Sustainable mobile strategy for a fragmented ecosystem

Nov

2011

Nikhil K Menon http://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkmenon

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Executive Summary

The disruptive nature of the mobile apps ecosystem and the ubiquity of smartphone are forcing

many organizations that offer web based services to implement a Mobile Strategy as part of their

Enterprise IT Strategy and Vision. Furthermore, several startups are sprouting grounds for great

ideas that have mobile use cases. Inclusion of a practical mobile strategy as an integral part of

one’s product development strategy will help realize the idea more effectively.

Regardless of the scale of your immediate mobile objective, one needs to consider the diverse

and fragmented state of the current mobile ecosystem and analyze all aspects of it and then

derive a road map best suited for the organization.

The task of developing a mobile strategy poses unique challenges that need to be solved in order

to efficiently deliver your offerings to the customers, regardless of the type of mobile device they

own.

This paper will focus primarily on the challenges and opportunities presented by the fragmented

mobile space and explore the different approaches that will enable your business to serve all the

customers in the continuously evolving mobile user base.

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Table of Contents Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................ 2

Rapidly evolving usage trends and expectations ............................................................................ 4

Different Phases in mobile strategy development .......................................................................... 5

What services should you offer on mobile? .................................................................................... 6

Enhance your IT infrastructure .................................................................................................. 6

Identify your customers and their mobile device platform .............................................................7

Define target platforms for your Mobile service offering ............................................................... 8

Role of SMS ................................................................................................................................. 9

Interactive Telephony application .............................................................................................10

Untapped potential of QR Codes and NFC tags ......................................................................... 11

QR Codes ................................................................................................................................ 11

NFC Tags ................................................................................................................................ 12

Developing Mobile App for multiple platforms ............................................................................. 12

Portability of mobile web apps ................................................................................................... 13

When to pick native mobile apps ............................................................................................... 13

Cross platform applications - HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for rescue ................................. 14

PhoneGap ............................................................................................................................... 14

Titanium Appcelerator ........................................................................................................... 15

Adobe AIR .............................................................................................................................. 15

Other Frameworks .................................................................................................................. 15

J2ME based feature phone apps ................................................................................................ 16

Feature phones – the elephant in the room ........................................................................... 16

Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 16

References ...................................................................................................................................... 17

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Rapidly evolving usage trends and expectations

A growing number of consumers access a variety of internet content using more than one type of

platform. They expect to receive the services whether they are in front of their computer or away

from it. Companies that does not adapt to this evolving trend in usage and expectation may end

up losing their competitive advantage.

In June 2011, mobile apps crossed a significant milestone. Consumers spent 9% more time on

mobile apps than on desktops and notebooks combined, based on the findings of the Mobile

apps analytics firm Flurry. For most users, their mobile device has become the primary source

for obtaining information and consuming services from the web.

1

1 Flurry Blog and State of the media/PewResearch

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Different Phases in mobile strategy development

Approaching your mobile strategy development in the following phases will help you create an

effective strategy that can maximize the reach of your business and improve your brand

experience.

Identify the services that you plan to offer to your mobile users.

Study the types of mobile devices your customers own.

Devise a plan to deliver your services to most, if not all, of your current and future customers on the devices they own.

Outline a vision for improving the discovery of your mobile offerings.

Create a plan for engaging your customers post sale and broaden your brand experience.

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What services should you offer on mobile?

Most businesses plan to offer a wide variety of services through online channels. In reality there

are no restrictions on the types of services that can be offered on mobile. However, it is not

practical and effective to offer every feature in your website on a mobile device.

The mobile use cases should typically have short sessions and require less user inputs.

Depending on the type of your business, the services you offer on the mobile can provide

additional context, such as location, that can help you serve the customer with more relevant

information.

Enhance your IT infrastructure

Your IT infrastructure needs to adapt to the complexity that will be brought in with the addition

of a mobile channel. Depending on the current state of your infrastructure, this can be a

seamless transition or a substantial undertaking. If your mobile offering includes an installable

mobile application, then there is a high likelihood that some of your customers might try to

access your services using the older versions of your mobile application. Consequently, you will

be required to prepare your backend services to be backward compatible with the prior versions

of your mobile applications. If you already follow a Service Oriented Architecture and have a

middleware or ESB in place, this would be an easy transition.

