Michael DeGusta of The Understatement posted an excellent infographic (that is, a truly useful one) this week showing just how poorly the Android community, namely Google (NSDQ: GOOG), phone makers, and carriers, have supported their early adopters with new versions of the software. Click through for the full graphic, but the stats are telling: of Android phones launched prior to June 2010, several of which are still under contract with their respective carriers, “12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less” and “10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.”

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Sometimes we come across an idea that is so interesting or innovative, we have to report on it even if it is not yet clear what the uptake will be.

One such idea is the “QR code service from Space“, recently launched by Phillips & Company.

Check it out.

The idea is that more and more people are using tools such as Google Maps or Google Earth to look at locations on the ground. For example, Google Earth has reportedly been downloaded over 400 million times!

So why not use this opportunity to connect with these people for marketing purposes.

The concept makes use of the fact that services such as Google get new satellite photos of the earth on a regular basis. So, for any company that has a building which is viewable for example on Google Maps, Phillips will arrange to place a large QR code on top of your building, just when the satellites are coming by to refresh their images of their location.

The result is that when someone looks on Google Maps, the will see the building with a QR code on it (see image below). Consumers can then use the QR code scanner in their mobile phone to learn more about the business. Scanning the QR code will cause them to be directed to any sort of website or information source that the business chooses.

Phillips calls this marketing service “Blue Marble“. Whether or not companies are willing to pay the money to have a QR code appear on their building in Google Maps is not clear, only time will tell. But in any case, this is one of the most innovative ideas for communicating with consumers.

This is from mobiadnews.com

Android smartphones already outsell the iPhone in the U.S. and many other markets, but one area where iOS still reigns supreme is app downloads. That may not last, though: research firm Xyologic estimates that if current trends continue, downloads from the Android market will surpass the iOS App Store in June of 2012. That’s around the same time that the number of available apps are expected to be equal.

Right now, at least 494 million iOS apps are downloaded by users every month. The same figure across most Android devices is just 279 million, but in a short eight months Android will have caught up worldwide, at least by Xyologic’s math. Certain markets already have a heavy Android dominance, including the Czech Republic, Poland and Portugal. It appears that Apple’s tablet dominance will take a lot longer to fall by the wayside – iPad app downloads make up an impressive 15% of its download space. Whatever the equivalent number is for Android’ Honeycomb-optimize apps, it’s nowhere near that.

Notably, Xyologic’s research does not include figures from China, where Android is growing by leaps and bounds despite the (suspected) best efforts of the Chinese government. It also doesn’t include third-party app downloads from the Amazon App Store and others, a factor that might increase exponentially as more and more tablets use the popular solution, to say nothing of the upcoming Amazon Kindle Fire. Keep in mind that all of these estimates are tentative and based upon usage as of August, 2011.

[via Taiwan News]

I came across this very interesting chart.

Following partner Nokia, Intel has now announced it is to abandon the MeeGo platform as well. Instead, it will be working on a new mobile platform with Samsung that’s called Tizen.

Though it will be possible to develop native apps for Tizen, the companies will promote its HTML5 engine toward app developers. The core of Tizen will in part be built from what Intel and Nokia developed for MeeGo. Other bits will come from another project that is merged in Tizen; LiMo. The first Samsung hardware with Tizen is expected nid-2012 while the SDK’s should de ready in four to six months from now. What will happen to Bada is unknown.

Have you heard of BloomWorlds? Chances are you probably haven’t, because even though I’ve been seeing intermittent updates about it on and off for the past year and a half, they never actually came out with a product, which was supposed to be a family-friendly, curated Android market. As of today, the project is shut down, and the post mortem report filled with reasons for its failure is sitting in our inboxes. And now your screens.

I’ve heard a lot of talk, and one of the founders even fruitlessly spent hours buying Brian and me drinks at CES trying to convince us that their market had a chance. I simply wasn’t seeing it, but he was adamant and as any passionate founder refused to accept reasoning. That was one of their biggest mistakes. If you’re going to bet against Google and the rest of the industry, you better make sure you have the top notch idea and top notch execution. BloomWorlds lacked both.

Ironically, they are probably going to see more press now than ever (BloomWorlds even passed on TechCrunch and Mashable coverage at the time).

^{If after 1.5 years you’re still staring at this, something is wrong}

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The biggest app stores are now tipping the half-million mark in terms of overall inventory, but a recent report from the app analytics firm found that when it comes to the most popular apps, consumers often gravitate to content published especially for their markets. In the biggest store of all—the App Store from Apple—on average, nearly one-third of the most popular apps in each country store—27 percent—were unique to those stores.

Distimo notes that the U.S.—at 7,158 apps—has the most exclusively published apps in its App Store. No surprise, really, given this is where so many developers are based and where so many hope to find success first before trying elsewhere.

Looking at worldwide trends, language also plays a big role.

