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Android: Opportuni-es & Challenges
Thai Tran Co-‐founder & CEO
Lightbox thai@lightbox.com Twi=er: @thait
www.lightbox.com
About Lightbox
• Mobile photo sharing service
• More than half million app downloads from Android Market
• “Android first” strategy – We’ve explicitly decided to build for Android before any other mobile plaJorm
Android vs. iPhone adop-on
From Mary Meeker’s Oct 2011 Internet Trends presentaPon Sources: Gartner, Morgan Stanley Research
550k+ acPvaPons per day
150M+ devices
Android is a global phenomenon
USA 45%
market share
Europe 22%
market share
China 50%
market share
Sources: comScore Sept 2011 US & EU5 mobile report, Morgan Keenan Dec 2010 China report
Android fragmenta-on
Android OS distribuPon
Eclair (2.1) 14%
Froyo (2.2) 43%
Gingerbread (2.3) 41%
Gingerbread is almost one year old, but is installed on less than half of
Android devices
Source: Lightbox usage data for Oct 2011
Android device distribuPon
Lightbox is used on 190+ different Android devices
Evo 4G 11%
Galaxy S II 8%
Xperia Arc 6%
Android tablets not successful so far… • Less than 3% of Lightbox’s usage comes from tablets
• Causes of low adopPon: – Didn’t launch with compelling media features
– Not many high quality Android tablet apps due to poor developer tools & lack of device seeding
– Android tablets priced in same range as iPad
Honeycomb (3.0)
Android OS distribuPon
…but the Amazon Kindle Fire is coming • Ships with Amazon books, music, and movies
• Priced at < $200 • 16M Kindles vs. 29M iPads shipped so far
– Kindle Fire rumored to have 250k pre-‐orders in first week
• But US only and they forked Android (2.x)
Developing on Android • Android’s developer tools are less mature than iOS’s
– Have to hand crai XML and write a lot of boilerplate code to build Android user interfaces
– Standard widgets not as polished & few UI frameworks – Many poorly documented APIs
• Don’t recommend using cross-‐plaJorm development tools such as Titanium
• Avoid directly using hardware likely to vary between Android devices such as the camera – Leverage other Android apps instead (via “intents”)
Tes-ng your Android app
Buy Borrow Beta test Your developers should have a handful of Android devices of different form factors.
Android apps can be installed via email, so you can easily
test in a phone store.
The Android Market has no human approvers, so you can distribute beta versions
prior to launch.
Android Market: Gatekeeper to success
Gekng featured on the Android Market = 7X
All of the press coverage of Lightbox
Bump from coverage in
Bump from gekng featured on the
Lightbox downloads per week
Tips for ge_ng your app featured • Build a high quality app specifically for Android • Add Android tablet support • Reach out to the Android developer advocates at Android events and on Google+
+Nick Butcher (London) +Richard Hyndman (London) +Sparky Rhode (Munich)
Android opportuni-es: We need… • Be=er Android libraries
– UI frameworks: “jQuery for Android” – High performance image processing
• Be=er Android developer & tesPng tools – Visual interface builder tool (like in iOS) – Automated tesPng across hundreds of devices
• Android tablet apps, especially games
Q&A
thai@lightbox.com Twi=er: @thait
www.lightbox.com
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