Employing an API manager layer on top of your middleware will simplify the mobile application

integration and maintenance. If you wish not to build this capability in house, API managers

such as Apigee or Mashery can provide the supporting infrastructure around existing enterprise

APIs. Each enterprise can either use their existing cloud based infrastructure or On-premise

appliance to expose these APIs.

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Identify your customers and their mobile device platform

Having answers to the following questions will greatly help you in narrowing down the

platforms you need to deliver your mobile service offering.

Who are your target customers?

Where they are geographically located?

What are the demographics?

Geographical location of your customers will impact your strategy and will put spotlight on

certain types of mobile platforms. For example, based on the chart given below, if majority of

your customers are located in US, UK or Singapore, then you have almost equal or more number

of internet users accessing your content on Tablets as compared to Mobile phones.

Knowing your customer demographics is also equally important. Based on the analytics from

Flurry, it is evident that the majority of smartphone users are less than 45 years of age and for

the age group 25-34 and above, majority of smartphone users are female.

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Define target platforms for your Mobile service offering

Chances are you have a diverse customer base. Due to the fragmented nature of the mobile

ecosystem, in order to provide your services to most, if not all, of your customers, you will have

to develop different types of mobile applications on multiple platforms.

A mobile application is not just limited to a native application or a mobile web site. The

following are the types of applications that can be made available on a mobile device.

Native Mobile Application

Mobile Web Browser based application

SMS

Telephony Application

QR codes

NFC tags

Without a doubt, native mobile app or mobile web browser based

services must be a significant part of your mobile strategy.

However, this will still leave a significant number of customers

who does not own a smartphone or have a data plan on their

mobile phone, out of reach.

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Role of SMS

It is a common mistake to underestimate the reach of SMS based services, especially in engaging

the customers. The SMS based services can be consumed by the user without the need to

download an application. Based on an article published by Financial Newsline, "over 90 percent

of all SMS text messages are read usually within three minutes of being received. In total, close

to 98 percent of all SMS text messages are indeed read by the consumer within hours of

receiving it."

Regardless of the type of the target mobile device,

SMS based alerts and notifications can be a value

added service to your customers. This use case is

widely employed in the banking industry. What

about other industries? Imagine if you are able to

receive a text message when your flight is delayed,

or if you are able to receive a reminder that your

appointment with the doctor is tomorrow. Unlike

traditional applications, which cannot send you

notifications unless it is running in the background,

SMS service is always available. Even if your device

is switched off, as soon as it comes back on, you receive any backlogged messages. It is simple to

use and does not need a tech savvy user to take full advantage of this.

SMS also plays an important role in mobile fund raising initiatives and marketing. The

substantial number of donations received through SMS text donations in the aftermath of Haiti

earthquake validates this. SMS can serve as a verification mechanism during a signup process

and can also be used for interactive polling. There are countless use cases that can be realized

using SMS.

Your application can be built to interact with the user via text messages. Twilio and Tropo are

the leading Webservice API providers in this domain.

The following diagram is from Twilio website. As depicted in the diagram, the text from the SMS

will be sent to your application which in turn will allow the application to respond with the

appropriate information. This type of approach is relatively easy to implement and eliminates

the hurdles associated with setting up a SMS based service.

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2

Interactive Telephony application

This is one of the oldest types of application available via any type of phone. There will not be

anyone who hasn’t used this type of application at least once. A common example for this is the

service that is made available when we call the 1-800 number that prompts for user inputs. The

user interface can be voice driven or based on a numeric dial pad.

Google attempted to broaden their local search services by making it available as a telephony

application. GOOG-411, voice automated directory assistance service, a part of Google labs

products, proved that you can provide valuable local search results while a customer is on the

road. However, Google shut down most of their Google labs products earlier this year of which

GOOG-411 was one of them.

Just like the SMS Webservices APIs, companies like Twilio, Tropo and several others provide

telephony APIs that can interface with your existing web applications relatively easily.

Interactive Telephony application should be given a good consideration in your mobile strategy

especially if your customers do not own smartphones.

2 Twilio SMS

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Untapped potential of QR Codes and NFC tags

QR Codes

Based on the press release from comScore, “14 million Americans Scanned QR Codes on their

Mobile Phones in June 2011”.

