This week on the podcast we're talking about mapping out your neighborhood with a Google weather balloon, saying goodbye to software we love, and learning about Google's new Knowledge Graph. Also, we're answering questions about batch audio conversions, making tablets productive, having a say in what search engines say about you. More »

There have been shady ways in the past to unlock your iPhone or Android smartphone and use a SIM card from a prepaid service, but in the wake of AT&T's recent decision to unlock phones for customers who leave their service or travel overseas you can officially switch your phone to prepaid and potentially save a lot of money without being a technological genius or deal with shady services. More »

Craig Palli is vice president of Client Services & Business Development at Fiksu (@fiksu), which helps brands boost iOS and Android mobile app ranking and secure large volumes of loyal users. You can find him on Twitter @cpalli.

Thriving with Google Play
Apple’s planned phase-out of the UDID has introduced considerable angst in the app marketing community. The UDID provides a standard, widely supported method for attributing performance of advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, there’s no single solution to replace the UDID and it appears the iOS market is fragmenting, with multiple technologies vying for developer attention. This is making it difficult for app developers to allocate their resources.

With all this uncertainty, some marketers are looking more closely at Google Play to fuel their continued growth in mobile. Unfortunately, many marketers are sidestepping Android development based on several published reports indicating that Apple’s iOS monetizes significantly better. Savvy marketers know that high-level statistics often mask a much more complex reality. While we’d never suggest that the iOS market be ignored, once you do the math you may find that Android represents a much more compelling (and profitable) opportunity than you thought.

Here’s why and how you can thrive with Google Play.

Bigger yet cheaper…
For sheer size, the Android platform has no equal. According to Nielsen, Android has more than 48 percent of the smartphone market, versus 32 percent for iOS. Google indicates there are 850,000 Android device activations per day and total Google Play app downloads have reached more than 15 billion. App search firm Xyologic reports that in March 2012 there were 617 million app downloads on Android versus 393 million app downloads on iPhone in the U.S.

Android also provides more advertising inventory, and at a lower cost. A recent analysis Fiksu did of available impressions concluded Android is able to deliver 12 percent more ad inventory than iOS. Further, the estimated cost of those impressions was 40 percent lower.

Android Advantages
Android also has a number of practical advantages over iOS that make it a great environment for market testing and quick rollout. Since there is no app approval process, you can quickly iterate your design and determine what features or offers work best. Updating an app can take weeks with iOS due to Apple’s submission and approval process.

In some ways, Google Play is also a more accessible market. Competition in the iOS sphere is extremely intense. Marketing any app is challenging, but the explosion of new apps and changes in Apple policy have made breaking a new app into the iOS market a much tougher hill to climb. Xyologic reports they “have seen the momentum of iOS for app publishers slow down considerably in the last 5 months. Several key performance indicators we track are down, especially the amount of new apps which make it to the Top 100. We view this as evidence of the new challenges the Apple environment puts on app marketers.”

Unlike iOS, where rank is critical and often expensive to attain, Google Play has a strong search engine that makes it easier for interested users to find your app. Our experience is that 80% of the organic users in Google Play come from searches.

Finally, Android also solves the problem of marketing attribution, since it provides referrer information that anonymously identifies the source of a download. This is a single industry-wide solution that provides reliable data, yet balances the need for user privacy.  You know exactly where your ad dollars go. You know exactly what is and isn’t working. And there’s none of the data ambiguity or user experience issues seen with some iOS tracking solutions.

What About Monetization?
Of course, the big concern about Android is monetization. There’s clearly a gap: an oft-quoted post last December by Peter Farago of Flurry indicates Google Play monetization is roughly 24 percent of that of iOS.  It’s important to note that the gap is closing. Flurry notes that the biggest factor behind the gap is payment mechanisms, and expects this situation to improve with the integration of Google Wallet and Google Checkout. Evidence of improvement has already surfaced: app research firm Distimo indicates it saw an 80 percent improvement in average daily revenues for the top 200 US apps between December 2011 and March 2012. Furthermore, in a post titled Treat Android as a first-class citizen… it’ll pay off!  TinyCo noted that Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU) for Google Play and iTunes is about the same as iOS, and found that Amazon performance surpassed that of iOS by a significant margin.

Beating the Averages
One problem with the monetization statistics on Google Play is that they cover the “average” experience. We’ve seen that if you target users effectively and you employ the right development strategy, Android apps convert and generate loyal users at roughly the same rate as iOS apps. More significantly, they do so at a lower acquisition cost.