Taking the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, these countries’ top apps overlap 54 percent of the time. Although Latin America does not seem to get ranked by Distimo, you can imagine that it too would see a similar trend. The storewide average overlap is 33 percent.

On the other hand, countries with the highest number of localized apps in the top rankings marry two important trends: they have very mobile-friendly consumers, and they are countries where English is not the first language.

Japan topped the list with 67 percent of its most popular apps being popular in that country alone. China, where Apple launched a country-specific App Store in October 2010, came in second with 56 percent of most popular apps specific to the China App Store.

Is there a limit to how many local apps have a chance against the world-wide bestsellers like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja? For now, it appears the answer is yes. Distimo notes that one-third local seems to be the general number for local apps’ popularity across all platforms, not just Apple’s.

Nokia’s Ovi Store, for example, has significantly more country-specific apps than other app stores—29.4 percent for Ovi with Apple the next-highest proportion at only 5.2 percent—but Distimo notes that the number of local apps that make it into the top rankings are roughly the same as for the App Store and the Android Market, despite Apple’s and Google’s catalogs having far fewer local apps.

That could spell an opportunity for those developers looking to have more visibility among users in specific markets.

You can see that trend playing out especially in China. Platforms like Android are seeing the creation of full-out local app stores to compete with the Android Market, catering to those using devices built on the OS, with app stores from the likes of Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) and Tencent.

There have also been a number of companies setting up shop to help localize apps from, say, the U.S. market for the Chinese market. The most recent of these was an effort from the DIY app platform Mobile Roadie, which as partnered with local mobile agency FabriQate to launch Q Mobao to help Western developers create iOS and Android apps for the Chinese market. It has also launched a similar initiative in South Korea.

Targeting specific markets is not just about local content, of course.

Last week IDC published figures (via Bloomberg) for smartphone market share in India, and it turns out that Apple has only a tiny part of the market in that country, shipping just over 62,000 iPhones to India in the last quarter, less than it shipped to Norway. That gives Apple a 2.6 percent share of the smartphone market in India. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) currently enjoys the biggest share of the market in India, with 46 percent.

With India the second-largest mobile market after China, that is a big miss for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). IDC notes that part of the issue has been a lack of widespread 3G network for fast mobile data services. Although users can still connect by WiFi, that’s an impractical solution for a person on the move.

Fifty percent of all mobile games distributed via Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store yield revenues under $3,000 throughout their lifecycle according to the results of a new developer survey conducted by Owen Goss, founder of Streaming Colour Studios, the startup behind iOS titles including Dapple and LandFormer.

Roughly 250 iOS developers participated in the online survey, conducted during the week of Sept. 19. Goss found that the top 20 percent of iOS developers earn 97 percent of App Store revenues, with the top 1 percent earning more than a third of App Store payouts. Only 25 percent of developers have earned more than $30,000 lifetime total revenue selling iOS games and another 25 percent of developers have hauled in less than $200. Four percent of survey respondents have earned more than $1 million in the App Store.

App Store games generated median revenues of $1,100 over the last 12 months–in other words, half earned more than $1,100 and the other half brought in less. Goss adds that a quarter of games earned more than $10,675 and another quarter generated less than $140.

Freemium mobile games–i.e., titles that are free to download but offer premium in-app transactions like virtual currency and virtual goods–generate 65 percent of gaming revenues in the App Store according to data published in July by mobile app analytics provider Flurry. The report states that the number of consumers who spend money in a free game ranges from 0.5 percent to 6 percent, with spending influenced by the quality of the title and its core mechanics. Ninety percent of consumers are still not spending a dime on in-game transactions.

Games remain the most popular mobile application category, with 64 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers playing mobile titles in the last 30 days, according to research published by Nielsen. Gamers across Apple’s iOS platform spend 14.7 hours a month playing mobile titles, while the average gamer spends 9.3 hours each month. Sixty-nine percent of iOS gamers download titles from the App Store–14 percent play preloaded games, 4 percent turn to web games and 3 percent play games transferred from another device.

Developers make the most money from apps developed for BlackBerry devices, according to market research company Evans Data.

The study, which covered 400 developers, found that 13 percent of BlackBerry developers make at least US$100,000 per app, “considerably more” than Android or Apple developers, according to Evans Data CEO Janel Garvin.

She said this will mean BlackBerry devices “continue to be compelling to developers, especially in the enterprise.”

“The industry has a perception that developers are going to target either Android or Apple, and those two will define the market. However, there’s room for more than two,” Garvin added.

However, Google’s Android Market is the app store most widely used by commercial developers, with 47 percent of those surveyed saying they have experience of the store compared to 43 percent for Apple’s App Store. Android Market was also tipped by the majority of developers to be the dominant app store in two years’ time.

Other figures to emerge from the research showed that the most-used monetisation model by app developees is paid apps without ads, followed by subscriptions. The biggest complaint developers had about app stores is poor visibility for their apps, with 37 percent citing this as an issue.