5 Mobile Analytics Tips To Drive Your Business

When you set out to build a mobile app, a well-planned strategy and solid development are a must and a neat design is paramount. But analytics is the key to measuring  execution and the value of all hard work you’ve put into building the app. As mobiles continue to penetrate every aspect of our lives, it is but natural that developers and marketers alike are constantly trying to measure user behaviour through app analytics. While the mobile app industry might be young, there are a number of platforms and services vying with each other to provide you with good app data.

Start using Analytics before your application is in the Appstore

There’s no use if you start thinking about analytics after your application has been accepted in the appstore. You can create a more robust, user-friendly version1 if you start analysing data during your application’s alpha and beta phases. You could use Testflight for example.

Users may not use your app the way you do

You’ve meticulously planned your app’s design, functionality and flow, but you still need to be able to think like the user. Get third party opinion by asking unbiased users to use your application. Put websites like Craigslist and heatma.ps which uses heatmaps to enable you to see which part of your application users interact with to good use.

Analyse market data to avoid mistakes of your competitors

While analytics providers may be a bit expensive, it is still worthwhile to see what other apps are doing in the market, their price and functionality. With this information, you can make decisions knowing how consumer preferences and application performances in your category.

Select KPIs that suit your target audience

There are a variety of apps for a variety of things. There are apps for education, testprep, epub, news, messaging, movies and entertainment. Each has a performance indicator of its own. User retention might be important for a particular application while purchase conversion would expectedly, be paramount for an ecommerce application. It is important to know what metric to focus on for your app.

Different providers for different apps

Again, this boils down to knowledge. You need to know which analytics provider caters to which vertical. Localytics and Platyomics are both analytics providers, but one caters to content delivery while the other is for mobile gaming.

As mobile users grow at a rapid pace, mobile analytics too would catch up. Which means you’ve got to keep pace as the scenario keeps changing.

5 Reasons Why You Should Have Gone Mobile By Now

A large number of users in today's world are using mobile apps to get the desired information and meet their daily needs. This has meant that businesses of all hues go mobile to attract customers. No matter what business you are into, having a mobile app helps to strengthen relations with clients and retain them. Having a mobile app for your business makes customers download and purchase your products or hire your services
.

In this article we look at the top 5 reasons why it’s time your business went mobile with a view to boost growth.

Visibility 

Customers these days use smartphones and tablets extensively. This has made businesses to have mobile apps of their own, to gain visibility. A mobile application makes your products & services available to the customers at any time of the hour. It is the most convenient way for mobile users to connect to your business and its offering.

Mobile apps thus enhance the visibility of businesses, help to attract more customers, and improve sales.

A new audience

Many users who are not your customers right now can come to know about your useful and feature-rich app and download them. A mobile application can widen your reach and interest more customers to select your products & services. It greatly helps in creating brand awareness and strengthening your brand among app users to draw new customers.

Marketing  

Mobile applications play an important role in directing your marketing efforts to the right direction. You can keep your customers updated with your latest products, new arrivals, discounts and more right at their fingertips. Push notifications continuously remind your customers of your products and services, encouraging them to buy regularly and even triggering impulse shopping.

Convenience 

Mobile apps offer convenience to customers in buying your products and services. Smartphone's users have access to your app even while on the move, thus making purchases from anywhere and at any time.

You can integrate your mobile app with your company's website to give latest information and updates of your business to customers. This ensures that your customers stay abreast with all your recent business activities.

This is a great way for your clients to stay in touch with your business, get a sense of belonging, put confidence in you, and choose your brand.

Competitive advantage 

In this cut-throat competitive market, businesses are always trying to attract more customers towards their offerings. Many businesses still do not use a mobile application or have not yet started to use it. This is where you can gain a competitive edge, keep your competitors behind, and enhance sales.

Going mobile? Choose Drupal

   
Since it was officially released, Drupal has been one of the most sought after languages for those who wish to build responsive web applications. Now as mobile devices open up new frontiers and step on to 24*7 interactions, it is imperative that Drupal reinvents itself to suit the needs of the changing times.