In Q1, Fiksu conducted a study of six clients running the same apps on both iOS and Android to determine differences in acquisition cost and loyal usage conversion rates. (Loyal users are those who return repeatedly to an app and are most likely to monetize.) The cost of acquiring an install was 24 percent lower for Android than iOS. Given the monetization issues noted above we expected a higher conversion from installs to loyal users for iOS. Instead, what we saw was that once a user was acquired, the loyalty rate was exactly the same for both platforms. The only difference was that the cost of acquiring those users on Android was 24 percent lower.

There are, however some exceptions where iOS does beat out Android. For example tablet based shopping apps are an area where iOS excels. Other than the Kindle Fire, there is no Android-based tablet that can challenge the iPad. Further, payment processing is stronger on iOS. Fiksu data shows that for such apps loyalty is far stronger on iOS. However, these issues are being addressed in the market and those shopping apps that move to Android now will have a significant early mover advantage since Play’s algorithm rewards total downloads and usage.

How to Thrive with Google Play
It’s clear that there are many apps that are struggling in the Google Play environment, yet some are doing extremely well. Here are factors that we’ve found have made for a successful Android implementation:

Good design has its rewards: A key to rising above the averages is simply to design for Android. Many developers port iOS apps to Android as an afterthought, resulting in a sub-optimal or even buggy user experience. ESPN for example, shared during a recent webinar that their ported apps originally did not perform to expectations. When they took the approach of developing specifically for each environment, they found that performance was on par with iOS.  Another example is game developer TinyCo. who specifically ascribes its aforementioned success with Android to taking “the Android pledge” to treat Android as a first class citizen. The result was that TinyCo doubled its market opportunity.

Prioritize device and OS support: With the large number of form factors in Android, developers can find themselves stretched trying to determine what devices to support. Fortunately, a subset of roughly 20 devices makes up about 80 percent of the volume for Android, so the problem is more manageable than one might suspect. Similarly, more than 90 percent of Android devices are addressed by supporting OS version 2.2 and later.

Look forward: In hockey, there’s a saying “skate where the puck is going” (not where it is now.) The monetization issue that has received so much press is being addressed as more consumers adopt Google payment mechanisms. As noted above, there are already indications that this situation is improving rapidly. In addition, Google’s rank algorithm benefits longevity yielding an early mover advantage for apps debuting on Play sooner.

Leverage lower customer acquisition costs: The enormous scrum of developers scrapping over the iOS marketplace has resulted in higher acquisition costs.  Android presents an opportunity to develop market share and test new strategies at a lower cost.

Best Practices
The following best practices will maximize the return on an Android implementation. Here are some practical tips for success:

• Maximize search potential in your app title: identify your most successful keywords and make sure to include them in your app title.  In fact, this is so critical to success (potentially 80 to 100 places in your search ranking), that you should seriously consider removing your app name from your title and focus your description on the best keywords. Include the app name in the body of the app description – users will still be able to find it by name. Unlike iOS, the body description is searched under Google Play.
• Use, but don’t overuse, keywords: try to use the best keywords at five times the body of your app description. This can affect search ranking from 10 to 20 places.  Anything over five times has no additional benefit, so don’t overdo it.
• Test your search parameters: the above recommendations are guidelines based on accumulated experience, but search results can vary based on many factors.
• Steady efforts work best: Google Play’s ranking algorithm is tilted towards long term user acquisition – apps that acquire and retain satisfied users are rewarded with higher ranks.  Advertising campaigns should be run over a longer term and sustained over two to three months, as opposed to the short bursts of activity often seen in the iOS market.
• Use closed loop attribution and target long term users:  since retained users have an important impact in ranking, use closed loop marketing to ensure you are identifying and utilizing ad sources that bring loyal users.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment and test market your strategy with Android. You can apply these learnings to your iOS versions and reduce your costs and risks.

Conclusion
The ecosystem continues to provide an unprecedented growth opportunity for mobile app brands. While there are several options that iOS-centric developers may explore to maintain their growth in the wake of UDID deprecation, perhaps the biggest opportunity has nothing to do with iOS at all. Android offers a bigger overall market, increased amounts of marketing insight, lower user acquisition costs and, in many cases, users who are at least as engaged as their iOS counterparts. Perhaps it’s time that we all thrived with Google Play.

