Android | Cheryl Waller

Facebook for Android: 10 Tips for Power Users

May 23, 2013 by Matt Silverman Leave a Comment

Facebook is a lot like crystal meth — it's highly addictive and will probably cause your teeth to fall out.* Android users are always one tap away from a snarky status update or a friend's vacation pics.

SEE ALSO: 20 Things Your Most Annoying Friends Do on Facebook

Facebook's Android app has come a long way from its humble beginnings. The most recent iterations are packed with features, from personal settings to page management to power sharing.

Here are a few tricks we use to keep up with Facebook pals on the go.

*Not clinically proven.

1. Sort your News Feed by "Most Recent"

If you don't trust an algorithm to sort your updates for you, use this feature to arrange things chronologically. The setting is not apparent — likely by design. Find it by tapping the three bars on the top-left to bring up the menu. Then tap the gear to the right of "News Feed." This will let you toggle between "Top Stories" and "Most Recent." Read more...

More about Mobile, Facebook, Android, Social Media, and Features

Filed Under: Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: android, Blogging, Facebook, features, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Social Networking

Google Drive App For Android Gets Card-Style Redesign, Document Scanner With OCR And Improved Spreadsheet Editing Experience

May 22, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google’s Drive app for Android just got a major redesign that brings the Google Now-like card-style look the company introduced with Google Now to its mobile productivity app.

This new look, which Google says is cleaner and simpler than the previews design, will likely be the first thing users notice, but the company has also added a number of new features to the app. Most of these are small, such as the ability to download copies of your files to your Android device, but the new document-scanning features open up a whole new range of use cases for Drive.

The scanner tool, for example, which you can now find under the “Add New” menu, allows you to easily turn paper documents like receipts, letter and billing statements into PDFs. Thanks to Google’s advanced optical character-recognition technology, you can also easily search them later on. This definitely feels a bit like Evernote and it’ll be interesting to see if Google will continue to go down this path in the future updates to the app.

Also new in this version is an updated editing experience for Google Sheets spreadsheets. Users can now adjust font types and sizes for their spreadsheets and change cell text colors and cell alignment right from the application. The app now also finally supports Google’s Cloud Print.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, Blogging, Facebook, Google, Google-Drive, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Chrome For Android Gets Fullscreen Mode For Phones, Simplified Searching From Omnibox, Voice Search Coming To iOS Soon

May 22, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Chrome 27 for the desktop arrived yesterday and today, Google updated Chrome for Android to version 27 as well. While the desktop update mostly focused on improved speed, the Android version actually includes a number of new features. The most important of these is probably the new fullscreen mode for phones. Just like in the iPhone app (or in the old stock Android browser), the toolbar will now disappear as you scroll down.

Also new in this version is a somewhat simplified search experience: searching from the omnibox, Google says, will “keep your search query visible in the omnibox, making it easier to edit, and show more on your search result page.”

The company has been experimenting with a similar feature in the desktop version of Chrome. It essentially turns the omnibox into the Google.com search form instead of switching to the URL for your search and then replicating the search interface it on the search results page. On the desktop, this always throws me for a loop, but given the space constraints on a smaller screen, this will probably allow for a few more lines of search results to show without the need to scroll down.

Other new features in this update include support for client-side certificates (something that’s often needed to connect to enterprise intranets) and tab history support for tablets (so you can use a long press on the back button to bring up your tab history.

What About iOS?

The iPhone and iPad versions of Chrome, the company today announced, will also soon get voice search. This update should launch in the next few days and will allow users to ask questions like “what’s the weather in Rome?” or “How many miles from San Antonio to Dallas?”

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, Blogging, chrome, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Google+ Gets A Refresh For Android To Mirror Its 41 Update Extravaganza From I/O, Adds New Location Section

May 20, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apps, Blogging, Facebook, Google, location, mobile, Photos, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, stream, TC

Android’s Design Principles And The Calculus Of The Human Pleasure Response

May 19, 2013 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially “enchat, simplify and amaze,” but there’s much more to those principles that that relatively slippery and non-scientific language might lead you to believe.

