What Is A Good Mobile Strategy For India?
As the previous post focused on an overview of the scenario for banking applications for Indian banks on Android, I thought it would be a good idea to have a follow-up post on what is a good mobile strategy for your products. Products built also for Mobile Internet in India goes back a very long way. Rediff had a mobile website in 2000 which was marked up in WML. Those days, more than a mobile phone it was a PDA that was the target device and it was a requirement from a product hygiene that led the well-funded companies down that path.
By 2005 the focus had changed drastically from building WAP-enabled websites to leveraging the SMS-based revenue streams. A lot of money and effort was spent on getting ‘on-deck’ with the operators, which was followed by the era of the short-code. Then came the age of the backend service providers such as July Systems who would transform your data into a mobile-friendly format and handle the presentation of it as a managed service. And now we find ourselves in the app era where content and service apps targetting iOS and Android (Blackberry, Symbian and WP being after thoughts) are being released by companies on a regular basis.
For decision makers in the industry this is a very confusing time since there are multiple strategies that could be deployed:
- Only web: Ignore mobile and all facets of it due to cost and operational complexities. There are zero cost workarounds possible if you are on WordPress by using plugins that will accomplish this for you. On custom platforms you can use a mobile-friendly template and hope that it renders decently across most devices, or at least devices that are less than 4-5 years old.
- Web + SMS: Considering the mess created by TRAI regarding bulk messaging, this is still an evolving scenario, but it is feasible to have an SMS-based operation with a managed service longer short code for a reasonable amount of money.
- Web + SMS + Mobile web: This is (2) augmented with a dedicated mobile website, or a main website that detects a mobile device and serves the right format for pages.
- Web + SMS + Mobile Web + app: This is (3) augmented with apps that are built for various mobile platforms.
- Web + Mobile Web + app: This is a strategy that seems to be picking up a lot these days, with a variant of Web + app.
There is no hard and fast rule that will help you decide which is the best route to pick. There are significant cost and operational complexities that are involved in adding a new target platform. Even with a managed, outsourced service the support needs to be provided to supply the right data, which is just one part of the entire integration puzzle.
Key Metrics:
- Cost: Of deployment, maintenance and growth.
- Audience: Size, geography, demographic.
- Platform: Size, geography, demographic.
- Monetization: Ads, subscriptions (current and projected)
Most operations don’t have a good handle on the four key metrics before they jump into the mobile rabbit hole. Of the available strategies (4) is the most expensive and worst in terms of integration issues. Even though apps are the in-thing to do, the costs for development of an application is quite high and in India you have to support the application on at least three platforms to reach out to a demographic who can be monetized a bit better. The NDTV application in Android Market has about half a million as an install base, but most of that came as a result of the app being featured in the marketplace and installs have fallen off a cliff ever since.
A good rule of thumb to use is to not go with apps for content-only websites, unless you can either support a significantly different/superior user experience or if you have content that is accessible only under a subscription. Non-aggregated content apps always stand the risk of being crowded on in the app screens and eventually decay without repeat usage. It is better to stick to having a mobile-friendly website in this case and only switch to an app if you see the demand for it or you have services that work well with an application. You also have to take into consideration that bandwidth is an issue here, even when it is available over 3G.
Service-oriented businesses are better off with a focus on applications primarily because monetization is already built into most online services. For instance, should a Flipkart decide to eventually support e-books, a fully functional (better than the wrapper around the mobile website approach they currently have) application will allow them to ease into that segment. Same is the case with ticketing services. These businesses also have a greater opportunity in providing unique user experiences around their services compared to content-only players.
For smaller shops, mobile applications are best left alone at the moment. There is simply not enough size/support in the market to justify the cost and effort. It is much easier to clean up the mark-up and have a website that presents a reasonably degraded and functional website to mobile browsers.
Read MoreIce Cream Sandwich On Samsung Galaxy S
The phone is now well over a year old and has been good to me. Sometime earlier this year I managed to dead boot it (a condition where you wind up corrupting the bootloader itself) and it had to be revived with a JTAG pinout. I was running a rooted and lag-fixed stock Gingerbread ROM on it for a long time and was quite satisfied with it. The primary reason why I love this phone has been how abuse-friendly it has been so far. I tend to drop my phones and carry them around without any screen guards or cases. This one has been dipped in water once, keeps falling on the ground at regular intervals and is not treated with a great deal of gentleness. To survive all that and to still keep going gets my loyalty any given day.
