

  (Source: U.S. Daily Review)


I. Smoother Performance




Jelly Bean
[Image Source: YouTube]


Jelly Bean Project Butter



II. New Features


Here's a brief breakdown of the editions:


Predictive Keyboard

Offline Voice Input

Offline voice

Expanded Language Support
18 new languages, including Arabic and Hebrew.

External brail input support, improved features for blind users.


JellyBean swipe photos

Google Beam Improvements


Jelly Bean notifications
JB style notifications [Image Source: YouTube]

Knowledge Graph Search

Google Now

JellyBean Google Now


App Improvements 

(these improvements will also affect Gingerbread and ICS builds)


Play Store

(These improvements are available today)


Play Store

III. Availability



Google I/O Freebies
[Image Source: YouTube]

That's enough to make non-developers pretty jealous...

IV. Galaxy Nexus Price Cut


Galaxy Nexus Wide


Source: YouTube [Keynote]

Comments     Threshold


RE: If only it mattered....
By TakinYourPoints on 6/27/2012 5:41:18 PM , Rating: 2
2/3 of mobile search also comes from iOS, as said by Google when under testimony:

This is outside of traffic from ads served in applications. Note that this is from last September, before the recent surge of iPhone sales.

Browser "efficiency", something you totally pulled out of thin air, then AdMob, man, I'm looking forward to seeing how you're going to spin this next.

RE: If only it mattered....
By matty123 on 6/27/2012 6:49:55 PM , Rating: 2
Says Nothing iOS stats include iPad, iPod and iPhone...

Let's look at facts...

October last year 250 million iOS devices {according to Tim Cook}


October last year 190 million android devices {according to google} minus {21 x 500 000 (android activations per day) = 10500000} So around 180 million android devices around the time Susan Creighton testified {and let's even be generous and assume she used data that was so up to date it was relevant for the very day she testified > an extremely unlikely event considering the sample sizes needed to determine this but any how}.


Lets take off 2 million apple sales {obviously impossible to confirm} for the weeks after the statements and say their were 248 million iOS devices to google's 180 million then the numbers fall perfectly in line with what you would expect especially considering android's prevalence in china {68.4%} compared to apple's {5.7%} and that by far the most popular search engine in china is Baidu {not google}.

We know today their are 400 million android devices...


I know apple announced 365 million i Devices at WDC {up till march 30} > No idea how the numbers look today...


In other words the numbers are almost exactly what one would expect given the distribution of iOS and android devices at the time unless you have something to back up your claim with today's numbers when google is actually in line with or slightly ahead of iOS, those old numbers prove nothing and certainly can't speak to the mobile landscape today especially since google has added roughly 220 million devices {more than double the 180 million} since that statement about nine months ago.

RE: If only it mattered....
By ltcommanderdata on 6/27/2012 8:35:21 PM , Rating: 2
I don't think your numbers of 248 million iOS devices vs 180 million Android devices at the time of Creighton's testimony explain the difference in search traffic Google saw as purely due to device distribution. Google saw 2x the search traffic from iOS as every other mobile OS while your numbers show the iOS installed base was only 1.38 times that of Android, which still leaves a large gap indicating increased usage per iOS user. That doesn't include Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone installed base which falls into the 1/3rd slice of mobile search traffic with Android and would make it even less that a large iOS installed base is responsible for a high iOS usage share.

I agree that Google's mobile search statements are now 9 months old and things could have changed. However, if developer revenue is a proxy for platform usage, Flurry's studies of 70,000 developers across 185,000 apps, has consistently showed developers make 4x the revenue on iOS as on Android, in Q4 2011, Q1 2012, and thus far in Q2 2012. So at least in terms of developer revenue share, iOS has maintained a higher level of activity despite Android's impressive increase in installed base in the last 9 months. As I mentioned in another post, I think this is due to iOS targeting the mid to high-end market where users are likely more active and willing to spend more money, whereas Android targets the entire market from low to high-end and it's the low-end users that results in Android seeing less usage/revenue share than raw installed base comparisons would suggest. I don't doubt high-end market Android phones/consumers are just as active as high-end iOS users, perhaps even more so. But high-end Android phones/users may represent a smaller portion of total Android phones/users than high-end iOS phones/users to total iOS phones/users.

RE: If only it mattered....
By matty123 on 6/27/2012 9:14:06 PM , Rating: 3
The flurry report has been discredited mainly due to the fact that flurry is used in less than 7% of android apps...

Last week Flurry Analytics released a report on iOS vs. Android titled “App Developers Signal Apple Allegiance Ahead of WWDC and Google I/O“. The report has been widely circulated around the internet, and generally accepted as factual with little or no critical review. A ZDNet investigation shows that the report’s math is flawed and its charts are misleading, thus throwing doubt onto all of its conclusions. Flurry’s report is broken up into four sections, and we found problems with all four. Two sections in particular, though, show the most glaring issues: one on new project starts, and one on platform fragmentation.

And a summary of the maths...