Ever been told that you should fully discharge your battery to prolong its life? Or that jailbreaking your phone is illegal? Or that you should wait for the newest Intel processor because it's going to be "so much faster"? These are tech myths we hear all the time, and likely spread to our friends—but most are just a waste of your time (and in some cases, they can actually harm your gadgets). Here are some of the worst offenders. More »

Everyone loves the iPhone's headset with volume and music controls on the inline remote, but if you have an Android phone, you can actually get iPhone-designed buds working with your device. All it takes is a little DIY magic. More »

There are a few players in the business collaboration space, but up-and-comer Convo continues to broaden its offerings, making it a service worth looking at before making a big decision of what your team is going to select.

We’re big fans of the service previously known as Convofy, and it’s something we use every day here. Today, Convo announced an Android app to go along with its previously release iOS version and it’s pretty sweet, along with an upcoming Group Chat feature that looks fantastic.

Android and Group Chat

Being able to connect with your team from wherever you are is dependent upon how accessible a service is. By adding an Android version to sit alongside its previous desktop and iOS offerings, Convo is now becoming a complete service.

By being able to share files, status updates, as well as participate in chats with members of your team from all over the world, Convo is the “headquarters” that every company needs. Its features surely beat using GChat or IM alone, and can serve as the hub for an entire business, no matter how large or small it is.

Convo is also releasing group chat functionality, saying its the first in the private social networking space to offer it. Up until now, you could only start a direct chat with one person at a time, causing you to pile up on tabs within the app.

Now, you’ll be able to invite as many people as you like into a chat, which I can already tell will be a huge plus.

In a space that has players like Yammer and Chatter, a company like Convo is going to have to iterate often and add features that its customers are asking for. It appears as if those two things are happening and it has been fun to watch. The service costs $5 per person within an organization and is well worth a try.

➤ Convo

Android: Evernote has given its Android app a complete makeover, and the updates are not only visually appealing but also make using the note-taking app on tiny devices much easier. More »

We've discussed how to speed up and refresh your Android phone before, but at the end of the day there's only so much you can do at one time to give your device a boost. Cosmos, a new app from the team at Support.com, aims to change that. Cosmos rolls privacy protection, battery management, and junk file removal all into one easy to use tool that promises to keep your phone safe, snappy, and responsive. More »

Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers.

For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse-over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell.

It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against OpenSignalMaps — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user.

That there are gobs of Android devices floating around out there isn’t exactly a shocker, but data like this really drives home the issue. With so many devices running so many versions of Android with who knows many carrier- and manufacturer-mandated tweaks onboard, how is a developer supposed to make sure that all of their users gets a consistent experience? They can’t, unless they’re willing to test like crazy.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt famously downplayed the term “fragmentation” at this year’s CES, suggesting instead that people call it “differentiation.” It’s hard not to agree with sentiment on some level — after all, one of Android’s key strengths is how easily it fits into different niches and price points. But according to him, as long as every Android user is able to use the same apps, there’s no problem here.

That strikes me as a rather shortsighted way of looking at it. Downloading and installing apps is one thing, but what I think really counts — the user experience — can still vary from hardware configuration to hardware configuration. Not a day goes by without new Android hardware (or rumors of new Android hardware) making the rounds — hell, just an hour or so ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google will soon be filling out the new Devices section in the Google Play Store with new, unlocked “Nexus” hardware thanks to cooperation from up to five hardware manufacturers.

That’s why developers like Animoca have invested what I can only imagine is a sizable amount of money and effort testing their apps with something like 400 Android devices before pushing them out into the world. And of course, fragmentation isn’t just a hardware issue — the OSM post points out that the two most used versions of Android now only account for 75% of the devices they surveyed, down from 90% last year, yet another issue for developers to grapple with.

Does every developer need to go through a process that outlandish? Certainly not — OpenSignalMaps seems to test on a tiny fraction of that, and smaller developers can cover most of their bases with a handful of carefully chosen devices. At the end of the day though, despite the sheer amount of choice and flexibility that Android has provided users, those developers still have a choice to make — do they want to strive for perfection, or do they want to keep their sanity?

Android: Firefox has been available on Android for awhile, but apart from Firefox-specific features like Firefox Sync, it was never a phenomenal browser, mostly because it was slower than molasses. The newest beta, however, brings a completely new interface, much better performance, and more to Android users everywhere. More »