just a matter of days. A week later, we learned that Vine had already grown to be about twice as popular as SocialCam and other competing video-sharing apps.

The team has been iterating ever since, adding the ability to use both front- and rear-facing cameras and working out some kinks. And it’s clearly paid off.

Nick Bilton of the NYT noticed just a few days ago that there seem to be more Vine shares on Twitter than Instagram for the first time ever, thanks to a handy graph from Topsy Analytics.

This could have something to do with the fact that Instagram pulled Twitter Card integration to direct more traffic to Instagram.com, but I’m not convinced that that’s a conscious thought running through the minds of Instagrammers as they’re deciding where to share.

What’s more likely is that Vine users want to share on Twitter because the Vine ecosystem is still growing, and those users want to ensure that their creation gets as many views from friends as possible. Then add to it the fact that Vine launched on Android just around the time that Vine.co shares surpassed Instagram.com shares, and it’s clear that Vine simply has a growing group of people interested in using the service.

Vine is available now in both the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Word leaked out earlier that the new release of Apple’s operating system, iOS 7, is in for a major overhaul, most notably bringing an end to so-called “skeuomorphic” design (visual metaphors reflecting the physical objects a digital version aims to replace – e.g. the faux leather in “Find My Friends,” bookshelves in iBooks, fake glass, notepad paper in Notes, green felt in Game Center, and so on.) It’s a welcome change to say the least, but more concerning is the fact that outside of the visual tweaks, the overall look of the operating system is supposed to remain very familiar.

That’s too bad, because iOS – perfectly simple as she may be – has gotten a little boring.

It’s easy to see the dilemma. Apple has found success by making technology accessible to a wide audience through careful design, quality craftsmanship and in-store technical assistance from blue shirt-wearing “geniuses.” A truly radical overhaul of its operating system could alienate a mainstream user base who’s grown comfortable with the general look-and-feel of iOS and its incrementally improving feature set.

But for another segment of the population – those no longer new to the concept of smartphones (or rather, these mini computers we occasionally use for phone calls) – iOS is starting to feel dated.

Rows of app icons. Hooray.

After years of back and forth between iPhones and Nexus devices, god knows I’ve tried to make Android stick, lured away by things like customizations, launchers, live updating widgets, as well as improved app switching, voice search, navigation, notification drop-downs, lock screens, and more – all of which I’d call “better,” but people will argue, so let’s just say “better for me.”

Yet as someone who writes about technology and startups, you can’t just abandon yourself to one platform. Startups often launch iOS first, requiring continued use of an iPhone, though my SIM currently resides in a Nexus 4 for the above reasons.

Most people are locked into contracts or can only afford one phone at a time, so I’m fortunate to usually have a few Androids, Windows Phones and iPhones at my disposal. (Sorry BlackBerry). Moving between the three, and it’s clear to see that the OS now coming up short in terms of pushing the bar forward is iOS. Hopefully, the new version of the operating system will address that problem. I’d love to be surprised again.

With iOS 7, we reportedly may get the following additions: new toggle switches for accessing quick settings in the notifications bar; deeper Flickr and Vimeo integration into the core OS; panoramic, scrollable background wallpapers; notifications you can manipulate with gestures; and maybe a new gesture to access “glance-able” information panels, like Notification Center. (This is why there are fanboy wars. Who had these things first? Not Apple. And when you realize that, it’s hard not to scoff. I get it.)

The big shift from skeuomorphism to flat design has not been without controversy - battle lines have been drawn on both sides of the design community. But if this and a few other tweaks is all we’re getting, there will be some letdown. To the untrained user’s eye, they’ll probably only notice that the interface and apps look different or more modern, and then either feel warmly or turned off by those changes, without having the correct language to explain what precisely has been edited or why. But the end of the day, gradients, colors, textures, styles – it all starts feeling like the OS got a new coat of paint. Necessary because rust was starting to show - and wow, does this paint sparkle! - but a coat of paint, nonetheless.

What does iOS really need? Oh wait, someone already did that post, with some snark of course. (The point being, there’s no way Apple can announce enough things at WWDC to please everyone. This is true.)

