An interesting infographic from the mobile advertising provider and mediation company – InnerActive was produced encompassing the timeline between the last year’s MWC in Barcelona and this year’s MWC.

Related posts:

1. Great collection of mobile UI resources
2. Building Secure Mobile Applications – AT&T free webcast
3. BlackBerry Developer Conference 2010 is tomorrow

A compilation of mobile UI resources:

• http://www.pttrns.com

• http://www.LovelyUI.com

• http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/

• http://mobile-patterns.com

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Building Secure Mobile Applications – AT&T free webcast

Last year I’ve put some stats for BB OS distribution here: BlackBerry OS distribution March/April 2011

Beginning 2012 I was wondering what is the OS distribution now with the BB OS 7.0 devices in the wild and especially since I wanted to do updates only for the devices running BB OS 5.0 and up.

So the distribution looks like this:

Making devices that run OS below 5.0 to be about 5-6% of all the devices. Of course this data is based on the users who use this specific app, but I am almost positive that this is pretty close to the generalized numbers.

The numbers look like this:

Related posts:

1. BlackBerry OS distribution March/April 2011
2. New England BlackBerry Developer Meetup group – first meetup notes

Here’s the chart of smartphones market share according to market research firm NPD

Quite interesting trend can be seen by the end of the year with huge spike in iOS sales. This of course can be attributed to the iPhone 4S and the holiday season. Apple products are still considered luxury and make great gifts as opposed to say Android which is considered more of a necessity.

UPDATE:
Additional source (showing the same trend though) from Nielsen
***Note the shift in timeline. Otherwise the graphs correlate.

Related posts:

1. Developers can see the device and app version on each comment on Android Market
2. Android vs. iPhone vs. BlackBerry Users
3. Is RIM going down?

Very energizing and inspiring video about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor with the Adreno GPU. Wide deployment of the SnapDragon processors (including in the new iPhone 4S) makes it so more attractive to develop for.

If you are a game developer watch the video and get inspired!

Click to view in the full post

Related posts:

1. Will Windows eventually loose portables war thanks to many ARM powered netbooks coming?

Just got an email from RIM with news and such and noticed the link to the OS center they run on their website to help developers choose which BB OS to target. After looking at the stats, I decided to make a comparison and see how the official stats from RIM differ from what I see within my applications.

Here’s the distribution published by RIM (dated March 3-d) I am not sure what they compiled into the March 3-d, i.e. what the timestamp of March 3-d actually means. Was it based on OS tracked for March 3-d, was it for last month, week or such. I couldn’t find that information.

And below is the distribution I have compiled from the data for the month of April 2011 (a month worth of data)

The breakdown by OS version is not identical but the picture is pretty much similar, except that my chart is much nicer I’ve got 6.1 devices (hmmm!) and the 5.0 OS section is a bit larger for my statistics than it is for the official statistics. But again, the official statistics are pretty much 2 month old now and actually since the rest of the sections pretty much coincide with the official statistics, I would assume that the number of OS 5.0 just got larger in these 2 month; which by itself is great news for BB developers. Hooray to that and I will try to keep up with statistics to see how the distribution shifts, maybe another post in couple month or when something interesting happens. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see something like that in the future and whether it was useful for you.

Related posts:

1. BlackBerry OS distribution January 2012
2. BlackBerry Developer Conference 2010 is tomorrow
3. BlackBerry Eclipse plugin 1.1 will fix some of the annoying problems

The rumors have it that Android 2.4 codenamed Ice Cream is expected this summer in June-July and the release will be announced at the Google/IO.

What’s next in store for Android releases? Will the next release going to be named “Jello” or maybe “Jam”? I personally vote for “Jello”

Related posts:

1. Developers can see the device and app version on each comment on Android Market
2. Android – Can’t find my ADB
3. iOS vs. Android vs. BlackBerry vs. Windows Phones

I wrote yesterday about my (mostly) negative experience working with these companies, but some of you might give it a try and maybe your results will be much better or maybe things have actually improved lately. In any case, the code here should get you up to speed covering most of the dirty work of working with these companies’ APIs.

I will post 4 classes here:

• AdGrabber -  main abstract class to give all other specific grabbers structure and save some repeating code
• MillenialAdGrabber - MillennialMedia specific grabber
• NexAgeAdGrabber - right, NexAge specific grabber
• SomaAdGrabber - the SMAATO ad grabber. Their ad platform is dubbed SOMA, hence the name

If you are using this code, please give an attribution when applicable with a link to this post.

AdGrabber

/**

 * Abstract class for ad unit grabbing. Inheriting subclasses will implement ad serving platform specific web service interfaces.