One of the oft-heard complaints against it is that it is incompatible for the small screen. If we make the small- and touch-screen experience more acceptable, everyone would want the freedom of using Drupal from anywhere-but-a-desk.

Mobile phones are personal devices: There is no other device that provides proximity, privacy and ease-of-use as much as a mobile phone. By restricting or dissuading users from interacting with Drupal on the go, one is limiting their connections to their needs.

For interactions called "just-in-time interactions"; user tasks are urgent and immediate. Speed is essential and waiting is not an option. Like the saying, "The best camera is the one you have with you." The same is true for computers. In the coming years people are going to be using Drupal from everywhere, whether we like it or not. Drupal 8 has to embrace this.

Attempting to build a mobile UI from the ground up is a large task with many facets. Design principles can help keep us on track, and give us a wider perspective. With global objectives we always have a good idea what "good" looks like.

Simple

Simplicity is Key to any language and any app that aims to connect with users.

Fast

This is an essential criterion be it a mobile or a desktop app. We need to keep in mind that no one likes to wait.

Consistency

We're designing a whole system of tools and objects. New situations will arrive that we won't expect; we can soften this pain by implementing framework components instead of one-shot solutions.We need to keep in mind that we’re not solving problems for individual pages.

New Toolbar

It’s alright if you can’t show all the menu items at once, what we need is some method of revealing them. What becomes really interesting is the thoughts on what else we could use the rest of the toolbar space for. Contextual actions include filter, add, delete, bulk edit and sort.

Finger Friendly

A thumb is more than a fat cursor. End of story.

Global Search

A global search function allows users who know they want to get there quickly..A nice, friendly, easy to use navigation tree is great but some users want to get around fast. This spotlight style feature is also a great safety net for new users who have lost their way in Drupal.

Swift And Its Impact On The Mobile Industry

           
There’s been a new excitement in the air in iOS developer circles. It is the arrival of Swift that is driving new developers to joy. The onset of Swift has meant that it is finally curtains down for the parent, Objective C. In this article, we look at the motives behind the switch to a new programming language and how it will affect the IT industry as a whole.

For those of you who didn’t know, Objective-C is ridiculously difficult to use. Most beginners who attempted to learn it and even developers familiar with its complexities breathed a huge sigh of relief at the announcement. It is clear that Apple wanted to make iOS accessible to a wider range of developers and it understood that sticking to Objective-C wouldn't work. However, it isn't exactly unfamiliar to existing developers because it uses the same LLVM compiler and runtime which means the code can live side-by-side in the same application. According to Apple, this will "unify the procedural and object-oriented portions of the language."

Apple's free e-book, The Swift Programming Language, offers a guide that goes deeper into the language and acts as a formal reference for any interested developer. Owing to its accessibility and its promise of adopting safe programming patterns and adding modern features to make programming easier, more flexible and fun, businesses looking to develop apps on iOS will soon have a wider pool of iOS and Mac OS X developers to choose from. This will help alleviate the stress of hiring qualified developers in a gradually shrinking talent pool. This increase in talent may also make developers' salaries accelerate at a slower rate.

Additionally, Swift utilizes several time saving features such as displaying outputs in real time and delivering instant feedback on errors. Developers are thus saved from having to create colossal amounts of code before seeing the results. Apple developers can also bid adieu to sifting through code line-by-line to find tiny errors whenever an issue arises. These benefits will result in huge cost reductions for corporations and may sway more of the IT industry's top innovators to developing for Apple.

Although it is too premature to say the effect of these will be seen immediately, the IT industry is certainly abuzz about Swift. It not only begins a new chapter in iOS development, but also makes iOS and Mac OS X development a more viable option in the years to come and its accessibility will most certainly work to Apple's advantage.