But let’s dig in anyway. For starters, there’s the problem of Apple’s services being no match for Google’s. From mail to calendaring to documents, Google is winning in the cloud. Apple needs to build a more functional iCloud – one that people understand, that isn’t angering developers, one that isn’t broken, buggy and overpriced. Google’s predictive add-on Google Now, also currently outsmarts Siri’s more limited virtual assistant, though Apple could change that quickly by opening up Siri’s API to third-party developers.

Apple also needs to be at least slightly more open. There’s a way of doing this where it could still maintain some level of control. For instance, it would be useful if apps could better to talk to each other and share data between them. With an ever-increasing number of iOS applications available, it’s becoming a winner takes all market. But because apps are treated largely as isolated silos, app engagement and usage rapidly declines after install. A shocking percentage of apps are never even opened.

Apps are tucked away in obscure backscreen folders and forgotten. That means, developers, in turn, have to use increasingly spammy push notifications to encourage re-opens. Frustrated, users simply delete the apps constantly bothering them. It’s a vicious cycle.

It’s hard also to see the harm in a bit more customizable operating system. One which loads the perfectly good vanilla experience for the masses, but which advanced users can personalize via the settings, allowing for new behaviors, gestures, homescreen setups, widgets, automations, different keyboards (I mean, really!), visualizations, layouts, and more. Why, for example, is it Apple’s call how many apps are stuffed in a folder, how many screens I have, or how many apps sit in my dock? Why can’t third-party apps become my “default”  browser, contacts app, notepad, weather app, mail client, and more? Why can’t I share to any app I want from Safari, not just Facebook, Twitter, iMessage and Mail? And so on.

There are those who will say that these sorts of changes are just not Apple’s M.O. They think for you, make the tough design decisions, and it usually works. It’s hard to point to their numbers and prove any differently. Still, a large number of Apple’s iOS users are perfectly comfortable with their iPhones and iPads now – they’re no longer as welcoming the heavy hand as they are feeling crushed by it. And they may be switching to Android, or just going Android-first when they finally ditch their feature phone.

So here’s hoping Apple can still surprise us with a new iOS 7 operating system whose newly upgraded beauty is more than skin deep, but is rather something which, once again, “just works”…for everyone.

Image credit: Simply Zesty

For most beginning hardware hackers, Arduino is hard and Linux/Android is easy. The folks at UDOO, a Kickstarter project that ends tonight, aim to solve that by mixing the best of both worlds. The UDOO device contains an ARM processor (dual or quad core) as well as an Arduino microprocessor. This allows you to program the Arduino using the tools you’re familiar with including a standard embedded Linux install and the associated command-line software.

The UDOO contains both and ARM cortex-A9 CPU and the hardware on a Arduino DUE. This includes 54 digital I/O pins, an optional SATA connection, and a number of other pin-outs and connectors. This part of the board allows users to add all of the shields and accessories associated with the highly evolved Arduino environment to the equally evolved Linux and Android environments. Think of it as a Raspberry Pi you can upgrade.

The UDOO also includes a Wi-Fi module, USB ports, and 1GB RAM. The dual core model costs $109 while the quad core costs $129. They’ve already surpassed their funding goal with 25 hours to go.

It looks like a great way to harness the power of Arduino using tools that geeks know and love. It is, as they say, two great tastes that taste great together thanks to complex interoperability and a rabid fan base for both platforms.

BlueStacks is hoping to take the clear early consumer interest in a home gaming console built with mobile technologies and make that into big business, and today it’s announcing what could become a huge advantage for its GamePop console over other similar offerings. GamePop will support iPhone and iPad apps at launch, in addition to Android titles, making the first such device to tap into Apple’s rich app ecosystem.

As part of this expansion, GamePop is also announcing its first partner on the iOS side today: Subatomic Studios. Subatomic is the studio behind Fieldrunners, the tower defense game that was one of the iPhone’s first true defining hits. Fieldrunners has since expanded to a number of different platforms, including the PlayStation Store, Android and more, but BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma explained in an interview that in the case where a title is available on both Android and iOS, GamePop will offer the version which is considered the flagship for the title.