 *

 * Copyright: Creative Common Attribution http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

 */

public abstract class AdGrabber {



   protected HashTableExt _adFieldPropertyBag;



   public AdGrabber(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      if (adFieldPropertyBag == null) {

         _adFieldPropertyBag = new HashTableExt();

      } else {

         _adFieldPropertyBag = adFieldPropertyBag;

      }

   }



   /**

    * Inheriting classes have to implement the grabbing and the parsing of the ad from the appropriate ad serving web service

    *

    * @return

    *          - an {@link Ad} object populated with the values parsed from the appropriate ad serving web service

    */

   public Ad grabTheAd() {

      try {

         Document adResponseDoc = StreamUtils.parseRemoteXML(getRequestURL(_adFieldPropertyBag));

         return parseServerResponse(adResponseDoc);

      } catch (Exception e) {

         //Log error

      }

      return new EmptyAd();

   }



   protected abstract String getRequestURL(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag);



   protected Ad parseServerResponse(Document doc) {

      Ad ad = null;



      if (doc == null) {

         return ad; // basically = return null

      }



      try {

         if (gotProperAd(doc)) {

            if (shouldParseAsImageAd(doc)) {

               ad = parseImageAd(doc);

            } else {

               ad = parseTextAd(doc);

            }



            ad.setNetwork(StringUtils.getClassName(this));



         } else { // did NOT get a proper ad

            ad = new EmptyAd();

         }



      } catch (Throwable t) {

         //Log error

      }



      return ad;

   }



   protected abstract boolean gotProperAd(Document doc) throws Exception;



   protected abstract TextAd parseTextAd(Document doc) throws Exception;



   protected abstract ImageAd parseImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception;



   protected abstract boolean shouldParseAsImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception;



}

MillenialAdGrabber

/**

 * Ad grabber that interfaces with Quattro Wireless service

 *

 * Copyright: Creative Common Attribution http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

 */

public class MillenialAdGrabber extends AdGrabber {



   /* ------------------------------------------         PUBLISHING CONSTANTS       ------------------------------------------*/



   private static final String APP_ID = "YOUR_APP_ID";



   /* ------------------------------------------                                 ------------------------------------------*/



   public MillenialAdGrabber(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      super(adFieldPropertyBag);

   }



   /**

    *

    * @param adFieldPropertyBag

    * @return

    *          - The URL to be sent to the advertising web service

    */

   protected String getRequestURL(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer("http://ads.mp.mydas.mobi/getAd.php5?");



      sb.append("apid=" + APP_ID);



      sb.append("&auid=" + BBInfo.getUniqueDeviceHash());



      sb.append("&uip=" + URLTools.urlEncodeBBForum(BBInfo.getIP())); // device IP 



      sb.append("&ua=" + URLTools.urlEncodeBBForum(BBInfo.getUserAgent())); // USER AGENT



      return sb.toString();

   }



   /* ------------------------------------------------            AD response PARSING        ------------------------------------------------ */



   protected boolean gotProperAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      NodeList nl = ((NodeList) doc.getElementsByTagName("ad"));

      if (nl != null) {

         return nl.getLength() > 0;

      } else {

         return false;

      }

   }



   protected boolean shouldParseAsImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      if (BBInfo.isTallScreen() || _adFieldPropertyBag.get(AdAllocManager.FETCH_IMAGE_ADS) != null) {

         if (!StringUtils.isEmpty(XML.getTextFromNode(doc.getElementsByTagName("url").item(0)))) {

            return true;

         }

      }



      return false;

   }



   protected TextAd parseTextAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      TextAd ad = new TextAd();

      parseCommonAdValues(ad, doc);



      //parse the TEXT of the banner

      ad.setText(XML.getTextFromNode(doc.getElementsByTagName("altText").item(0)));



      return ad;

   }



   protected ImageAd parseImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      ImageAd ad = new ImageAd();

      parseCommonAdValues(ad, doc);



      //parse the IMAGE of the banner

      String imageURL = XML.getNodeTextCumulative(doc.getElementsByTagName("url"));

      EncodedImage bannerImage = EncodedImage.createEncodedImage(StreamUtils.readRemoteStream(imageURL).getBytes(), 0, -1);

      ad.setImage(bannerImage);



      return ad;

   }



   /**

    * Parse common values from the responce like the:

    *  - tracking pixels/beacons

    *  - the click URL

    *

    * @param ad

    * @param doc

    */

   private void parseCommonAdValues(Ad ad, Document doc) throws Exception {

      // CLICK URL

      ad.setClickURL(XML.getNodeTextCumulative(doc.getElementsByTagName("clickUrl")));

