Android Application, Developing For Android, Android App Development, Android Mobiles

A total of about 2000 smartphone patent applications have been published but only about 85 have issued. Patent applications, however, are published a year and a half after an application is filed. So there is anywhere between 1500 applications (0% per year growth rate) and 2500 applications (1.5X per year growth) that have been filed but have not been published...

According to Jennifer Lu, director of business development at TinyCo, this mobile app developer's establishment of the TinyFund on May 25th is drawing a huge response—no surprise there, given how many people want to develop apps. "I'm really excited about the number of quality applicants we've already received…selecting funding recipients is going to be an extensive process!" she says. TinyCo, who recently received substantial funding from Andreessen Horowitz, launched the $5 million investment TinyFund to help support mobile developers. A few interesting tidbits came out of this interview with Lu.

In a talk recently at Google IO on the topic of app piracy, Google made some great points about how developers should combat piracy. Many of these observations apply to all platforms, a few just to Google Android technologies.

"There is a tectonic shift in the landscape of video gaming" writes Flurry, Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of mobile analytics on iOS and Android. "The era of marketing singularly to the 18-34 hardcore male gamer is officially over" reads their latest analysis on mobile social gamers, noting the impressive growth of both iOS and Android in relation to the rest of the market. The data makes for some interesting reading, and the emergence of a "mobile casual gamer" (someone who plays games on their mobile device for fun) is becoming ever clearer. And iOS is the one who's taking the biggest "bite" out of portable platforms.

Once upon a time, you could have up to 1000 songs in your pocket (that was iPod 1). Now you can have 8.5 million, thanks to Rdio's Mobile API. Formed by the founders of Skype, Rdio (pronounced arr-dee-o, a combination of radio and audio) is an "unlimited, on-demand social music service" that allows users to discover – and listen to – music through their friends and followers. Now developers can tap into this resource, with an API that allows for the search, access and playback of the entire Rdio catalogue (their top charts, too).