Tag Archives: android

This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: All Google I/O, All The Time

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Google’s major developer conference, Google I/O, went down this week. Was it a bit of a letdown? Probably. Did cool stuff still come out of the event? Eh? Maybe? We discuss these topics and more this week on the TC Gadgets podcast. In fact, we even had Frederic Lardinois join as a guest, along with John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook (that’s me!), Romain Dillet, and Darrell Etherington as Bob McKenzie.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Google Play In-App Purchase Revenue Growth Jumps 7X In One Year, Subscription Revenue Growing 2X Each Quarter

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Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway.

Google said that its in-app revenues through Play are up 700 percent since the same time last year, which is reflected in the top apps as listed by highest grossing titles in the Play rankings. Subscriptions, which just launched around 12 months ago, is also making headway, doubling inbound revenue each quarter according to Google. Some apps which use subscription as their exclusive revenue model are now cracking the top grossing list, like Pandora.

The momentum is still clearly behind in-app purchase, and as a result Google suggested that there’s good reason to consider that as a revenue model when building apps. Session host and Google Play Product Manger for Commerce and Monetization Ibrahim Elbouchikhi said that while the team likes to play a game called “Where’s Minecraft?” where they spot the world simulation sim from Notch, which continues to sit high on the charts despite being a one-time purchase paid app, the trend is overwhelmingly favoring freemium experiences.

Other key trends identified include a higher propensity to buy things on tablets vs. phones. Google framed this in light of its attempts to get developers to build tablet-optimized experience, saying that there’s a 1.7x higher purchase rate on tablets than on phones for apps. Also, updated versions of apps that take advantage of recent platform additions like the new capabilities unveiled at I/O this year have a 2.2x advantage at monetization vs. older versions, on average.

For Google, spelling that out is a way of it being able to show devs that it makes financial sense to invest the resources and efforts needed to convert apps to tablet versions, or to make them available with as many new features as possible that show off Android’s system improvements. And it does look to be having an effect on Google’s efforts to improve Android user monetization; Elbouchikhi said that average revenue per user (ARPU) among the Android install base is up 2.5x versus the same time last year.

U.S. military clears Apple devices for use on its networks

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The Pentagon cleared Apple Inc. devices for use on its networks, setting the stage for the maker of iPhones and iPads to compete with Samsung Electronics Co. and BlackBerry for military sales.

The Defense Department said in a statement today that it has approved the use of Cupertino, California-based Apple’s products running a version of the iOS 6 mobile platform.

The decision eventually may spur a three-way fight for a market long dominated by Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry. The Pentagon on May 2 approved Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung’s devices, as well as BlackBerry 10 smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

The Pentagon has depended on BlackBerrys, which have consistently received federal certification for protecting sensitive data.

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The Defense Department has more than 600,000 mobile devices, including 470,000 BlackBerrys, 41,000 Apple products and 8,700 devices running Google Inc.’s Android operating system, according to the agency. Many of the Apple and Android products in use aren’t connected to military networks except for testing.

Samsung, the largest seller of smartphones for commercial use, worked with the U.S. National Security Agency to create a secure version of Google’s Android operating system with multiple layers of software and hardware protection, Tim Wagner, a Samsung vice president, has said.

The Galaxy S4 released in April will be the first smartphone using the new system, known as Knox, according to Samsung.

The military has said it wants employees to have the flexibility to use commercial products on its networks. It plans to create a military mobile applications store and hire a contractor to build a system that may handle as many as 8 million devices.

Nvidia’s Shield handheld console is now available for preorder

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The Nvidia shield, now available for pre-order and set to launch next month.

The preorder date for Nvidia’s handheld gaming console entry has been moved up to today, May 17, per an announcement on Nvidia’s site. Originally the Shield, a portable console with a flip-open screen, was going to be available to preorder starting Monday, May 20, but Nvidia seems to have decided to allow customers to strike while the console is on their minds.

Nvidia unveiled the unexpected Project Shield at CES in January as console running Android 4.2.2 on a Tegra 4 processor. Nvidia said the system would have a 5-inch 720p display, two analog sticks, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, HDMI output, 2GB RAM, 16GB of storage, and stereo speakers. When not playing its own games the Shield can also be used as a controller for other consoles, said Nvidia, and can stream games to a desktop computer.

The company announced on Wednesday that the device will sell for $349 will be released sometime in June. The handheld will be sold online by retailers like Newegg as well as at physical retail stores including GameStop, Micro Center, and Canada Computers.