   }



}

NexAgeAdGrabber

/**

 * Copyright: Creative Common Attribution http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

 */

public class NexAgeAdGrabber extends AdGrabber {



   public NexAgeAdGrabber(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      super(adFieldPropertyBag);

   }



   /* ------------------------------------------         PUBLISHING CONSTANTS       ------------------------------------------*/



   private static final String SITE_ID = "YOUR_SITE_ID";



   /* ------------------------------------------                                 ------------------------------------------*/



   /**

    *

    * @param adFieldPropertyBag

    * @return

    *          - The URL to be sent to the advertising web service

    */

   protected String getRequestURL(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer("http://admax.nexage.com/adServe?");



      sb.append("dcn=" + SITE_ID);



      sb.append("&pos=" + getAdPosition(adFieldPropertyBag));



      sb.append("&ip=" + URLTools.urlEncodeBBForum(BBInfo.getIP())); // device IP 



      sb.append("&ua=" + URLTools.urlEncodeBBForum(BBInfo.getUserAgent())); // device USER AGENT



      sb.append("&f=" + "xml");



      sb.append("&u(id)=" + BBInfo.getUniqueDeviceHash());



      return sb.toString();

   }



   private static String getAdPosition(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      if (adFieldPropertyBag != null && adFieldPropertyBag.get(AdAllocManager.AD_POSITION) != null) { //if we specified the ad position - return the specified ad position

         return (String) adFieldPropertyBag.get(AdAllocManager.AD_POSITION);

      } else {

         // otherwise, use the "imageonly" or "textonly", depending on the display size, or manual override

         return (BBInfo.isTallScreen() || (adFieldPropertyBag != null && adFieldPropertyBag.get(AdAllocManager.FETCH_IMAGE_ADS) != null)) ? "imageonly" : "textonly";

      }

   }



   protected boolean gotProperAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      Node adsNode = doc.getElementsByTagName("ads").item(0);

      if (adsNode != null) {

         int adCount = Integer.parseInt(XML.getAttributeValue(adsNode, "count"));

         return adCount > 0;

      } else {

         return false;

      }

   }



   protected ImageAd parseImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      ImageAd ad = new ImageAd();

      parseCommonAdValues(ad, doc);



      //parse the IMAGE of the banner

      String imageURL = XML.getAttributeValue(doc.getElementsByTagName("ad:content").item(0), "url");



      EncodedImage bannerImage = EncodedImage.createEncodedImage(StreamUtils.readRemoteStream(imageURL).getBytes(), 0, -1);

      ad.setImage(bannerImage);



      return ad;

   }



   protected TextAd parseTextAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      TextAd ad = new TextAd();

      parseCommonAdValues(ad, doc);



      //parse the TEXT of the banner

      ad.setText(XML.getTextFromNode(doc.getElementsByTagName("ad:text").item(0)));



      return ad;

   }



   protected boolean shouldParseAsImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      Node node = doc.getElementsByTagName("ad:group").item(0);

      String adType = XML.getAttributeValue(node, "type");



      return adType.toLowerCase().compareTo("banner") == 0;

   }



   /**

    * Parse common values from the responce like the:

    *  - tracking pixels/beacons

    *  - the click URL

    *

    * @param ad

    * @param doc

    */

   private void parseCommonAdValues(Ad ad, Document doc) {

      // CLICK URL

      ad.setClickURL(XML.getTextFromNode(doc.getElementsByTagName("link").item(0)));



      // TRACKING PIXEL URLs - get only ones from the FIRST  node (in case there are more than 1 ad in the response, only the first should be processed and the rest ignored)

      Node adEventsNode = doc.getElementsByTagName("ad:events").item(0);

      NodeList nl = adEventsNode.getChildNodes();



      for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {

         // If the tracking is of the "display" type - it is a tracking PIXEL URL

         if (XML.getAttributeValue(nl.item(i), "type").toLowerCase().compareTo("display") == 0) {

            String nodeName = nl.item(i).getFirstChild().getNodeName();

            if (nodeName.toLowerCase().compareTo("link") == 0) {

               String trackingPx = XML.getTextFromNode(nl.item(i).getFirstChild());

               ad.addTrackingPixelURL(trackingPx);

            }

         }

         // otherwise, if it is of the "click" type - it is a CLICK tracking URL

         else if (XML.getAttributeValue(nl.item(i), "type").toLowerCase().compareTo("click") == 0) {