By 2.3.4 itself I had decided to hold off until Samsung releases (or leaks) a build of Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) for the phone before I do any more experiments with the new ROMs. Over time, I have come to dislike most of the heavily modified ROMs and it also tends to be a bottomless pit, you keep trying one after the other and waste a lot of time on it. When Google announced the release of ICS to the developer community, I was expecting a wait of a few months before a stable enough build was out for the SGS. But, things have changed a lot on Samsung’s end since I bought the phone over a year ago, when it was on Froyo and took forever to get a stable, non-leaked official Gingerbread build out.
Early in November Onecosmic on XDA Forums had released a build from AOSP codebase. I tried the beta2 release and found it to be quite stable, but the battery life was the worst I have ever had on a mobile device. It would not last more than 10-hours if I was lucky and it meant that I had to carry around my old Nokia E71 as a backup phone. But things changed dramatically when Teamhacksung released an AOSP build of their own late November. The first build I tried was build5, which was a vast improvement in battery life over the Onecosmic build. Build6 was the best I have ever had on their releases with the phone being at its fastest best. I am running build7 at the moment, but it has not been as snappy as build6. There are a few things that don’t work well (video recording, front-facing camera), but it is very stable and “force close” is not that rampant and I can now easily go a full 24-hour day of normal usage with 12% battery left on the device.
I have tweaked a few things to get that kind of life.
- Force GPU rendering: Off
- Window animation scale: Off
- Transition animation scale: Off
- Email service: Disabled
- Exchange services: Disabled
- Google Plus: Disabled
- 2G networks only
- Turned back on Window animation and Transition animation.
- Email and Exchange services are still disabled.
- First run after new update was awful, got barely 10-hours of battery life.
- Changed modem to JP5 and battery life is back to normal. 11-hours on 55% battery, Wifi on all the time, more than 2-hours already on phone calls.
- Trying out the Thunderbolt scripts, even though the jury is divided whether they work or not. It seems a lot smoother for me.
Gingerbread On The Samsung Galaxy GTi9000
I have been running the leaked early beta release of Gingerbread (Android 2.3.2, I9000XXJVE) on the Samsung Galaxy S for about a month now and I can tell you that it looks really really good. The build is very buggy, so I would advise anyone who is tempted to do the same to hold on till Samsung puts out an official stable release (it will also not play nice with your warranty should you chose to run it on your phone).
There is little by means of cosmetic changes that is noticeable to those who are not detail-oriented and it is largely consistent from the 2.2.1 days. The notifications pane gets a new coat of paint and new icons. The apps stack is a straight carryover from 2.2.x, though I guess they may change it by the time a stable release is out. Almost everything worked out of the box for me and installation was done using Odin, which is never a comfortable thing.
Before I flashed to this build, I was upgrading to the CM7 beta release for the SGS, but after I set up the phone it figured that it just would not get on the mobile network. CM7 was looking really good till that point. I will probably move to that once they put out a stable release.
The Gingerbread release by Samsung, though, fixes most of the bad issues of previous releases of Android on the Galaxy S. The boot process is really really fast, unlike previous releases where you had to wait forever to get the phone booted into an usable state. The fact that I have not rooted it or applied any lag-fixes on it should tell you how good it is. Neither Eclair or Froyo have run unrooted/non-lag fixed on my phone for long since the experience used to be that bad. If they can close out the nasty bugs, Samsung may have a winner on their hands with this.
Since it is a beta, as mentioned earlier, the OS is still buggy in places. It can freeze up and a few reboots are the norm in a day. For me, that is worth living with since none of the cooked ROMs have given the kind of battery life this buggy release has given me. I have tried it in various combinations with wifi, GPS, data and it has consistently outperformed anything else I have run on this phone.
It will be really interesting if the guys at Cyanogen can fix up CM7 for the Galaxy S in time for Samsung's official release of Gingerbread. In either case, it is going to be finally happy times for SGS owners – another couple of months and the phone, which is an excellent hardware package, should get the kind of software it truly deserves, making it a really good iPhone competitor at a significantly cheaper price point.
Read MoreSamsung Galaxy S Three Month Review
I have now spent a good three months with the Samsung Galaxy S and it has been an interesting time. The phone is good enough for me to persist with it. It is no perfect and Samsung has botched what could have been a perfect non-iPhone iPhone with a bad choice of filesystem and issues with lag.
In its current shape it is rooted (SuperOneClick), lag fixed (OCLF) and running a Samsung beta release of Froyo (2.2, I9000XXJPH, 2.6.32.9). It has a pretty high Quadrant score (1852), but I really don't think much of that. Overall, I am quite happy with the phone. In a lot of ways, it is like Windows XP once you get used to it. It can really annoy you at times, but over time you get used to extracting the best out of it.