In fact, Garb and Roeber have based the ADP on compelling recent research that suggests eliciting negative emotional responses have an outsized effect on user experience, and require lots more counterbalance in terms of positive experiences to achieve a net positive, or even net zero lasting impression.

The Math Of Joy

They cited a John Gottman study that found successful marriages maintain around a 5:1 ration of pleasant feelings to bad, whereas those with more like a 1:1 ration have a far greater chance of ending in divorce. Another study they cited offers insight into team productivity, which suggests that positive-to-negative interactions in a work group setting operating in at least a 3:1 ratio result in much more productive teams than those with more negative experiences. Finally, they suggested that humans need three positive experiences to compensate for every bad one.

A lot of that may sound obvious when simplified; it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that designers and app builders should strive to please their audiences. But the execution of enacting that pleasure is where things get interesting, and where Roeber and Garb’s insight really shone through. It’s one thing to say “okay, we won’t anger a user here, and we’ll make them happy instead,” and quite another to actually do it.

Putting Theory Into Action

Hearing them describe it, the ADP almost came about under a sort of moral obligation. Roeber described how the teams in charge of Android UX and interaction found that tech now has “a profound impact” on all of our lives, and as such, when things go wrong, we have a tendency to blame ourselves, and that can have a subtle but ultimately strong impact on people’s wellbeing.

“All those non-ideal implementations eroded people’s confidence in their own abilities and caused frustration,” she said, describing how even small things that you might not think that much about ultimately leave you with a tick in the negative column if left unresolved. So if you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong in setting up Gmail on your phone, for instance, that’s something you’ll carry, and something that requires that much more to negate in terms of the overall karmic balancing act.

The example offered by the presenters of how exactly this works in action in Android right now is the visual signal given for when you’ve hit the last of your home screens. Android users will know that you’re greated with a blue glow animation and a visual representation of a page turning up to suggested nothing underneath. It’s clear in what it indicates, but it’s less accusatory or finger-pointing than a text alert, Roeber explained, which can still make users feel admonished and leave them internalizing some blame.

Another example meant to explain how interface elements can not only minimize or eliminate bad feelings, but actually generate good ones was the Google Now art which occupies the search box when you call up Android’s digital personal assistant. It changes based on both location and time of day, and Roeber and Garb explained that in testing, the produced a reaction of wonder and enjoyment not just the first time it was encountered by users in testing, but every time after that as well, thanks to its dynamic nature. Experiences like this rack up positive emotions on the part of the user.

The Interface As The Ultimate Customer Service Rep

Essentially, what Roeber and Garb described in their chat is a means of combining the best possible way of tiptoeing around a potentially negative interaction with positive ones that excite and delight. It’s a simple calculus designed to result in an overwhelmingly net positive experience, the ultimate aim of which isn’t just to minimize the negative impact of the tech we now use constantly, but also to add points in the wins column that can be used to offset negative interactions that happen anywhere in our lives. The ADP isn’t conceived as a way to make using apps not suck, in other words; it’s actually designed to turn Android into a means of spreading happiness.

That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s impossible to deny that the experience of using Android on a daily basis has improved dramatically since the introduction of the ADP. And all of these improvements serve to illustrate how mobile software is perhaps at its best when it’s acting as the idealized customer service representative: friendly and informal, but not overly familiar; attentive to and anticipatory of your needs; gentle and kind when you’re barking up the wrong tree. A truly great customer service experience leaves you feeling lifted, capable, intelligent and happy. It’s more than fair to expect the same out of our device interactions.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: ADP, android, apps, Blogging, Facebook, Google, io2013, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

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

May 17, 2013 by Jordan Crook Leave a Comment

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!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS.
Subscribe in iTunes

Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, Blogging, Facebook, Gadgets, gadgets podcast, Google, I/O, mobile, nexus, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC, video

With Google Play For Education, Google Looks To Challenge Apple’s Dominance In The Classroom

May 16, 2013 by Rip Empson Leave a Comment

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apps, Blogging, ecommerce, edtech, Education, Facebook, Google, Google Education, Google Play, media, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, startups, TC

Death By A Thousand Cuts? Google Wallet’s Plan To Take On PayPal Leverages Chrome, Android, Google+, Gmail & More

May 15, 2013 by Sarah Perez Leave a Comment

Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more.