            String nodeName = nl.item(i).getFirstChild().getNodeName();

            if (nodeName.toLowerCase().compareTo("link") == 0) {

               String trackingPx = XML.getTextFromNode(nl.item(i).getFirstChild());

               ad.addClickTrackingURL(trackingPx);

            }

         }

      }

   }



}

SomaAdGrabber

/**

 * Copyright © Comitic Software

 */

public class SOMAAdGrabber extends AdGrabber {



   public SOMAAdGrabber(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      super(adFieldPropertyBag);

   }



   /* ------------------------------------------         PUBLISHING CONSTANTS       ------------------------------------------*/

   private static final String AD_SPACE = "YOUR_AD_SPACE";



   private static final String PUBLISHER_ID = "YOUR_PUB_ID";



   private static final String SOMA_API_VER = "somaapi-318"; //This is the version of the API I used



   /* ------------------------------------------                                 ------------------------------------------*/



   /**

    *

    * @param overrideImageAds

    * @return

    *          - The URL to be sent to the advertising web service

    */

   protected String getRequestURL(HashTableExt adFieldPropertyBag) {

      StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer("http://soma.smaato.net/oapi/reqAd.jsp?");



      sb.append("adspace=" + AD_SPACE);



      sb.append("&pub=" + PUBLISHER_ID);



      sb.append("&client=" + SOMA_API_VER);



      sb.append("&devip=" + URLTools.urlEncodeBBForum(BBInfo.getIP())); // device IP 



      sb.append("&device=" + URLTools.urlEncodeBBForum(BBInfo.getUserAgent())); // device USER AGENT



      String adMode = (BBInfo.isTallScreen() || (adFieldPropertyBag!=null && adFieldPropertyBag.get(AdAllocManager.FETCH_IMAGE_ADS) != null)) ? "all" : "txt"; // "all" = IMAGE and TEXT; "txt" = TEXT only

      sb.append("&format=" + adMode);



      sb.append("&ownid=" + BBInfo.getUniqueDeviceHash());



      sb.append("&responce=" + "xml");



      return sb.toString();

   }



   protected boolean gotProperAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      //return ((NodeList) doc.getElementsByTagName("ads")).getLength() > 0 && canProcessTheAd(doc);

      NodeList nl = ((NodeList) doc.getElementsByTagName("ads"));

      if (nl != null) {

         return nl.getLength() > 0  && canProcessTheAd(doc);

      } else {

         return false;

      }

   }



   private boolean canProcessTheAd(Document doc) {

      Node node = doc.getElementsByTagName("action").item(0);

      String actionType = XML.getAttributeValue(node, "type");

      return actionType.toLowerCase().compareTo("link") == 0;

   }



   protected ImageAd parseImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      ImageAd ad = new ImageAd();

      parseCommonAdValues(ad, doc);



      //parse the IMAGE of the banner

      String imageURL = XML.getNodeTextCumulative(doc.getElementsByTagName("link"));



      EncodedImage bannerImage = EncodedImage.createEncodedImage(StreamUtils.readRemoteStream(imageURL).getBytes(), 0, -1);

      ad.setImage(bannerImage);



      return ad;

   }



   protected TextAd parseTextAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      TextAd ad = new TextAd();

      parseCommonAdValues(ad, doc);



      //parse the TEXT of the banner

      ad.setText(XML.getTextFromNode(doc.getElementsByTagName("adtext").item(0)));



      return ad;

   }



   protected boolean shouldParseAsImageAd(Document doc) throws Exception {

      Node node = doc.getElementsByTagName("ad").item(0);

      String adType = XML.getAttributeValue(node, "type");



      return adType.toLowerCase().compareTo("img") == 0;



   }



   /**

    * Parse common values from the responce like the:

    *  - tracking pixels/beacons

    *  - the click URL

    *

    * @param ad

    * @param doc

    */

   private void parseCommonAdValues(Ad ad, Document doc) {

      // CLICK URL

      ad.setClickURL(XML.getAttributeValue(doc.getElementsByTagName("action").item(0), "target"));



      //TRACKING PIXEL URLs = the BEACONs as they are named in SMAATO network

      NodeList nl = doc.getElementsByTagName("beacon");

      for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {

         String trackingPx = XML.getTextFromNode(nl.item(i));

         ad.addTrackingPixelURL(trackingPx);

      }

   }



}

Please let me know in the comments if you find this useful!

Related posts:

1. In App Advertising on BlackBerry with QuattroWireless, MillennialMedia, SMAATO and NexAge a bitter experience
2. Convert ARGB to int value (Java)

Preface

At some point in the past I was trying to monetize free application on BlackBerry and since most of the advertising networks that actually work with BlackBerry don’t have an SDK, I had to work with their WEB APIs directly.