My current workflow on it involves the usage of it more as a communications device (calls, email and light browsing), followed by a bit of gaming and very little in terms of music or videos. I do read a lot on it, using both the e-book reader and the browser, but 90% of the heavy lifting on the phone for me is still voice. Mail is handled by the native Gmail application and a lot of work-related data is handled through Dropbox.
So, what do I still like about the phone after 3-months:
1. The screen. It is gorgeous and even in my horribly clumsy, grimy hands it still does not have a single scratch on it.
2. Application stability. I have not yet come across a single application that does not install or run properly on it.
3. The Mobile Access Point feature. Saves me a lot of the usual tethering (cable or bluetooth) nightmares.
4. The camera: both the videos and photos are awesome IF you have decent lighting.
5. Decoupled core applications (you can't get this unless you are on 2.2).
6. App quality is steadily getting better.
What I don't like:
1. They are destroying an awesome phone with a lousy OS implementation. Official Froyo is miles ahead of the 2.1-update 1 release, but it still gets it wrong so many ways.
2. Market still remains the weakest link in the chain. Pick any part of it and it will be lousy.
3. It requires tinkering to make it run both fast and reliably.
4. There is no single, easy-to-understand interface to manage app access permissions. (More of an Android problem).
5. Samsung Kies.
Apps I can't do without:
1. Email – The Official Gmail App.
2. Browsing – Opera Mini (I have Fennec, Android's native browser, Opera Mobile and Skyfire installed, but on EDGE it is Opera Mini all the way).
3. E-books – Aldiko.
4. Twitter – Tweetcaster.
5. Maps & Location – Google Maps.
6. File Sync: Dropbox.
7. News & Reading: Express News, Everpaper.
8. Blogging: Tumblr.
9. Music & Video: Doubletwist.
10. Games: Angry Birds, Falling Ball, Air Control Lite.
11. Productivity: Swype
12. Geek: Connectbot (SSH sessions)
I don't have a single paid app on the phone yet. This is something that will change in the coming months. I still have not fully settled into the Android world to make that sort of a commitment, even though at Rs. 90 – Rs. 500 per app, it makes for massive fight with temptation every time I stroll over to the market to prevent myself from picking up something.
Read MoreSamsung Galaxy S, GTi9000
My trusted Nokia E71 sort of gave up on me about a month ago, which is never a great thing to happen while you are on the road. Since I was already on the lookout for a decent Android phone, I gave into the lure of extreme gadget lust and went for the latest Samsung Galaxy S GTi9000.
I was very skeptical about getting a touchscreen phone. I like buttons that I can feel and don't quite like the idea of tapping on a sheet of glass to type. It is just not my thing. A month on, I have grown used to typing on it. Swype has helped matters considerably, but the entire flick, pinch, tap routine is still a bit alien to me.
Android by itself is a major paradigm change for me. I am used to phones that do a few smart bits. Even though the E71 is a massive improvement on the earlier phones (you can watch videos, browse most parts of the net, use a Twitter client etc), Android is a world apart compared to that.
The first major change that stares you in the face is that being online and consuming data is not an add-on, but something that is at the core of the whole experience. Of course, it is very much possible to use Android without a data connection, but it is only less than half of what it is capable of when you don't use data on it.
The phone runs Eclair, which is Android 2.1, with update1 on it. The experience has been largely OK and feels more or less complete and consistent, but there is still room for a massive amount of improvement. And I am saying that without having used an iPhone in a while and I have not owned one either, ever.
The weakest point I feel in the whole Android game is not fragmentation. Apple has altered perceptions on this front a bit too far from reality. You can't control the entire ecosystem if you want massive scale. The “i” ecosystem is not about massive scale, it is a high margin play. Android is a different pony from that. So, if you are looking for the Apple experience on the Android, you are out of luck. If you are willing to put up with a few niggles here and there and a largely polished outcome, Android will do fine for you.
That said, the Android Market is one of the weakest links in the Android chain. It feels and works like having been designed and conceptualized by a 2-year-old. It really needs to be done better and I am surprised that Google has allowed it to languish like this. There is very much a lovely market opportunity for someone to start a “certified by xyz” marketplace, where every app is tested and rated. I would gladly pay for something like that and as Android takes on more market share, I can imagine a lot of others too would like that.
What I don't often understand are the constant flamewars between the Apple and Android fanatics. Both are phones/platforms that work well and have their respective strengths and weaknesses. The passion with which each of the groups go at each other really baffles me.
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