It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand cuts, leveraging everything from Chrome to Android and even Gmail. What Google hasn’t quite worked out yet is how all this will tie together in the long run, but you can see the plan beginning to form.

#1: Google Wallet On The Web: Storing Payment Credentials In Chrome

Let’s start with the browser, the de facto home for online shopping.

It’s not news that the checkout experience is broken. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest pain points for today’s merchants, mainly because their websites have traditionally offered only cumbersome and tedious forms for shoppers to fill out in order to make a purchase.

As noted during today’s keynote, one of the hardest things you can do on the web is try to buy something. The process takes around 21 steps, the company explained. Of course, Google is exaggerating here a bit – billing and shipping details are usually the same, but Google counted each field (street, ZIP, etc.) twice.

That being said, things are even worse on mobile. Google notes that shopping cart abandonment on mobile devices is now an outrageous 97 percent. Again, that seems high (here’s the source for that figure), but the trend Google is illustrating with these slightly puffed up figures is not.

For comparison’s sake, Monetate’s data put global cart abandonment at around 82 percent as of Q4 2012. The company has been seeing increases in cart abandonment – which had been around 60 percent over the past several years – due to an increased number of shoppers doing research on mobile phones and other devices. As they reach the point of checking out on mobile, they’re now more likely to give up and move on because of the increased difficulty of the experience on mobile’s small screen, combined with retailers’ failure to roll out mobile-optimized experiences even as percentages of mobile shoppers continue to grow at record rates.

A number of startups have been attacking this challenge in various forms – mobile apps featuring universal carts, native m-commerce storefronts, mobile optimized payment flows, one-click mobile payments, in-stream payments, and more.

Google’s plan? Leverage Chrome.

Chrome is already the world’s most popular browser, with more than 750 million monthly active users today, up from 450 million just a year ago. Now it will begin baking a speedier checkout experience into its browser by syncing your billing information and other details within Chrome.

What that means is that when you visit a website using the Chrome browser, including the Chrome mobile browser, you’ll automatically be offered a prompt with your billing profiles. Chrome can then use autocomplete functionality to fill in information for you, such as your address, ZIP code, credit card info and more.

This functionality is being introduced via a new requestAutocomplete API, which Google describes here as “an aspiring web standard that will allow users to bypass pages of form fields with an imperative API for requesting details the browser knows.”

Google says this decreases the number of steps in the checkout process from 21 to just 3.

Overall, it’s a worthy attempt at solving the problem with online checkout, but it still suffers from some potential obstacles to broader adoption: Website owners will have to implement the functionality (the API) on their end, and unless this “aspiring” web standard becomes an “actual” web standard supported by all browsers, its impact would be limited.

This feature is still in its early days, but it’s designed to be open. Presumably, the company would still want to at least offer support for payment information retrieved from users’ Google Wallet accounts, if not actually require it. (Theoretically, payment info could just be saved directly in Chrome or any other browser without the need for a Wallet account.)

#2 Google Wallet On The Web (Um, Again): Google Wallet API

While the above describes what will first be a Chrome-only feature to start, Google Wallet has already found a way to support the web and mobile web through more traditional means.

In addition to supporting online checkout through Wallet, last fall, the company launched a Google Wallet API, which allows e-commerce website owners to support checkout via Google Wallet on mobile devices. This is independent of the browser or mobile operating system, however, making it more like an alternative to the PayPal button.

It’s a bit confusing because with the new Chrome autocomplete functionality, it seems there will be some overlap between the two. Site owners would end up implementing two APIs to be fully supportive of Google users: one to speed up checkout through automated form-filling in Chrome (likely pulling payment credentials from a user’s Google Wallet), and another if they wanted a Google Wallet button on their site that users could click to instead be walked through the Google Wallet checkout flow.