QR (Quick Response) codes attempts to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds.

These can be spotted in publications, products, store fronts, direct mail and countless other

locations. Upon scanning a QR code using a pre-existing QR code reader application, it can

direct the user to a mobile application, make a phone call, send a text message, download a

coupon, open a mobile website or a product manual. There are numerous other ways to make

use of QR Code.

QR codes can help you market your brand and accelerate the customer sign-up process beyond

your store, website or mobile app. It can improve the discovery of your mobile app which

otherwise may be buried deep inside the App store search results. QR code is undoubtedly a

valuable tool when it comes to empowering your marketing.

3

3 QR Codes information from comScore

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NFC Tags

NFC tags (Near Field Communication) has use cases beyond mobile payments and as a magnetic

card alternative. Like QR codes, NFC tags allow the user to interact with physical objects. They

can be used in almost all of the areas where QR codes can be employed and more.

NFC tags can offer innovative ways for allowing the users to check-in to stores or restaurants,

get more information on a product or add reviews. Imagine if you have the opportunity to touch

the movie poster with your smartphone in a theater after watching the movie to add instant

reviews. Offering such medium to engage your customers even after the sale has been completed

improve their experience with your brand and will increase participation.

Once you have a narrowed down on the types of mobile applications you will be including in

your mobile service offering, a scalable development platform needs to be selected for

developing your mobile applications. In order to deliver the mobile application to your target

customers, you may be required to develop it for multiple platforms as explained below.

Developing Mobile App for multiple platforms

This is one of the biggest challenges in realizing any mobile objective. There are numerous

mobile operating systems that run on multitude of devices with a wide range of form factors.

Fragmentation is costly

Developing a native app on several platforms will require you to employ multiple mobile

development teams and will require maintenance of multiple code bases. Nevertheless, ignoring

certain archaic mobile platforms is not a wise move either. The mobile strategy must incorporate

a plan to create applications that is accessible from multiple platforms with less operating costs

and maintenance overhead.

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4

Portability of mobile web apps

Most of the mobile use cases do not require development of a native application for each mobile

use-case. A considerable number of applications are best served as mobile web based

experiences. The mobile web app ensures that each user always uses the latest version of the app

and can be accessed from multiple devices.

A rich user experience can be achieved by efficient use of HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript

technologies. Several popular frameworks such as jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and others use

these technologies to create mobile web apps that provides near native look and feel on iOS,

Android and BlackBerry devices.

That being said, there are certain situations that can only be satisfied by native mobile apps as

described below.

When to pick native mobile apps

Native applications are inherently faster and can be seamlessly integrated with the device

hardware. If your mobile app needs to be available offline or needs to run in the background,

then you must consider developing a native application. If your application contains

sophisticated animations, then it is best rendered using a native mobile app. Native applications

are also able to leverage the full hardware capabilities of a mobile device.

Besides these clear advantages, native mobile apps have also higher visibility via app stores

which offer a platform for distribution, payment and review of the app. But what if a third

option was possible that marries both the uniformity of experience along with the portability of

mobile web and the sophisticated capabilities of a native mobile application?

4 comScore Mobile market share

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Cross platform applications - HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for

rescue

What if you need the portability of a mobile web application and the deployment and

distribution features of app stores that are offered to only native applications? Imagine being

able to create single code base and take advantage of the several years of web development skills

of your existing web team in developing the mobile application. This is possible, thanks to the

emergence of the cross platform application tools that uses the popular web development

technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is one of the open source mobile development platforms that allows creation of native

applications using web technologies. It provides access to phone features hitherto unavailable to

mobile web apps such as file system, camera, GPS etc using JavaScript API. PhoneGap can be

combined with Sencha Touch, jQuery to simplify development and reduce time to market

requirements.

5

HTML5 pages are wrapped inside native components and make use of JavaScript to provide

access to device APIs. Adobe realized the substantial opportunities this platform presents to the

future of mobile application development and acquired Nitobi, creators of the PhoneGap

platform.