And while Subatomic is just the first announced partner bringing iOS software to the GamePop, there are many more partnerships in the works And all of the iOS titles will be included free with the cost of the $6.99 per month subscription, alongside Android titles, to make up the 500 titles BlueStacks is aiming to provide to subscribers as part of their package. Like with Android titles, BlueStacks will be looking to procure high-quality iOS games, and Sharma points to Fieldrunners as a perfect example, since it’s a $2.99 game at regular price when purchased through the App Store. Any iOS titles will also be able to bring in-app purchases to the GamePop, though they’ll be handled through one of leading third-party in-app purchase API providers on Android rather than through Apple.

To get iOS games running on the GamePop, the use a new proprietary technology pioneered by BlueStacks called “Looking Glass,” which is somewhat similar to the type of virtualization that the company does when bringing Android titles to Windows 8, for instance, but with some crucial differences.. But Rosen also notes that this isn’t something that’s using Apple APIs or is in any way in danger of running afoul of that company’s rules regarding iOS software.

“From a technology perspective, it uses virtualitzation, but it’s a different kind of virtualization than what we use for example for our PC products,” he said. “This is more API-level virtualization. We don’t use any of Apple’s bits – the developer just gives us the app and we make sure that it’ll run on GamePop.”

Nor does GamePop’s method of bringing mobile software designed for Apple devices result in any kind of sacrifices when it comes to performance or quality of experience. Since the virtualization happens at a very basic level, the GamePop is essentially doing the same heavy lifting as the iPhone or iPad hardware, but doesn’t need to do any additional work, the way it would if it were virtualizing in the same way that Parallels does with Windows on an OS X computer, for instance.

“In iOS the app makes a call and says, for example, ‘draw a menu for me,’ and in GamePop the app would make the same call and we’d be drawing the menu for them,” he said. “At this point, iOS and Android are so similar from an API perspective that it’s feasible to do this. So there’s no difference in terms of performance, and in fact developers on iOS follow such good guidelines that getting them on GamePop is relatively straightforward.”

The change to GamePop not only gives it access to a broader library of software from which to choose its core group of titles, but it also means that GamePop isn’t just another Android-based home gaming console in the tradition of OUYA and GameStick. Now, it’s a different beast entirely, and one with a crucial competitive advantage over and above its subscription-based revenue model. GamePop is currently on sale for the introductory price of ‘free’ through June, with the $6.99 per month subscription, and will retail for $129 after that.

Update: Additional info has come to light that suggests this T-Mobile tweet may have been issued prematurely. See below for details.

BlackBerry Messenger is reportedly coming to iOS and Android on June 27, according to a tweet from T-Mobile UK’s official account today. The tweet was accompanied by a picture of BBM in action on a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. We knew it was coming, since BlackBerry announced it would be arriving “this summer” back in May, and that it would be free on both platforms and require either iOS 6 or higher, or Android Ice Cream Sandwich or greater.

Great news – BlackBerry Messenger will be available to download on iOS and Android from June 27th! #BBM http://t.co/PbG1uknM3h—
T-MOBILE UK (@TMobileUK) June 06, 2013

BBM on other platforms will initially offer just messaging, but BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said in the service’s announcement that they’ll be adding more features over time, including screen sharing, BBM voice and the new BBM Channels. Making BBM an independent product is a dramatic, bold step for the company, given that it is often cited as a key competitive advantage that BlackBerry still maintains over its rivals, but the company is clearly keen to look at survival strategies that go beyond making a comeback as a smartphone maker.

BBM isn’t the only fish in the sea anymore, however, as there is now an amazing bounty of mobile messaging platforms to choose from on iOS, Android and even BlackBerry that offer similar functionality. In fact, in a worst case scenario, it’s easy to see BBM launching on iOS and Android as giving license to disaffected users to leave for what they perceive as greener pastures, while taking their network and social contacts with them.