This did not work for me at all (with minor exception for Quattro Wireless). Maybe this was personal to me, I don’t know, probably not. The monetization through advertising on BlackBerry is unfortunately does not work. I am talking from a lot of experience supporting free applications with ads on Android and iOS.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for advertising agencies working with BlackBerry and then signing up and then getting the necessary information from them and then working through their documentation to implement a custom web client to pull the info from their web APIs – all this to learn once again that the revenue I could get is a joke.

Quattro Wireless

Advertising with Quattro Wireless actually turned out to be the best BlackBerry advertising experience I had so far… As long as it lasted (not very long unfortunately).

Starting Sept. 30 1020 Quattro is iAd exclusive and stopped serving any ads to BlackBerry. Since I do not ever trust what I can get from advertising service, when the service stopped, the application was not impacted but other developers that were less careful (something you should not ever do though) might have had some problems.

NexAge

NexAge left me with the worst impression of all. First these guys at NexAge took a hell lot of my time with manual sign up and many  many phone calls I had to have with them to get anywhere. It looked very suspicious to me that they can’t implement an automatic sign up and to actually sign up for the service you had to talk to them over the phone. I should have known better at this point. Coupled with their awfully looking website, this fact should have stopped me from moving forward with them and saving a lot of my time and frustration. But since there were not many options at a time, I decided to try them out. The interesting part is that when I voiced my concerns about the manual sign-up to some higher up developer relations manager, he told me “We are the BMW of advertising, we give you a personalized and best service out there”… yeah… right…  After signing up with them and integrating their code (there were a few hiccups on the way but nothing deal breaking) I started to serve their advertisements and the results were – well… simply put horrible. When I talked to them they were not really helpful and they kept saying “we will investigate and will try to optimize”. I wonder if they are optimizing the ads manually as the sign-up. After couple weeks of my pilot with them, during which I wrote them and called them to complain about the ridiculousness of the revenue with not much results (they mostly simply ignored me) I shut them down and decided to forget about them and about the partial revenue I have generated in these couple weeks for the sake of my own mental health. I have to point out that they did have an SDK – a ridiculously large SDK, so I decided that I can not add an SDK which is almost as much as half of my whole application size, especially while I can implement the same thing with couple classes.

SMAATO

With SMAATO everything was much simpler, but the revenue was as bad if not worse as with NexAge. After trying them for some time and not seeing any improvement, I gave up on them.

MillennialMedia

With Millenial, it was more complicated. At some point I was simply furious with them and if there were any other options to advertise on BlackBerry, I would definitely avoid them, but since there aren’t I still work with them in a very limited capacity. I was so so sorry to learn that they are going to handle the technology side of RIM’s advertising service. The reason is simple – they are SUPER unorganized. And coupled with RIM, they just doubled the amount of mess. For example, they say you are ready to serve ads and you are fully operational and you publish your app and then you see some super weird stats and you ask them and they tell you some BS and then you wait a little more and then you ask again and then a few weeks later they say – “Ohh the ads you were serving are test ads”. To make things even worse – this happened to me more than once.

Summary

In summary, unfortunately, if you want to monetize your free application on BlackBerry – you better prepare yourself for the worst. I was hoping the official RIM advertising service will solve this problem, but unfortunately it didn’t. It’s a complete mess, as I mentioned and I don’t think they are going to sort this out any time soon. If you are a developer that knows of a better service – please let me know, I would appreciate it. Hopefully my experience also helps you to save some of your time. If you are eager to try anyway, I plan to post the custom integration code that I wrote here so that you (again) can save some time reusing this code.

Related posts:

1. Java code to work with MillennialMedia, SMAATO and NexAge web advertising APIs

In the following video, the web experience on the BlackBerry Playbook is compared to the web experience on the iPad. It is clearly shown (the video is made by RIM) that PlayBook significantly outperforms the iPad. While these tests are definitely subjective since they are performed by RIM, so they could choose website favorable to the PlayBook and otherwise objectively-subjectively give the PlayBook some edge, the interesting thing to note is that the PlayBook uses the open source WebKit browser initially developed by Apple. It is a very interesting camparo nevertheless.

Would be very interesting to see the Samsung Galaxy Tab running Android participate in this comparison, especially since it has the same 7″ form factor as the PlayBook and it has Flash enabled of course.

Enjoy the video and let me know what you think!

Blackberry PlayBook vs. Apple iPad comparison:

Related posts:

1. Chrome OS and the iPad
2. Some notes on QNX – the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS
3. BlackBerry Upcoming WebKit Browser