Applications developed using PhoneGap can be deployed to the following mobile operating

systems using their respective app stores.

iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS, Symbian and bada

Real World Applications: PhoneGap Apps

Several cross-platform apps have been successfully created using PhoneGap framework. Two

such popular apps are METAR Reader and Logitech Squeezebox™ Controller. You can get the

full list of popular applications that are developed using PhoneGap on the featured apps page of

their website.

5 PhoneGap

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Titanium Appcelerator

Titanium allows developers to use the web skills to develop apps that will run on iOS, Android

and BlackBerry platforms. Applications developed using Titanium SDK have real native look

and feel. Titanium uses a JavaScript interpreter to execute the JavaScript in the application.

The pluggable architecture of Titanium also allows the addition of native code (Objective-C or

Java) to the application.

When compared to PhoneGap, Titanium offers access to more device APIs and the ability to add

custom native code allows you to extend the capabilities. However, inclusion of platform specific

native code has a disadvantage of limiting its portability.

Real World Examples: Appcelerator Apps

NBC, PayPal and eBay created rich native applications for IPAD using Titanium Appcelerator.

You can find other popular applications that used Appcelerator framework on the Titanium

Applications Showcase page.

Adobe AIR

Adobe Air lets you develop cross platform mobile applications using Flex, ActionScript, HTML,

JavaScript and Flash. Adobe AIR applications will run on iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices

and delivers rich user experiences. Native extensions included in Adobe AIR allow you to

seamlessly integrate with the device APIs thereby extending the capabilities of the AIR

applications.

Real World Applications: AIR Apps

Politifact Mobile application from Times Publishing Company is developed using Adobe AIR for

Android platform. Hacker News, and Slashdot are two other popular applications based on

Adobe AIR. You can find the full list of popular Adobe AIR application on AppBrain.

Other Frameworks

In addition to the frameworks discussed here, there are several other promising frameworks

that allow cross platform application development. Some of these frameworks are listed below.

Each of these has its advantages and one must evaluate all of the active frameworks that

supports portability of the mobile application before deciding on the framework that is best

suited for your application development.

RhoMobile

MoSync

J2ME Polish

Ramp

Grapple

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J2ME based feature phone apps

Feature phones – the elephant in the room

Even though the number of smartphone users overtook the feature phone users in US this year,

there are still 36% users who uses feature phones. In the developing countries, the feature phone

users outnumber smartphone users by a substantial margin. Including a Java enabled feature

phone app to your mobile portfolio will increase the accessibility of your services to more

customers, especially in emerging markets.

This fact is reinforced with the release of the Facebook mobile app for Java enabled feature

phones there by expanding the reach of Facebook apps to 2500+ devices. This app is built on

Snaptu - a java enabled feature phone app platform.

Summary

The rate of adoption and usage of mobile device as a means for accessing content and services

over the internet is only going to rise further. The addition of a mobile service offering to your

business is an inevitable transition that needs to be considered imminently if you must stay

ahead of the curve. Given the current fragmented state of the mobile space, especially among

mobile operating systems, the mobile strategy you pick for your business needs to be sustainable

and effective without affecting the business bottom line.

There is no one size fit all approach when it comes to the mobile development strategy. There

are several good solutions that address the problem of the diverse platforms; and each has its

own advantages. Based on your business goals, target mobile platforms need to be prioritized

and a scalable mobile development technology needs to be adopted to accelerate deployment.

In this rapidly emerging mobile technology era, businesses need to take a bullish approach to

reducing the time to market. In order to maximize the return on investment, adequate

investment needs to be made in creation of a continuous and sustainable mobile strategy.

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References

Digital Omnivores whitepaper from comScore:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Digital_O

mnivores

Flurry Blog: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/71285/Mobile-App-Inventory-Hungry-Enough-

to-Eat-Internet-Display-Ad-Spend

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-Rear-view-

Mirror

QR Codes information from comScore:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/8/14_Million_America

ns_Scanned_QR_or_Bar_Codes_on_their_Mobile_Phones_in_June_2011

Twilio SMS: http://www.twilio.com/api/sms

comScore Mobile market share:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Reports_

September_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

PhoneGap: http://phonegap.com/

State of the media/PewResearch: http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/mobile-survey

Financial Newsline: http://www.financialnewsline.com/mortgage/business-owners-

shocked-at-99-percent-read-rate-with-mobile-advertising-and-sms-marketing