Which is better? How will these two tie together? For now, Google can’t say, only noting that it’s still “early days” for the Chrome autocomplete API and it’s probable that Google Wallet will be supported in some way.

But nothing is definite yet.

It’s indicative of how Google needs to bring its separate teams together in order to tell a more cohesive story about payments. Rumor has it that the Wallet team has been too “siloed,” which has caused some issues. (See part #5 below, for example).

#3 Going Wallet On Android: Paid Apps, In-App Purchases & Now, the Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API

Android is the world’s most popular mobile operating system, so it only makes sense for Google to take advantage of that fact to pull in more users’ payment information. After all, today’s users are already using Google Wallet to purchase paid applications for Android devices, as well as in-app purchases, so why not extend Wallet to support purchases of physical goods, too?

That’s just what Google did.

With the new Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API, merchants and developers selling physical goods and services (as opposed to virtual goods like those sold in mobile games), can now offer their customers 2-click checkout.

At launch, the company has signed on a number of new partners, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Fancy, GoPago live POS, NFC Task Launcher, Priceline, Rue La La, Tabbedout, Uber and Wrapp.

The service ties in also with Google+, allowing users to register and sign in to the apps, similar to Facebook Connect, and then tap to checkout without the need to enter billing or shipping information.

#4: Google Wallet in Gmail: “Attach” Money

Another vector in the fight to topple PayPal is person-to-person payments – like paying the babysitter or paying your dad the money you borrowed, for example. Digitally savvy folks today still largely turn to PayPal to make this happen.

Google’s plan here? Leverage Gmail.

It’s simple and ingenious really. The familiar email “attachment” icon has just become another onboarding experience for Google Wallet. With the Gmail update, the service’s 425 million+ users can hover over the attachment paperclip icon, then click the $ icon in order to “attach money” to their message.

Of course you’ll need a Google Wallet account first.

For now, the feature is only available in the desktop version of Gmail, but it will certainly come to mobile in time.

#5 Google Wallet In Real World? (What’s Plan B If NFC Never Wins?)

The only area where Google is lacking a solid strategy is in real-world payments – an area where competitor PayPal has been ramping up quickly in recent months. PayPal has been working with nearly two-dozen nationwide retail chains, including Home Depot, Jamba Juice and more, to be integrated into their point-of-sale systems. It has separately announced integrations with point-of-sale and hardware makers like NCR, gas station and convenience store-focused Gilbarco Veeder-Root’s point-of-sale system, coin-counting kiosk maker Coinstar, and more.

Google has been trudging along with its NFC-based Google Wallet app. The app uses technology whose broader adoption has been slow to pick up here in the U.S., in part due to a lack of support from Apple, as well as swirling questions as to how much of an improvement tapping your phone at point-of-sale really has over a card swipe in the long run.

Google had plans to launch a plastic “universal” credit card that would allow users to switch between their preferred payment methods on the fly while still using a physical card at point-of-sale. For whatever reason, the company scrapped those plans just ahead of Google I/O.

Combined, all of the above areas on their own can’t be considered a PayPal killer by any means. But as they become more tightly integrated over time (assuming Google can get its teams together to focus on the bigger picture beyond their own product’s development and focus on the global stage), you can see a viable threat to PayPal starting to shape up.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, Blogging, ecommerce, Facebook, Google, google wallet, io2013, mobile, Mobile payments, payments, paypal, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC, Tldr

Apple Bagged 57% Of $12.5B In Smartphone Profits In Q1; Android 43% – Samsung 95% Share Of That, “More Than Google”

May 15, 2013 by Ingrid Lunden Leave a Comment

Apple continues to lead both as the single-most profitable smartphone maker, and by default the most profitable platform, taking 57% of $12.5 billion in smartphone operating profits in Q1, according to figures out from Strategy Analytics today. Android took 43%, equating to $5.3 billion, Neil Mawston, chief analyst with the firm, tells TechCrunch.