9 Facts You Should Know About Mobile Payments

 
Technology is evolving at such a rapid speed that businesses need to keep pace or fall back. Mobile phones have contributed greatly towards enhancing the quality of our lives and mobile payments is an essential part of this. In this article, we look at how exactly they help securing our financial dimension.

1. Mobile payments are more secure

Safety and security are global concerns and mobile payments ensure precisely that. Mobile payments do away with the need of you having to take your wallet wherever you go.

2. They provide flexibility

Carrying cash has become not only an inconvenience but also a danger. Instead users now have the privilege of just tapping your mobile phones to complete transactions.

3. Mobile payments are growing globally

Many parts of the globe have little access to financial services, but 85% of the global population has mobiles. So payments through these phones are definitely on the path towards high growth

4. They help Economies Flourish

From transferring money to pay your utility bills to sending money home, mobile payments make transactions so much more smooth and streamlined. They also help rural economies by making micropayments possible.

5. NFC is the way of the future

A simple and secure technology solution, near field communications (NFC) helps businesses and consumers alike make faster, safer transactions. They’re called contactless payments because all you need to do is keep your NFC enabled phone near a suitable reader to make payments.

6. It’s already built into many phones

Many of the latest smart phones already have built in NFC chips, so adopting this technology is even more hassle-free. Just upgrade your phone or maybe get an NFC sticker for your present phone and you’re ready to make mobile payments.

7. NFC saves time and trouble

Whether you pay for your bus fare or for a movie show, NFC payments make the process so much faster that it’s already a trend that’s catching on everywhere.

8. They are easy to top-up

Whether you are online or at a mall, your mobile wallet can be topped up anywhere. Life’s so much more easier, isn’t it?

9. Mobile wallets make money transfers easier

Mobile wallets also allow you to send funds to your family and friends who may need money fast. In addition everything from electricity bills to parking fees can be paid by you, even if you are far from home.

How Mobile Apps Make Your Work Place Better

   
Mobile apps and smartphones have together brought about a 180 degree shift in the way data is accessed and shared at the workplace. Smartphones are already a part of the list of productivity tools in many businesses. A study by Forrester shows workers gathering about 13 per cent of information from their smartphones. This article looks at the different options mobile apps give you to help your business run better.

• Development options 

The growing demand for apps has given birth to the mobile development boom we are currently witness to. Though there are many options for building than before, the options fall into two distinct categories - off-the-shelf development and custom development.

• Custom-development

 Here, the company pays a development team or hires one in-house to create customized apps for its business. Often the best option for companies that look to build mission-critical native apps, this methodology of development however is expensive. As a result, most businesses, particularly the small ones, don't prefer them.

• Off-the-shelf development

 If you haven’t the budget or resources to build a custom app in-house or with a development team, you could look at purchasing off-the-shelf apps, albeit at a much lower cost. They can be used for email scheduling, data collection, CRM and so on.

Common mobile apps in enterprise workplace 

Here we give you a list of some common mobile apps used at the enterprise workplace.

• E-mail apps

These are among the basic and most commonly used apps in business mobile devices. E-mail apps enable e-mail usage on smartphones and tablets. Apparently 92% of information workers have an e-mail app on their smartphone according to a Forrester survey.

• Schedule planner apps 

These apps have a calendar that records events, reminding users of important discussions, meetings, etc. No less than 80% of information workers have calendar apps.

• Customer relationship management apps 

They manage and share interactions with customers, and increase your sales prospects by integrating sales, customer support and marketing information into a single, centralized database and software system.

• Service and support automation apps 

They enable you to capture using your mobile phone or tablet, real-time service information. They help you transfer it to back-end systems immediately via wireless connectivity. They also allow you to access this data instantly at any point of time.

• Near field communication apps

 Establish radio communication between two smartphones within a certain range.

• Financial apps 

Can access your financial data like payments, expenses, pending bills, customer accounts from your mobile phone. You can also use these to share or record the financial data whenever required.

