FriendCaller Blog

Android’s App download count has been a hot topic this week, Generally when it comes to counting, 10  billion is a great number by any capacity, yet, when its unfolding the speed at which a thing is growing, its simply incredible!  For Google and the Android Market I think we can move forward and consider it a big number, because earlier this week, Google declared that over 10 billion apps has been downloaded. But the real kicker is that rate of downloads is one billion per month. Incredible! Lets keep our fingers crossed as to where this skyrocketing download will take its place in year 2012 !

To celebrate this event, Google is offering some really cool paid apps for an awesome price of  10-cents on Android Market for 10 days. This 10 cent sale is being done in cooperation with some great Android App developers who contributed to this landmark by making some great apps available at an amazing price of 10 cents. FriendCaller will continue offering 5 million calling minutes and text messages in its Offer Wall, and yes, we are still free to download and use!

So Android lovers, Do you know that with our latest Android version (1.2.0.4) launched just today, you can avail FREE credits by downloading apps from our credit enriched Offer Wall which has 5 Million Calling Minutes and Text/SMS secured for you. The latest release contains much refined an All-in-One Offer Wall loaded with offers of downloading apps, watching videos, and short surveys. A real treat for Android users, indeed! So what are you waiting for? Download the latest version, and earn credits to call and text, making your Android a full featured VoIP device, saving huge on bills!

According to a testimony, US have finally declared that Nokia will pay developers so that they can create Windows Phone 7 Mango applications.

The information  is thought to be extracted from a popular news channel CNN which averts that, ‘Nokia is attempting to woo app developers with such incentives as pre-installing their software on the forthcoming phone, prominent promotion for their products and funding development of an app, according to three people involved in the negotiations.’

Microsoft’s remark  on the claim is yet to come.However if the company’s track record is taken into consideration, then its more likely that the report CNN broke out is definitely true.

Evidently nothing is wrong with incentivising app growth for one of your platforms, infact it’s a great way to take the initiative.But one thing that will be a question mark for everyone is, What made Nokia do this? I mean there are numerous applications already serving the Windows Marketplace. As a matter of fact, it is propagating even faster than the Google’s Android Market for now.

When CNN encountered with one of spokeswoman from Nokia, this is what she had to say:

‘the company offers app developers a variety of incentives, some in partnership with Microsoft, which include coding assistance and marketing.’

She added more by saying: ‘We do not disclose these arrangements, as each is different.’

One of the presumptions could be that Nokia is trying to get its Symbian developers to swap over to Windows Phone 7, making the deal less pungent. Now that surely makes some sense since, its a matter of time when Symbian would be amongst least favourites.

Nokia’s very first batch of Windows Phone 7 Mango handsets are thought to emerge in Q4 of 2011. Rumors are buzzing around that the very first handset, significantly the Sea Ray, could be arriving as early as next week.

As mentioned in one of our previous blogs, Microsoft is offering free phones, developer tools and training to all those stranded developers who have been affected by WebOS burial by HP? Pretty generous isn’t it?

Similarly Nokia is following on the same lines but in a different way. So let’s have our fingers crossed and wait what this brings for Nokia in future.

Though Nokia do have to declare a verified release date but as ZTE, HTC and Samsung have announced their respective handsets publicly, we look forward as to when Nokia would soon join in with them.

Back in April Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted taking FriendCaller along with it. In August we mentioned in our blog about AWS facing a serious outage again, and that was quite a puff for numerous startups, including FriendCaller, and so millions of users. Obviously, managing billion of calls are totally not possible without cloud hosting. Especially when it comes to our Video Calling, it is entirely dependent on peer-to-peer technology.

More or less same problem is being faced by the BlackBerry users since Monday. BlackBerry users have been left furious after their internet service crashed Monday morning, with outages touching subscribers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Communications and social networking tools, including the email,Internet, Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger, and Facebook, were unable to process data from around 11am and the problem persists. Outage is reported to spread across Brazil, Chile and Argentina on Tuesday being the latest headache for the Canadian based Research in Motion (RIM).

RIM assured later on Monday that all services had been restored to users; however the root cause of the problem was still unknown. It took nearly 20 hours to restore the services, but within a few hours after restoration, the services collapsed again; causing problems to the users, many of whom solely rely on it for their business communications.

‘We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience it has caused’, said RIM in an email statement.

No need to mention RIM’s BlackBerry services has long been awarded by executives and politicians who rely on its security parameters to deliver email and other messaging to mobile personnel. “The current situation with the BlackBerry outages couldn’t come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months,” Informa Telecoms & Media analyst, Malik Saadi, said in a statement. RIM has struggled this year with fewer sales of the BlackBerry against rivals like Apple’s iPhone, various models from HTC, and other handsets powered by Google’s Android OS.

In the August blog we mentioned that as far as RIM’s BlackBerry is concerned, we noticed progressive trends that have made us go for creating a FriendCaller App for BlackBerry, therefore we certainly don’t want this outage to affect us in future. We hope RIM gets success in resolving the problem at their latest.

At Google I/O 2011 last month in San Francisco, it was announced that the Android Market has more than 200,000 downloadable applications and several analyst predict the number of Android apps bypassing iTunes soon.

The truth is, however, that the Android Market is growing rapidly, yet at the same time it has a much higher attrition rate than the iTunes Store. Recently, Appsfire reports that 32% of Android apps have disappeared from the Android Market since they were introduced. In contrast, the attrition rate for iTunes Store is half, at only 16%.

So, why is the attrition rate higher for Android? Appsfire points out that Android developers are more creative, and therefore are using the Android Market as a testing ground for new ideas. With the Android Market, virtually anyone can publish an app. In fact it only costs a $25 on-time fee to open a developer account, and there is no approval process. In contrast, Apple requires developers to pay an annual fee and imposes strict developer guidelines.

So is it a matter of low cost and convenience that is driving the high attrition rate for Android Apps? Easy come, easy go, as they say? Creativity vs. conformity? Quantity vs. quality? Are developers simply pulling their own apps? Google rarely removes apps from the market, and it limits its intervention to removal of malicious apps.

Personally, I am not fully convinced that it is the lack of an approval process that creates a higher attrition rate. Published apps can be updated immediately, and once published there is no cost involved to keep them in the store. For example, we have been updating our FriendCaller Android VoIP app on a regular basis, and it has been fun since we can react to user feedback at the Android Market much faster that on the iTunes Store.

Some of our latest updates to the FriendCaller Android version make it easier to build your friend list using Web email or Outlook contacts, and comes with an extended offer wall that presents opportunities to get more free call credits. On the other hand, our FriendCaller iPhone VoIP app has not been updated since Apple requested fundamental changes in the way offer walls work.

What do you think? Is it simply easy come, easy go? Are there other reasons that one third of all Android apps have disappeared from the Android Market? Please share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment or re-tweeting this post.

Google I/O is just over, lot of cool new stuff coming to the market. We are pushing our popular FriendCaller Android app forward as well. Today’s release supports now more 331 different Android devices!

Now Google’s Android 3.0, code-named Honeycomb, targeting tablets, is better supported. FriendCaller turns these tablets into cool calling and texting devices. Other improvements deal with the quick display and fast scrolling of really large contact lists and the sorting and display of foreign languages like Chinese, Korean and Thai.

The second most popular language on Android is? No peeking! OK, I guessed it wrong as well … it is not German but Korean and Japanese comes third.

The FriendCaller update is out on the Android market. Our Tip: Allow automatically updating so you always have the latest version.