The figures come as analyst houses are releasing various estimates for how smartphones have been selling in Q1. Strategy Analytics have published some numbers that tell the story in a different way.

Yes, Android is dominating smartphone sales (Gartner’s figures yesterday noted that Google’s platform took nearly 75% of all sales in the three month period). Yes, Samsung continues to widen its lead against Apple — now at 31% of all smartphone sales. But it still has a ways to go before it tops Apple, which has built its brand as the premium offering. (One possible reason why it has resisted up to now launching a low-cost, more cheaply made handset.)

Within the Android portion of smartphone profits, Samsung is taking ever the bigger lion’s share. Its $5.1 billion in operating profit works out to 95% of all Android revenues, and 40.8% of all smartphone operating profits overall. Bad news for other vendors/platforms like Nokia and BlackBerry: their collective profits totalled just $300 million for the quarter, working out to a 2.2% share of profits.

This also shows that Samsung has come quite some way in working out its profitability engine in the last year as it has continued to grow. This time a year ago, it was generating only about half the revenues of Apple in mobile devices (and that was counting Samsung’s smartphones as well as its feature phone handsets), and accordingly a thinner proportion of profits.

These numbers largely tally with some released earlier this month by Canaccord Genuity (via AllThingsD). The difference lies at the lower end, where Canaccord Genuity says that vendors beyond the top two effectively took nothing.

With these numbers coming out just as Google I/O kicks off, Strategy Analytics again throws light on just how disproportionate Samsung’s weight is in the Android ecosystem, and how its sales dominance works out to larger economies of scale and profit: its $5.1 billion in operating profits works out to 95% of all profits made on Android, with LG the only other vendor to break out from “others,” with a meagre 2.5% of profit share on $100 million in operating profits.

“An efficient supply chain, sleek products and crisp marketing have been among the main drivers of Samsung’s impressive profitability,” Woody Oh, Strategy Analytics’ senior analyst writes. In contrast, “LG delivered a small profit during the quarter, but it currently lacks the volume scale needed to match Samsung’s outsized profits.”

Just think of what that means for the even smaller Android OEMs.

Mawston believes that Samsung is actually generating even more revenue than Google itself from Android, counting things like mobile advertising and apps revenue.

“We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does,” he writes. As Google’s Android head Sundar Pichai today reported during that I/O keynote that there have been some 900 million Android activations worldwide, this begs the question of who is in the driver’s seat on the platform — and by association smartphones worldwide.

“Samsung has strong market power and it may use this position to influence the future direction of the Android ecosystem,” Mawston writes. “For example, Samsung could request first or exclusive updates of new software from Android before rival hardware vendors.” If those kinds of requests are likely to get made, it will get harder and harder for Google to resist and continue maintaining the level playing field it’s tried to create for its mobile platform.

Tablets are not included in any of the above calculations, Strategy Analytics says.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Analysis, android, apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, Strategy Analytics, TC

Google Announces It Has Reached 900M Android Activations, Sundar Pichai Calls It “Most Popular Mobile OS In The World”

May 15, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Today, Google announced that its Android operating system has reached 900M activations. This is a 500M increase from last year’s announcement. At one point, Google said that it was experiencing 1M Android activations a day.

These activations have brought in 48M app installs for developers who have launched on Google Play, which is why the I/O conference exists. As we noted yesterday, Google is making its move to try and sway developers to select their OS first, rather than its competitor Apple.

Android and Chrome boss, Sundar Pichai, took the stage and discussed how far Google has come with Android:

Android started with a simple goal to bring open standards to the world. Today, it is the most popular mobile operating system in the world.

The company was quick to point out that there are 7B people in the world, so they have a long ways to go as far as installations.

As Google gets more distribution through different types of devices, be it smartphones, tablets, video game systems or Glass, the open nature of the platform is clearly working. Getting into emerging markets will also be easier for Google, as its operating system can be placed onto lower-end devices and doesn’t require new yearly phone launches to start the distribution cycle again.

Google’s stock is currently at an all-time high of $909.02 as the company shares its news.