If it feels like you not only have more apps on your iPhone, but that you’re spending more time in those apps, then you should congratulate yourself on being as savvy as pollster Nielsen. According to a report from the organization, the number of apps on the average smartphone increased from 32 to 41 — a jump of 28 percent — over the past year.

As you can see from the Nielsen infographic at the top of this post, the percentage of time spent by smartphone owners in apps rather than on the web has also climbed. The average smartphone user spends only about 19 percent of his or her time on the web; the rest of the time, native apps are being used.

The one other fascinating tidbit on the chart shows that the number of smartphone owners in the US has climbed from 38 million in 2011 to 84 million in 2012 — that’s a jump of 121 percent in just one calendar year.

[via Engadget]

Report: Americans have 28 percent more mobile apps in 2012 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By now, we’re pretty familiar with the term 4G LTE. But that in and of itself is somewhat surprising. It took 12 years for GSM wireless technology to reach one billion connections, and WCDMA took 11 years. But LTE will hit the same mark in just seven years of existence, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a brief explanation would be that LTE (or Long Term Evolution) is a fourth-generation wireless standard that provides users with faster data speeds, all the while making more efficient use of a carrier’s wireless spectrum.

We’ve already seen a plethora of LTE devices hit the U.S. market, and now that the technology is established in major markets like Korea, Japan, and the U.S., the growth trajectory for LTE will only continue to rise. Strategy Analytics expects over 90 million LTE connections to be activated before the end of 2012, and that figure should reach the 1 billion mark by 2017. This is far and away the fastest implementation of new wireless technology to date.

At the same time, however, previous technologies were born into a world with far fewer overall connections. LTE launched with over 6 billion connections in existence in the world, whereas CDMA was first revealed at a time when less than 1 billion connections had been activated.

“The race is on for mobile operators to reduce cost per GB to match the rate at which revenue per GB is falling,” said director of service provider analysis Sue Rudd, in a prepared statement. “LTE is one of the key tools to deliver this improvement, with the early volume in LTE devices an encouraging sign for operators looking to maximize return on their LTE investments.”

To her point, we certainly wouldn’t mind a reduction in data costs, considering that we’re more data hungry than ever and unlimited data has basically been nixed across the boards.

It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2,280 downloads for paid apps.

For free apps, other competitive categories include ‘entertainment’ (6,700 daily downloads), ‘social networking’ (5,800), ‘lifestyle’ (3,900) and ‘music’ (3,900). Interestingly, in the paid app charts photography apps rank just behind games and entertainment apps. Still, it currently only takes about 270 daily downloads to rank in the photography top 25 for paid apps.

These numbers, of course, are always changing and this just represent a snapshot of what Distimo found when it compiled this data last month.

Update: We just talked to one source with a lot of experience in building mobile apps and who also currently runs a top App Store app. According to this source, Distimo’s numbers are too low and may just represent data from a relatively small number of apps. Keep that in mind as you read Distimo’s data.

Given the popularity of games on iOS, Distimo also took a closer look at the various gaming subcategories. Here, arcade and action games lead the pack:

This is the first time Distimo is releasing a detailed set of these numbers. It’s worth noting, though, that at the end of 2011, the company reported that it still took about 45,000 daily downloads to rank in the top 25 of most popular free apps. Since then, though, Apple has been working hard to shut down various scams and bots that automatically downloaded apps and allowed developers to rank in Apple’s charts without having a real user base (then, once you are in the top 25, of course, real users will automatically find you, of course). Judging from Distimo’s latest data, these efforts are starting to pay off and will hopefully make life a little bit easier for legit developers.

A map of all the thousands of separate device models that downloaded OpenSignalMaps in a six month period.

OpenSignalMaps

One developer can do business with nearly 4,000 distinct Android ROMs, according to data posted by the creators of OpenSignalMaps on Tuesday. While the Android platform provides a lot of flexibility to consumers, OpenSignalMaps’ data drives home the point that the small army of device variations can be staggering. Market developers can miss out on a lot by not supporting less popular or older devices.