Still, this is a calculated risk, and BlackBerry must see a very clear and present upside to opening up its platform beyond BB OS. It definitely has the network volume, which is generally the goal of pre-monetization startups launching similar products, so we’ll see where it takes things from here. We’ve reached out to BlackBerry for direct confirmation, and will update this story if we hear back with more information.

Update: Business Insider says this date is “incorrect” according to its own sources close to the company. We’re still waiting to hear bak from our own sources with any additional info.

Update 2: BlackBerry has responded with a reaffirmation that they haven’t yet announced an official date, but T-Mobile UK still hasn’t retracted, removed or added more context to its tweet (update within the update: and now the T-Mobile UK tweet has been deleted):

We haven’t announced a date other than BBM for iOS and Android is coming this summer.

iOS and Android aren’t necessarily competing for one mobile crown anymore, according to the latest Flurry mobile report, which shows that in the two-horse race the smartphone and mobile OS market has become, both Apple and Google’s offerings in fact have room to earn their own separate crown.

Android can rule in the North, in other words, while iOS reigns over the rest of the kingdom from its iron throne. And what that means is that while Android leads in device market share, with Flurry data suggesting that Android devices on its network doubled during the past year to reach a whopping 564 million in April 2013, Apple’s iOS manages to lead in terms of total time spent in apps. And though Android once neared Apple’s numbers in this regard, new device launches like the 3rd generation iPad have ensured that Apple has since made gains on its mobile rival in engagement.

Apple leads Android in time spent in apps as both a total, cumulative figure on Flurry’s network, and on a per device basis, broken down by various device types. It’s a little difficult to wrap your head around; why would the mobile OS with the largest overall share not also take the win for most time spent in apps? Flurry argues that iPhone shoppers and Android buyers were considerably different, at least at the outset of the smartphone wars, with those on iOS actively seeking out a device that could operate as a pocket computer, and Android users merely being pulled in with the tide when they go to upgrade their feature phone, thanks to price discounts and a range of available models, some as cheap as the dumb phones they’re replacing.

They also suggest that Android’s fragmentation problem is causing an impediment to app development, resulting in a level of quality that isn’t up to par with software on iOS, and distribution issues, and that Apple’s larger and deeper ecosystem of quality titles starts a self-improving cycle, with devs seeing good usage on the platform, devoting more resources to encouraging growth, and receiving still higher usage as a result.

Flurry’s perspective on the mobile race, and how it might actually be multiple races with winners in different contexts, is likely a more realistic and mature view than the oppositional one that’s been popular before. Android and iOS are no doubt still vying for customer attention, but ecosystem dominance and a smaller market share overall likely fit with Apple’s overall goals as a company, and vice versa for Google. The problem for competitors is making a dent in either lead, and that’s something we haven’t seen much indication will be all that possible as of yet.

Heads up Android keyboard aficionados — if your handset runs Android 4.0 or later and you’re just not thrilled with the keyboard you already have, you can now download Google’s stock keyboard app from the Google Play store.

According to a post on the official Android Google+ page, the app has launched in certain English-speaking markets with a wider rollout to follow shortly. But that’s not to say that people in those launch markets are restricted to pecking out missives in English. The app comes with libraries for 26 languages, as well as the ability to select next word suggestions and swipe across the keyboard to form words. In the event you haven’t played around with it yet, it’s really quite good — far better than what I’ve experienced in Samsung and HTC’s custom skins, anyway.

Yeah, fine, I know — who gets hot and bothered about keyboards? Well, quite a few people if the number of replacement keyboard apps in the Google Play store is any indication. Nearly every Android OEM under the sun feels the bizarre compulsion to fiddle with the keyboard as they make their (arguably unnecessary) changes to the Android experience, and the end results aren’t always what the end-user had in mind. It’s no surprise then that some people have been clamoring for a cleaner way to type, and developers have been eager to fill that gap.

So what does this mean for the countless replacement keyboards that have already carved out their niches in the Google Play Store? Well, it depends on who you’re concerned about — prominent developers like Swype and SwiftKey already have deals in place with device OEMs like Samsung (and last year the latter started to focus on the health-care market of all things) so they’ll almost certainly continue chugging along just fine.