If you’ll excuse some quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations, Google claims 500,000 apps in their market, which works out to about 35,000 apps using Flurry. According to Flurry, their SDK is used by 185,000 apps, which comes to 150,000 for iOS and 35,000 for Android. Apple claims about 600,000 apps in the Apple app store, which means roughly 25% of iOS apps use Flurry. Now, in Q1 2012, the Flurry chart shows approximately 13,000 Flurry new project starts on iOS, and 6,000 new starts on Android. That’s how they got their ‘7 out of 10 are iOS’ figure, because 13,000/(13,000 + 6,000)=0.72. But if you take into account the percentage of apps on each platform that use Flurry, you get 52,000 new projects on iOS total (13,000/0.25), vs. 91,000 new projects on Android total (6,000/0.0658).


Another point of contention is that flurry's report {at least the version you linked to} leaves out the other android markets for example amazon...


The chart above compares revenue generated per user across iOS, Amazon and Android app stores. We start by taking the revenue generated per user in the iTunes App Store and setting it to 100%. We then compare the relative revenue generated per active user from Amazon and Google to the amount of revenue per active user generated by the iTunes App Store. Doing so, we find that Amazon Appstore revenue per active user is 89% of iTunes App Store revenue, and Google Play revenue per active is 23% of iTunes App Store revenue. Another way to interpret the results is that, for the same number of users per platform, every $1.00 generated in the iTunes App Store, will also fetch $0.89 in the Amazon Appstore and $0.23 in Google Play. These results mirror those of a similar analysis conducted by Flurry last December, where we found for every $1.00 generated per user in the iTunes App Store, developers generated $0.24 per user in the Android Market.

Their are hundreds of android markets many of them more profitable than the play store and the cost to publish in all of them is effectively zero, the flurry report tries it's absolute best to paint android in a bad light when in other reports released by them {flurry} amazon apps are almost as profitable as iOS apps {and obviously these are just android apps > no extra work required to code them}. I personally make use of getJar, amazon, Samsung app store and the google play market {and almost all android users I know make use of two or three markets at least} so it stands to reason that the play store will never be as profitable as the only source of apple apps {the app store} but let's be clear that this doesn't mean that android apps arn't as profitable as iOS apps, also the flurry report only looks at cash revenue and ignores android's main business model > mobile adds, which are used by over half of all android apps, yet flurry conveniently leaves them out when equating revenue on each platform.


RIM and all windows phones use BING by default and symbian offers a choice of which you want but since we are being meticulous lets also add that many third party browsers on android don't use google by default {something not allowed on iOS}.

While I don't disagree with what you are saying about iphones and such being on the higher end {to a degree} using that flurry report to back your facts is weak sauce as so many people have bashed it as being completely {and with clear bias} way to pro iOS.

RE: If only it mattered....
By ltcommanderdata on 6/28/2012 2:43:14 AM , Rating: 3

When Flurry says their SDK is used by 185,000 mobile apps at the time of the survey (June 8), they appear to mean across all Flurry Analytics supported platforms including Blackberry, Windows Phone, JavaME, and HTML5.

Over 70,000 companies have chosen Flurry Analytics to use in more than 190,000 applications across iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, JavaME and HTML5.

In the 3 weeks since that study was published Flurry is now up to 190,000 apps. Seeing Flurry found Android and iOS app starts in a quarter was around 18,000 apps, assuming an average weekly app start rate, 3 weeks is ~4100 new apps on Android and iOS plus some additional apps from other platforms, the 5000 app difference falls in line with expected app starts. So if 190,000 apps represents all Flurry SDK apps across all platforms now, 185,000 apps 3 weeks ago in the survey likewise represents all platforms and not just Android and iOS.

Flurry doesn't provide the platform breakdown for their SDK usage so knowing only 6.58% of Android apps use Flurry doesn't provide enough information to work out how many iOS apps use Flurry given there are a number of other platforms forming the pie. Ed Burnette's back of the envelope calculation that 25% of iOS apps use Flurry seems high anyways, but we can't actually say one way or another. There isn't enough data to conclude iOS Flurry SDK adoption is disproportionately large skewing the results or Flurry's conclusions.


It would be interesting to find out what share of Android app downloads are done on Google Play vs other third-party markets. I would assume that Google still has good control of their platform and the clear majority of app purchases are done in Google Play. That would mean that while leaving out other markets is a definite weakness of the survey, it would only qualify the conclusion rather than completely change it. ie. cross-platform apps generate say 2-3x more revenue on iOS than Android rather than the 4x they concluded.


We examine a basket of top-ranked apps that have similar presence across iOS, Amazon and Android. Their primary business models are in-app purchase, which is the revenue type we compare for this analysis. Additionally, earlier research by Flurry found that the in-app purchase revenue model generates the majority of revenue for apps.

It's true that Flurry doesn't really address the ad revenue question. They say that research has found in-app purchase generates the majority of app revenue which is why they focus on it, but they link to a study that compared revenue from paid apps vs. revenue from free-to-play apps, which often include ads, but they don't mention if they've included or excluded ad revenue in their total freemium revenue. By comparing in-app revenue made by the same apps while only varying the store (iTunes App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore), Flurry is methodologically correct in isolating the effect of different stores on a given cross-platform app that is the "same" across all platforms. As you say though, the reality is that an app likely needs to adapt to each platform for best results.

