by Reza Farivari
If you are developing Open Data applications, best to keep in mind the growing mobile market. While you may think your clients are still sitting behind desktop machines or balancing laptops on their knees, there may also be lots of data hungry mobile users out there who should not be neglected.
The trend towards mobile is accelerating and the statistics are revealing. According to Tony Bowers in Tech Decision Maker, one in three minutes spent online is now done on mobile devices. Google research indicates if you don’t have a mobile site or the site is not optimized for smartphones, over 60 percent of visitors will select another site that works well on mobile. A 2014 Gartner article says worldwide shipments of mobile devices are anticipated to grow by 7.6 percent to 2.5 billion units in 2014. People are moving away from notebooks and desktops as tablets and hybrid devices grow. Desktops and tablets are expected to show a 7 percent worldwide decline in 2014 compared to last year.
When planning your mobile product, considering the market shares of the three dominant operating systems (OS) can help set priorities. Android is the top OS for mobile. There are 1.9 billion Android OS devices versus 682 million Apple OS products. According to tech industry analyst Mary Meeker, Android surpassed Windows as the #1 OS for Internet devices in the first quarter of 2012.
She illustrates the social change brought about by smart phones with twin pictures in her Industry Trends presentation of May 2013. Notice what is in the hands of the people:
The rate of mobile internet traffic growth is also graphically illustrated in her Industry Trends presentation of 2014:
Keep all this in mind when developing your next data or Open Data site. The world is going mobile.