The picture gets hazier when you consider the smaller players in the space — at least a few developers (like this guy, or this guy, or this guy) have been selling replacement keyboard apps that aim to replicate the stock typing experience on non-Nexus devices, and Google has basically just made them all obsolete. Those guys weren’t exactly raking in the downloads to start with, and it’s obviously in Google’s best interest not to alienate developers that have pledged allegiance to their mobile platform, but I suspect some of those smaller keyboard app creators may soon feel the pinch.

As a brief aside, feel free to tweet at Darrell (@drizzled) to tell him to clean out his notifications shade (seen above). It’s just shameful.

Remember the Wikipad, the Android-powered gaming tablet/hefty controller rig combo that was supposed to launch in 2012 before suffering delay after delay? Well, the wait is just about over — the company announced earlier today that the $249 gaming tablet will be available on U.S. store shelves starting on June 11, and that a global launch is being prepped for the summer.

The road to an official release has been nothing if not eventful for the Wikipad team. The Android gaming device was originally touted as a 10-inch tablet that was shown off at CES last year and a media tour ahead of a launch slated for the end of October… a deadline that was ultimately pushed back a few times. For a while there it seemed as though the Wikipad might have met its demise, but the tablet re-emerged earlier this year with a 7-inch display running at 1,200 x 800 and the same quad-core Tegra 3 chipset under the hood.

Make no mistake: that 10-inch version is still in the works, but the company hasn’t yet said when it hopes to push the thing out the door save for a vague “Christmas 2013″ window. For better or worse, this more portable 7-inch model will be the vanguard of the Wikipad product line, and some early impressions haven’t exactly been bullish on the tablet’s prospects.

To make things worse, the Android gaming scene just isn’t what it was when Wikipad first decided to take a stab at a game-centric tablet. Sure, the quality of these games has only gotten better as time has passed, but the prospect of churning out dedicated Android gaming hardware has been embraced by some prominent hardware players. Take NVIDIA for instance: it recently joined the fray with the ambitious (if pricey) SHIELD handheld, which will feature (among other things) the ability to stream select PC games, as well as play the usual slew of Android titles. If anything, the Wikipad’s big advantage is the relatively small price tag attached to it, but we’ll soon see if it’s enough to enthrall the masses.

Troubled Taiwanese mobile maker HTC, which has seen its profits plummet as it struggles to compete in an Android mobile space dominated by its Galaxy-spewing rival Samsung, is losing (yet) another senior executive. Bloomberg reports that Chief Operating Officer Matthew Costello will step down after less than three years at the company. Costello joined HTC in December 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Bloomberg reports that Fred Liu, currently HTC’s president of engineering and operations, will “take on Costello’s responsibilities in an expanded role covering operations, quality, sales operations and services”. The details were in an email to employees obtained by the news agency, which also notes that despite stepping down as COO Costello will stay on as an executive adviser after moving to Europe. We’ve reached out to HTC for comment and will update this story with any response.

Update: HTC has now sent the following statement, made by CEO Peter Chou: “To achieve success, we’ve had to change when it was right for the business. Recently was one of those times. We took control of our business, narrowed our focus, and launched our new HTC One. Actions to streamline our business resulted in some reorganization and executive departures, but initial sales of the One have validated our approach. Response for our flagship device has been strong and demand has exceeded our expectations. We are confident that the business steps we have taken and continue to take are the right ones to lead to a strong resurgence of the HTC brand.”

Costello’s departure is the latest in a string of senior exec loses at HTC, including its Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Greg Fisher, Chief Product Office Kouji Kodera, Global Communications VP Jason Gordon, Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland, digital marketing chief John Starkweather and Eric Lin, manager of product strategy — all within the past three months. Last November the company also announced the appointment of a new Chief Marketing Officer, Benjamin Ho, to replace John Wang from January, with the aim of turning the marketing noise up on HTC’s innovations.

