31–40 of 239 posts
Facebook paid 16B Dollars for 400,000,000 active phone numbers and all the personal info bound to them. It's not the app itself it's the data, you know it well too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of today: Smartphones outsold feature phones for this first time ever in India. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/samsung-smartphones-outse... From my personal experiences, international countries that have smartphone adoption use Viber, and the feature phone countries use WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is also really strong here in Germany and other parts of Europe. More of my friends are on WhatsApp than Facebook (only very few more though).
It all seems to me that it's just to pad the "total number of active users on Facebook and associated platforms" column during earnings season.
Let's not forget Symbian and Blackberry either. WhatsApp also runs on those. I don't think starting a new Blackberry, Symbian or J2ME project today is really a good idea, though. It takes at least a few years for a company to make an exit, and by the time you do, those burning platforms will have flamed out.
Most people I know who earn ~10$ a day have smartphones with Android or WP.
Its biggest plus is that it is cross platform. They have apps for Blackberry, Android, iOS and Symbian. So you can talk with almost anybody out there. At least in my home country, most people have Blackberry/Symbian. Imagine having a group conversation with people on different platforms and in different countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Background notifications too? I'm surprised - I wrote a Twitter client in 2009, and I couldn't find a way to make that work. I didn't think J2ME could do that at all, to be honest.
Maybe some form of this... ? http://www.javaworld.com/article/2071753/mobile-java/push-me...
The key take away from this article is not to build your app in J2ME but to recognize how big the world is outside of America. American focused startups face lots of competition in a relatively small market.
The key take away from this article is not to build your app in J2ME but to recognize how big the world is outside of America. American focused startups face lots of competition in a relatively small market.
Ya.. that is definitely the takeaway. If you address all platforms, your market is suddenly both under served and absolutely huge.
Let's not forget Symbian and Blackberry either. WhatsApp also runs on those. I don't think starting a new Blackberry, Symbian or J2ME project today is really a good idea, though. It takes at least a few years for a company to make an exit, and by the time you do, those burning platforms will have flamed out.
It absolutely makes sense to work on a J2ME app today if you have a product aimed at developing nations. They won't be swimming in smartphones any time soon.
Whether or not that impacts your business model depends on what the business model is, of course. I'm sure a few more Symbian apps will be cranked out as retailers blow out their stock of old inventory. Very poor people will probably hold on to old phones for years, as well. But phones do break, and batteries die after a few years, so a decade from now Symbian will be just an obscure memory, like the Acorn Archimedes or the ZX Spectrum.