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Apple announced last week that in just 3 years 15 billion apps have been downloaded through it’s online store.
With a sizeable revenue cut of paid programmes, it has become the accidental goose who has laid the golden egg for Steve Jobs.

And although Apple did not invent the smartphone application, its system has defined the user experience. iOS apps are simplicity at every turn – payment, installation and use.

Others have followed-suit, with great success. Android Market passed three billion downloads in May.

But after a period of rapid growth, native smartphone apps are facing a fight for survival.

That threat comes from web apps – software that runs in a browser rather than being downloaded and installed on the device’s operating system.

Mubaloo, one of the UK’s biggest mobile app developers, estimates that requests from clients for web apps has doubled in recent months – enough to make them the third big player in app development.

The reason for that is simple – developing web apps solves several headaches.

Firstly, like the regular internet, a good web app can be made to adapt to a wide variety of devices rather than forcing the developer to create different products for each platform – be it iPhone or Android, smartphone or tablet.

Secondly, by circumventing the strict guidelines associated with official stores, Mr Mason’s clients can have exactly what they want, and can say for certain when it will be ready for the public.

Should any changes need to be made once the app is live, they can be made instantly, rather than wait several days for approval.

And then there’s the matter of money.

Put an app in the App Store and 30% of each sale goes to Apple. Android takes the same, but the cash goes to payment processors and mobile carriers. Microsoft and BlackBerry also get a cut of what sells in their stores.

Web apps offer developers the chance to cut out the middle man.

If that was not enough of an incentive to fly solo, in February of this year, Apple announced that it would also be taking 30% of revenue from in-app subscription payments.

It is that levy which may have proved be the final straw for cash-strapped publishers relying on a lucrative digital strategy to keep operations moving.

The first major player to adopt a web-apped approach to mobile subscribers was the Financial Times (FT). In June, the newspaper released its debut web app. Since launch it has attracted 200,000 users.

FT bosses have said subsequently that future app development will be focused on web platforms rather than native.

Key improvements in smartphones’ ability to power staple web components mean the FT web app does almost everything the company would expect from a downloaded app – including offline reading.

Smartphones and their mobile apps have been added to the official basket of goods used to calculate UK inflation rates.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS)  updates its 650 item basket of goods and services annually, to better reflect changing public spending habits.

The shifting of goods and services in and out of the basket gives an insight into the changing nature of shopping habits and new technology in the UK.

The ONS collects about 180,000 separate price quotations of this basket of items in 150 areas of the UK.

These are then used to calculate the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) measures of inflation.

Smartphone applications have replaced mobile phone downloads, such as ringtones and phone wallpaper, in the ONS’s estimate of a typical shop.

Also added to the 2011 basket were sparkling wines and oven-ready joints, with vending machine cigarettes and pork shoulder being taken out.

The ONS ensures that items or distinct markets where consumers’ expenditure exceeds about £400m a year are explicitly represented in the basket, unless adequately represented by other items.

Where spending on items falls below £100m a year, there should be good reason for their continuing inclusion in the basket, the ONS said.

For example, while spending on acoustic guitars and power drills is relatively low, both are included in the basket to represent wider markets, namely musical instruments and electrical tools.

A new mobile apps awards ceremony has awarded Flipboard, the media app, the best in show at the first Appys – an awards ceremony organisers hope to make an annual fixture.
The MediaPost event in San Francisco honoured the best in downloadable software for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers.

The Appys are all about acknowledging extraordinary Applications, whether they be mobile, social, or Web-based Apps living inside another Web site.

Winners were announced at the Appy Awards gala event on Monday, February 28, 2011 at the conclusion of the first day of MediaPost’s annual OMMA Global Conference & Expo in San Francisco, CA.

Appys receives submissions for consideration for an award which includes a “brief” with a detailed description of the app’s features, as well as any anecdotes, supporting facts, or figures that illustrate its creativity and accomplishment.

This year’s Best in Show award went to Flipboard- which offers a magazine-style interface to read through status updates and photos, links and content shared by the reader’s social network.

Designed for use on the iPad, Flipboard allows users to pick the websites they want to create a personalised magazine.