The company’s prior ‘quietly brilliant’ marketing messaging has fizzled against the onslaught of Samsung’s well-oiled and funded marketing machinery — which is pretty much the opposite of quiet. So it barely seemed to matter that HTC made a cracking Android flagship in the HTC One, arguably the best Android flagship on the market, because selling smartphones has become a game of who can shout the loudest for the longest. A game of brash tones, if you will.

But there’s one bright spot amid all this gloom for HTC. The company has just posted monthly revenues for May showing a 48.03% surge in sales — its best uplift all year (it has, however, been a terrible year for HTC). It’s still 3.35% down year-on-year but considering April’s revenues were down 36.87% that’s a substantial improvement. May’s revenues were NT$29 billion ($970 million).

Whether HTC can claw back from the brink with one star phone in its portfolio is, however, debatable. Its Facebook Home gamble, with the HTC First, looks to have backfired, as that device has been withdrawn pre-sale in Europe and its position in the U.S. looks perilous. Meanwhile Samsung keeps on firing forth iterations of its Galaxy flagships aimed at saturating the market with differed sized and priced versions of its hardware, leaving even less wiggle room for HTC.

Still, another quietly positive note for HTC is that Google looks to be stepping in to try to help out a little, by offering a Google Edition of the HTC One for sale on its Play Store. After all, an Android ecosystem dominated by Samsung is not without problems for Mountain View — for Android ecosystem health/biodiversity reasons — but also because of the risk that Samsung starts to hold too many of its cards. Whatever Google’s motives, HTC could certainly do with a few friends in high places right now.

Generally we seem content to be rudely shocked out of sleep, with alarms that blare at us and beep violently, rendering continued sleep impossible. New Android app Warmly, from the Seattle-based Chaos Collective, thinks it might be better if an app wakes you up with gradually mounting sounds that not only aren’t alien and frightening, but are actually comforting and familiar.

It’s a project that’s characteristic of what The Chaos Collective hopes to achieve, according to co-founder Adam Kumpf, who I spoke to about the new project. We’ve previously covered another project of the Seattle-based group, the depth-of-field camera hack that mimics the effects of the Lytro using any camera with manually adjustable focus. Kumpf says that both Warmly and that camera hack fit a loose product strategy that The Chaos Collective takes as its guiding light.

“The Chaos Collective is about working on projects that excite us and sharing that excitement with the world,” he said. “Admittedly, it’s a pretty unconventional business plan, but we believe that working on things we love is the best way to create things that aren’t just clutter. The world is a huge place, but the Internet bring us all together; we hope that the passion we have for each project, hack and experiment translates into others loving them, too.”

Warmly is something that has come from experimenting with concepts and technical elements that the team was interested in. And in many ways, it’s about giving them something to help them kickstart their own creative efforts, in a way that’s generative of more interesting results, since a good start is as important as anything to a good finish.

“Warmly is a product that has grown out of much experimentation,” Kumpf explains. “We’ve worked on a lot of collaborative, real-time systems, but have come to realize that getting started can be as much of a barrier to productivity as the tools you use. So we started looking into alarm clocks and had many of the same criticisms.”

The concept behind Warmly is that pleasing sounds are just as effective at waking you up as unpleasant ones, and the Collective played around with a few different sound combinations before coming up with the ones that are built into the app, including things like the sounds of breakfast being cooked. The app went from experiment to shipping product based on its success with beta testers and Collective members, Kumpf says, which is how all products make their way through the company’s pipeline.

The Warmly app costs $1.99, which Kumpf says they believe is justified, since “if it’s not worth the price of a cup of coffee, [they] aren’t doing their jobs.” He says that while the Collective’s general preference is to embrace open source as much as possible, at some point, projects must become products in order to generate revenue and fuel further efforts. While Warmly is debuting on Android, owing to its generally more positive attitude toward experimentation, an iOS version is definitely in the queue if reaction is positive enough.

Google today announced the launch of its Mobile Backend Starter that allows Android developers to deploy a basic cloud infrastructure for their apps that runs on Google’s App Engine. Mobile Backend Starter provides developers with a one-click deployable mobile backend and a client-side framework for Android that provides them with storage services, access to Google Cloud Messaging, continuous queries and Google’s authentication and authorization features.