It’s no secret that the Android umbrella covers many makes and models of devices, and that fragmentation is an occasionally daunting problem for developers. To see how wide a net they cast, OpenSignalMaps logged the specs of devices that downloaded the app over the course of six months. This collected info on over 680,000 devices—a significant sample, even if small compared to the many millions of Android users and devices in the world.

The Hungarian Concorde Tab

The developers logged 3,997 distinct devices, the most popular of which was the Samsung Galaxy S II. This figure was inflated quite a bit by custom ROMs, which overwrite the android.build.MODEL variable and cause those phones to be logged as separate devices. 1,363 types were logged only once, and while some were custom ROMs bucking the numbers, a good few were just massively unpopular devices—for example, the Hungarian 10.1-inch Concorde Tab.

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Picture this: The board members of Etsy, the hot Brooklyn-based startup that’s reinventing handcrafted e-commerce, are meeting by video conference.

The connection breaks up.

At most companies, the obvious next question is: Who’s the CEO going to fire?

Not at Etsy, though. And that’s not just because Chad Dickerson is a nice guy with what seems like a permanent smile on his face.

It’s because Dickerson instituted a culture of blamelessness across the company since he got promoted from CTO to CEO last July—a culture that's allowed Etsy employees to take more risks and move faster.

As a result, Etsy has delivered results that wowed its investors, including new mobile products and accelerating sales growth last December, during the critical holiday-shopping season. They rewarded Etsy with a new $40 million investment round and a $688 million valuation.

Clearly, no hard feelings over the video-conference snafu.

So how did Dickerson and his team do it?

Mistakes happen. When they happen at Etsy, they’re reviewed in what’s called a “blameless post-mortem.”

Dickerson started the practice in the technology department as CTO, then took it companywide.

This is not some wacky-DUMBO-hipster management idea. It’s a management principle known as “just culture” adapted from fields like healthcare and manufacturing, where blameless reporting of medical mistakes has led to better patient care and fewer accidents.

“One of the things I allowed people to do is make mistakes more freely,” said Dickerson. “The best way to learn to ride a bike is to ride the bike and fall down.”

Holding a blameless post-mortem is pretty simple—once you get people past the natural human instincts of pointing fingers and hiding mistakes: ”We have a ground rule that the purpose of a post-mortem is to find out what happened and how to make it better, not to find a person to blame.”

 As a result, said Dickerson, “what we’ve seen is a company that’s learning and moving faster.”

John Allspaw, senior vice president of technical operations, is in charge of Etsy's post-mortems—even the nontechnical ones, like the one where he helped Etsy's information-technology department get to the bottom of the video-conferencing system's failure.

In another example, a developer broke the system which let users favorite, or bookmark, items they were thinking about buying.

“Less-skilled companies name, blame, and shame,” said Allspaw.

It’s not about avoiding accountability. In a blameless culture, it’s easier for people to take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them.

“Developers already feel quite guilty when they break the site,” said Allspaw.

Allspaw and Dickerson contrasted Etsy’s culture to others they’d experienced, where blame was a big factor. (Neither named names, but Dickerson and Allspaw both joined Etsy from Yahoo.)

Etsy even had a post-mortem about seating arrangements during a recent office expansion. Seems small, but think about the fingerpointing and grumbling that goes on behind the scenes about such moves. Isn't it better to be open about it—and figure out how to improve

3 TIPS FROM ETSY ON ADOPTING A BLAMELESS CULTURE:

Assume good will.  ”Employees are making decisions based on what they think is right for the company,” said Allspaw.

Identify causes, not culprits. Accountability happens naturally as people learn the facts. Focus on exploring what happened—and recognize that in complex systems, there's rarely one root cause.

Take your time. People used to blaming cultures may take time to come out of their shell and share mistakes and learnings freely.

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To capture the attention of prospective clients, French creative agency Murmure designed these very clever concrete business cards.

via Freshome