It gives you your current location and it gives you options like find cool stuff nearby, make plans and explore a new location”

Another winning app was Goby, in the mapping and location-based category.

To many people Google and Facebook share the same disregard for their users’ personal data security- so their latest spat is somewhat ironic.Google’s latest mobile operating system upgrade will not display Facebook contacts from the users’ smart phone address book.

Google said it took the action as it was no longer willing to exempt Facebook from its data-sharing rules.

The contact-altering update applies to the Gingerbread version of Google’s Android mobile operating system – currently only available for the Nexus S and Nexus One handsets, which are manufactured for Google.

Makers of other Android-based handsets are expected to make the Gingerbread upgrade available to their users in the coming months.

If those mobiles use the same version of Gingerbread as the Nexus phones, more owners would find Facebook contacts wiped from their address book.

Originally, Facebook’s Android app allowed users to populate the phone’s address book with Facebook contacts.

However, that data could not be exported from the handset, instead it was controlled by Facebook – something Google has said it can no longer tolerate.

“Since Facebook contacts cannot be exported from the device, the appearance of integration created a false sense of data portability,” Google said in a statement.

Facebook contacts will, however, remain accessible via the app.

More than 200 million people accessed Facebook via a mobile device in 2010, according to its own figures – up from 65 million in the previous year.

That information could be used to improve the targeting of adverts that Google publishes, he added.

In late 2010, the two companies engaged in a similar data quarrel over the sharing of contact data between Facebook and Google’s Gmail web-based email system.

Google has launched a new apps payment system that allows users to subscribe to online content for a 10% commission fee.The move comes after rival Apple was lambasted after they increased the charges of it’s payment system which now takes 30% of the apps sellers’ sale price.

The payments system is called “One Pass” and will work on tablets and smartphones, as well as Google-related websites.

One Pass will launch initially in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The announcement came just one day after Apple announced new rules for publishers selling subscriptions on its iOS platform.

Apple says companies must now offer users the option to buy directly through an iTunes account, handing 30% of the price to Apple.

Previously, vendors were allowed to simply direct customers to an external website, keeping all of the profits.

On a Google blog posting, Lee Shirani, the company’s director of business product management wrote: “Publishers can customise how and when they charge for content while experimenting with different models to see what works best for them.”

Britons who watch live TV on their iPad and Android smart phones with a new BBC appliction but do not have a TV licence are unlikely to be caught after the corporation admitted it has failed to develop the necessary tracking technology.
The corporation has not updated its detection technology to include tablet devices, mobile phones and computers.

Instead it continues to use the same tracking system which only detects television signals to discover which homes have TV sets that might be unlicensed.

The BBC claimed that they will prosecute anyone who watches live TV via the new iPlayer application, which it is launched last week, without a TV licence – but it was unclear how they would be caught.

The corporation said it does not have a “separate enforcement” strategy to ensure people using the BBC iPlayer have paid for a TV licence.

The free “app” allows people to watch BBC TV and listen to BBC Radio live on the move – an action which usually needs to be covered by a TV licence.

However, a TV licensing spokesman said: “There is no separate enforcement strategy [to cover iPlayer consumption], we continue to focus our attention on the small minority of unlicensed addresses.”

Nor is the BBC developing a strategy, such as compulsory online registration with a TV licence code for a password, to catch people evading the fee.

This is despite the fact that anyone watching or recording programmes at the same time as they are shown on TV, regardless of the device used, needs to have paid the £145.50 annual licence fee.

The admission also comes at the same time as the BBC’s digital department is prioritising the development of iPlayer apps to serve the increasing demand of people wanting to watch live TV on the move via portable devices.

“Apps are a big part of our plans to make BBC Online more easily accessible on mobile devices,” said Daniel Danker, general manager of BBC Future Media and Technology.

“These apps are coming at a time when we’re really beginning to see massive growth of people using BBC iPlayer on mobile devices. Over Christmas, growth in mobile use of BBC iPlayer outpaced PC growth by more than 2-to-1, and BBC iPlayer growth on tablets outpaced PCs by more than 20-to-1.”