As many folks know I have been plunging in to the wild-and-wooly world of educational mobile app development... My biggest issue in App development has been developer talent and budget (and they're related because if I had unlimited budget I could hit the larger job market with contract work). I have had 2 iOS developers "fade" on me midstream. I have students with related skills to make things work, but that is not an ideal long-term solution.
I am fairly confident my next round of projects will go faster based on lessons learned from my current ones. We have developed some useful prototyping methods and have refined user-testing processes as well. The iOS app I have been working on for months is about 90% done and that last 10% is proving challenging. In the time I have been working on that we developed several "web-apps" and am wrapping up a project that developed an instructional app using Flash (not iOS compatible, but likely increasingly less an issue!).
We have done some great design-based research on App development and I have several papers in process (hope to have them submitted by the end of my winter break!) on aspects of projects. The research capacity from my NSF grant has helped immensely
The market is evolving - tools are changing. Obviously I have been thinking about iOS vs Android in my own life and recently added an Android phone to my too-long list of mobile devices. An interesting post from a venture capitalist in NY really got me thinking about the future of mobile and platform choices"
But I care a lot about where our portfolio companies should be focusing their precious mobile development resources.
And this chart from comScore tells a very interesting story:
Apple is stuck at about 25% of the smartphone market. RIM is losing share and Google is gaining share. If we have two more quarters like this past quarter, Google will have 37% market share, RIM will be at 29%, and Apple will be at 26%.
Of course there is no certainty that the next two quarters will play out the same way the past quarter went. Many people replied that getting the iPhone on Verizon will be a boost to Apple's numbers. I suspect that will help. Apple could get into the mid 30s with the help of Verizon.
But the most interesting number in that table is the 6.5% increase in share by Android.
http://bit.ly/h2G2PR