Google argues that most successful mobile apps now use some kind of server infrastructure to power their services, but for most mobile developers, that’s a distraction and often not something they are comfortable with. This new tool essentially provides developers with most of the infrastructure services they need for their apps without the need to write any backend code themselves. Because it runs on top of App Engine, the backend should also easily scale to handle virtually any load a mobile app can throw at it.

To get started, developers simply have to select the Mobile Backend sample app when they start a new App Engine project and follow the instructions here. While Google describes the process as “one-click,” it’s worth noting that while that’s true for deploying the backend, it does take a little bit more effort than that to get everything up and running.

Google first announced this tool at its I/O developer conference last month, but it looks like it only released it today. The project’s source code is available on GitHub, and you can watch the full I/O session about it below:

Among mobile browsers, Safari continues to lead the pack by a wide margin, according to this month’s data from NetMarketShare. But the real movement is happening within the Android segment, with Chrome growing fast as the stock Android browser lags behind. Android overall dipped slightly in May in terms of mobile OS share, hitting an eight-month low, according to NetMarketShare’s tracking.

Android’s stock browser lost over 2 percentage points of share between April and May, and Chrome mobile gained just under a full percentage point. Google has been pushing the mobile version of Chrome, shipping it on devices with Android pre-installed since last fall. That has resulted in a steady upwards movement of share, growing from 0.34 percent last July to 3.22 percent this past May. Stock Android browser share is actually flat over that 11-month period, however, indicating that Chrome’s share is all coming in new device sales, and not as a result of people switching from one to the other on their own devices.

According to OS share, Android is down slightly from last month, and in fact hits a low point compared to many previous measuring periods. Apple’s iOS is up slightly from last month, but mostly flat, and Symbian, Java ME and BlackBerry actually all experienced small bumps, meaning Android’s nearly 2 percentage point fall didn’t result in a big win for pretty much any platform. Still, it’s interesting to see those numbers dip during a month when Android saw the launch of two big new flagship phones in the Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

Overall, though, the most interesting story here is Chrome’s mobile growth. Google is making a big push for cross-platform compatibility and portability, and a lot of what it’s showing off on the Chrome side of things is designed to bring mobile and desktop together. To achieve that goal, it becomes instrumental that mobile Chrome achieve greater uptake, which is an uphill battle considering that it only arrived last year. Still, it seems to be gaining momentum, which is good for Google’s long-term goals.

Twitter has released Vine for Android, bringing the 6-second video sharing service to Google’s mobile OS for the first time. The Vine app is available for Android smartphones right now, and is a free download for anyone running Android 4.0 or higher.

The Vine app for Android arrives just about five months after it arrived on iPhone, when Twitter launched the app back in late January after acquiring the startup behind Vine. In that time, it has managed to amass an impressive 13 million users on iOS alone.

The version that arrives today for Android isn’t necessarily feature complete; the official Vine site says that it will be delivering a host of new features in future updates, including access to the front-facing camera, push notifications, the introduction of hashtag and mention features, and searching for both people and tags. These will arrive in “frequent” updates according to the company. Already, the Vine app for Android has a unique Android feature, as it supports zooming on both the Galaxy S4 and the HTC One.

Vine previously updated the iPhone app to add some of these features, including use of the front-facing camera, people mentions in posts and comments and improved people search in a big update that arrived at the end of April. Twitter’s Vine team appears to have taken the approach of launching a basic product and refining it on iOS, and now looks primed to do the same on Android.

The tech world will be watching the next few weeks closely to see what effect Vine’s arrival on Android has on its user base, and there’s a pretty obvious opportunity for comparison ready at hand: Instagram. Instagram launched on Android back in April of 2012, after managing to build a user base 30 million strong on iOS. The photo-sharing app then added a million new users in just 12 hours thanks to Android users flooding the service.

Twitter had said that Vine would be coming to Android “soon” back at the end of April, though they didn’t offer a more specific date when it confirmed that impending release. Its launch today should certainly prompt a spike in new users, though just how many remains to be seen.