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NVIDIA’s Shield May Be A Tough Sell, But Now You Can Pre-Order It From GameStop And Newegg Anyway

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If you were among the select few that signed up for NVIDIA’s Shield newsletter then you’ve been able to pre-order the company’s curious handset for a few days now. The remainder of the gaming masses originally had to wait until Monday for their own turn, but that’s no longer the case — NVIDIA’s retail partners have jumped on the pre-order bandwagon too so you can now stake your claim on a Shield from Newegg, Gamestop, and Canada Computer starting today.

MicroCenter will also sell the Shield in June but it hasn’t yet gotten its pre-order page set up. Get yourself together, MicroCenter.

I’m still not convinced that the Shield will find a foothold outside of the geekiest mobile gamers, but our own Darrell Etherington recently took the thing for a spin and came away rather impressed. He even went as far as calling it “the way Android games should be played,” a sentiment I don’t completely disagree with — we’ve seen the quality of mobile games surge by leaps and bounds these past few years, to the point where they easily eclipse consoles of years past. While those mobile games have slowly come into their own, the control schemes that are forced upon us thanks to the advent of the touchscreen leave much to be desired. There’s still something limiting and unsatisfying about effetely pawing at a piece of glass (or worse, a resistive display — yuck), a sentiment that others have championed, too. Early reactions to the Shield are generally positive, at least where the hardware and control layout is concerned, so at least there’s that to look forward to.

But in the end, will the Shield sell? And what does NVIDIA hope to get out of it? As it happens, NVIDIA may not care all that much about pure sales volume anyway. Time’s Jared Newman spoke to NVIDIA GM of mobile games Bill Rehbock at I/O, who pointed out that the Shield was designed to highlight the sorts of high-end gaming experiences developers have crafted for Android, not to mention the power of the company’s Tegra 4 chipset. There’s little question that NVIDIA’s newest system-on-a-chip has got plenty of horsepower to play with, but it’s still hard to see the Shield as much more than an incredibly niche device that raises more questions than answers.

How Google updated Android without releasing version 4.3

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Google I/O didn’t give us the Android update we were expecting—or did it??
Andrew Cunningham

Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn’t announce was the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that’s true, why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic developers?

The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it’s trying to fix the update problem.

Consider the full breadth of yesterday’s Android-related improvements: you’ve got an update to the Android version of Google Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There’s a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that’s to say nothing of the products that affect Google’s services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements.

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White Nexus 4 and Android 4.3 reportedly slated for June 10

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A white Nexus 4 spotted in the wild. It missed the keynote, but it’s apparently still coming.
Android and Me

It’s fair to say that we didn’t get everything we wanted to out of Google’s marathon opening-day keynote yesterday. Persistent rumors pointed to a possible refresh for last year’s Nexus 7 tablet and small tweaks to the Nexus 4. And Android 4.3 was very briefly outed on one of Google’s own product pages yesterday.

None of this actually happened—yet some rumors die hard. Android and Me reports that it was able to lay hands on a white version of the Nexus 4 at Google I/O and that the phone would be available in the Google Play store on June 10. The phone’s hardware is otherwise identical to the black Nexus 4 that has been available (or not available) from Google Play since last November, but the new version of the phone will also apparently bring us the Android 4.3 update that we missed yesterday.

Specifics about the next version of Android have been hard to come by. Speculation points to the inclusion of some new Bluetooth features and support for OpenGL ES 3.0 but otherwise we haven’t heard much. Even the low-key Android 4.2 update came with plenty of small features and tweaks, though. In the event that the new operating system actually comes to pass this time, expect us to take an in-depth look at it as soon we can.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Google wants your WordPress blog—and everything else—in its cloud

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Google wants your applications and data on its servers. At the Google I/O conference today, Google’s Cloud Platform team introduced new public services and tweaks to existing services based on the compute and data storage infrastructure that supports Google’s search engine and other applications.

Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, unveiled the changes during a developer session on the Google Cloud Platform. The change that got the most applause from the developer audience was the expansion of Google’s App Engine service to support applications written in the PHP scripting language. Google’s announcement that it would be opening up its Cloud Datastore to applications running anywhere—not just in Google’s cloud—got love from the audience too.

All of the changes make Google’s public services much more competitive and directly comparable to Amazon Web Services and other public cloud infrastructure providers, and open up Google’s infrastructure to a much larger audience. With tight integration into Android development tools and the rest of Google’s ecosystem, the services could help Google become more of a one-stop shop for mobile and web app developers.

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