49. If you have an Android phone (sometimes called a Droid, Inspire, MyTouch, Evo, Behold, Cliq, Eris, Hero, Galaxy, Nexus, Desire or many other names)
50. Open up the Android Marketplace. Note, your phone manufacturer may have renamed the Android Marketplace to something else, or removed it and replaced it with their own version, or installed the Amazon Marketplace, and we cannot guarantee our application will be in all marketplaces.
51. If you have an HP/Palm Web OS device (Pre, Pixi, TouchPad):
58. Click on the “Find Survey” button on the bottom menu (It looks like a magnifying glass) if you are on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Otherwise bring up the menu and select the “Find Survey” option.
The app revolution is hot, right? It seems you can do almost anything through an app these days? Check sports scores, book a flight, buy and sell stocks and more. As a company, it’s great to have your app in the marketplace, right?2 years ago there were 50,000 apps in the iPhone app store, today there are over 350,000
So many great advances in mobile technology! Everyone is carrying these, right?Maybe most people in this room are, but it’s not representative of mostmobile subscribers.So, which one do you make an app for? The iPhone, right? More people use the iPhone than any other smartphone platform, right?Let’s take a look at the current breakdown in the US…
ComScore just released this data – 1/3 of US mobile subscribers carry a smartphone.I thought everyone carries a smartphone! After all, I do! (pull out my Evo and show crowd)Let’s take a closer look at those smartphones…
Hmmm…so iPhone and Blackberry (RIM) are about neck and neck?! That’s not how the media and advertising portrays it.So, which demographic makeup are you looking for? Are all smartphone users affluent? This is much less the case in the US where wireless carriers heavily subsidize equipment. Only business-people use Blackberry, right? What kind of bias are we introducing when we so narrowly target
Who do you support?You have to support iOS and Android. Everyone knows that.You can toss out the very old ones, right?What about the old ones like BlackBerry and Symbian that still have a ton of users. Maybe not them.You can toss out the very small ones, right?But what about the ones just launching and with very big companies behind them. Not so very long ago the number of people using iOS and Android was zero. So maybe you shouldn’t throw them out either.Assuming you throw a few more of those out, how do you support 7 platforms, or 6 or even 5.Who can write that many apps? How much will it cost? How long will it take?There are two huge problems with this picture for mobile research.The first is that each phone platform represents a demographically biased sample. People who buy an iPhone are different from people who buy a BlackBerry.The second is that only about ⅓ of mobile subscribers in the US are actually using smart phones. And that’s an even bigger demographic bias, the difference between a smart phone buyer and a feature phone buyer.So let’s say you have an iOS and an Android and a BlackBerry app. While that will get you about 90% of smart phone users in the US, that’s only 30% of mobile phone users in the US, and that’s an much smaller number in the rest of the world where Symbian is still huge, and Android and BlackBerry are much smaller.Can we, as mobile researchers, only reach a heavily biased 30% of mobile users and retain any sense of academic honesty. Well it depends, maybe you’re specifically gathering research on smart phone users or Android users, or the wealthy. But the answer is probably no.
Native apps can be quite expensive and it’s not uncommon to be $100K+Depending of the size of the team working on them, apps can take weeks or several months to complete.App approval is not guaranteed and is not always timely.Ultimately, we don’t want to introduce unnecessary bias into a research sample.A few other issues are:Software updates - across various platforms which gets expensive and time consuming and not guaranteed as the user may choose not to upgrade or may simply not do it for a few weeks.App Store Customization – Android, for instance, is open and allows the device manufacturers to decide if they want to customize the app marketplace on their devices – will your app make the cut?
So, what impact does this have on Market Research?Well, it used to be fairly common for people to give 30-45 minutes of their time to answer some market research questions.
Today, people don’t even take time to read their email!It’s getting more and more difficult to reach consumers…especially with old methods. As consumer behaviors adapt, we need to meet them on their terms.
Today, people don’t even take time to read their email!It’s getting more and more difficult to reach consumers…especially with old methods. As consumer behaviors adapt, we need to meet them on their terms.
The size of communication is shrinking. Increasingly, information is created and consumed in bite-sized chunksAsk someone to write a blog post and that’s too much timeAsk them to “micro-blog” (Twitter, FB, etc.) and they will do it all day longJust look at how text messaging is so prevalent.Consumers are willing to give input, we just need to make it easy for them
When survey participation is difficult, then you only hear from those who will go to the trouble…the Vocal Minority.This is a common issue today…running a business based on feedback from the outliers.
The Painful P’s: Pinch, pull, pan to navigate around a page that was designed for a desktop computer.Don’t squeeze the desktop web onto mobile or you will lose people.
Device detection and serve up appropriate code path
By doing so, you can get to all of these devices and more