Embeddable, interactive iOS app previews using App.io

App.io (which used to be Kickfolio) allows users to create interactive previews of your iPhone and iPad apps. Not sure exactly how its working but pretty darn cool. Check out Airbnb example below:

I think this will be overkill for a lot of apps where simple screenshots will work, but it’s amazing tech and would be useful for certain types of apps that might need a little more in-depth explanation/preview before a person is willing to plunk down 2 bucks.

I would not recommend using App.io if you’ve got a free app. Get those potential customers to the App Store as quickly as possible to download your app and that can be the “demo”. I will be trying App.io out soon, as much to see how it works as anything and will post my thoughts about it afterwards.

Measuring Android Version Fragmentation

android-fragmentation
Comparing Android version market share and adoption rates over time.

Android fragmentation is a dirty little buzzword you’ve likely heard everywhere from Angry Birds to Steve Jobs and probably in strategy meetings with us here at MarketNet about that big app idea your company has.

Just what exactly is fragmentation and how big of a problem is it for Android and your project? Chris Sauve at pxldot has done a great job summarizing and charting the issue on his blog post Android Measuring Stick.

One of the best things about Google’s Android operating system is that it’s open source and available for other developers and device manufacturers to pretty much do whatever they’d like with it. That means we can get cool things like fitness accessories and Fossil watches powered by Android, but it also means that there’s no one true version of Android out there that to develop for.

Right now there are three versions of Android still out there in numbers large enough to require support, and that’s ignoring the brand new Android 4.0 (also called Ice Cream Sandwich) that was released in November and is currently running on about 1% of Android devices. It’s easy to predict that in just a month or two there will be four versions of Android out there, each with huge numbers of users. Even if version 2.1 (Eclair) is “only” at a 7.6% share, with the number of total Android devices out there numbering in the hundreds of millions that is a lot of potential customers you could be turning away if your site or app doesn’t work with that version. Add in the diversity of screen sizes available and you’re starting to understand what a difficult and important issue market fragmentation can be for a mobile project.