What You Shouldn't Do When Devoloping A Mobile App

If you had a killer idea and wanted to make it actionable, you would be developing a mobile app to implement it. That’s the easiest way to ensure that you’re idea is visible, taken note of, and most importantly, put to use by millions. What you require is a clear plan, good strategy, proper programming structure and user friendly implementation. But there are pitfalls even for the trained. We look at some of them in this article.

1. Be very clear about your platform

Android, iOS, Windows....reading them back and forth? Well, just look at who you wanna target. If it’s the global market that you’re targeting, Android must be your choice. If you are looking at a US centric market, you could go for iOS. Either way, avoid ambiguity on the platform front. If you intend to launch it on both the platforms, know that your engineering costs will double accordingly.

2. Mobile is NOT web experience downsized

A majority of website owners do not focus on developing a mobile application that is optimized for all mobile platforms. All that they do is rely on responsive website features or consider that mobile app development should be done with just few necessary elements and features of a website.

3. Don’t confuse the Designer for the Developer

Whatever it is that the designer creates, it will have to go through a developer. It is important the design follows the functionality since we often find that apps where design dictates functionality inevitable fail.
For example, if you app has been planned to include a search box, but the designer might envision one with a type-ahead search that generates live results as the user types. This is a nice add-on, but could mean significant undertaking for the developer.

4. Avoid overlooking User experience

Say Apple and ask people what comes to their mind first. The reply would be its elegance/user experience. So, it’s important to know that a mobile user is more demanding and intuitive when it comes to UX. This is borne by the fact that 26% of the are opened only to be never used again and 48% are opened less than 10 times. Make sure you test your app with Craigslist or better find early beta testers.

5. The app won’t sell by itself

When your app goes live, thousands of competitors are going to look at it and use it. If you do not have a well planned strategy to increase visibility, you are only increase the risk of your app disappearing into oblivion.

This means you’ve got to market your app, identify trends and consumer demand with tools such as Xyologic and Google Trends. If you are looking at a wider market, you’ve got to make sure your app has features that the specific market demands.

The Ultimate Checklist For Mobile App Templates

        
In the previous article we saw why you need a mobile app with a nice template. If you are into mobile app development, you better take template design seriously. Whether you select a mobile app template or choose a custom design, you’ll have to keep in mind a few guidelines. This article tells you what you need to keep in mind when you create a template for your mobile app.

Consistency with your corporate design

Every business has a "corporate design” i.e. letter heads, business cards, and official documents and letter heads that have some pattern, a look and feel to them. When designing your mobile app, ensure that it is in sync with this design. This means you select the right colour scheme, the right font and you probably have a logo to begin with.

If you’re selecting a mobile app template, make sure that you choose those fonts that resemble your existing font and colour combinations closest. For an app template, decide which parts of the app you want to customize. Overall, you need to find a template that will suit your business style.

Right kind of navigation

When you select an app template, make sure the navigation suits your business. You don’t want to be stuck with complex navigation that your employees or customers cannot use. The front page must have all the related sections for users to select and browse. Next, select whether you want to use a swipe style or a tap style of navigation. For instance, if you want a newsstand or blog kind of app, make sure swipes are easy.

Header designs 

If your company already has a logo, it's would be great to include it in the header. You could also create something innovative - but keep in mind that the available space is just 300x74 pixels. Having your brand name in the header is a great idea too.

Select the right pattern for the various sections

Selecting the right pattern for the various segments of your app is essential for app success. The way you display your content and images on the app will definitely make a difference. For every type of content, you’ll find that there are several ways of displaying it. Select the layout that allows you to emphasise on the most important aspects of your business.

Last but not the least, the splash screen and the icon will be your first interaction with the customers. Make sure they are powerful enough to create that lasting first impression.

How to promote your mobile app

         
We saw what it takes to build an app in the last article. To recap, you basically need three things:

• Knowledge of how to create a user interface that’s attractive and easy to use
• Knowledge of Software development, network security and database management
• Comprehensive knowledge of web development, OOPS concepts and mobile APIs.

Before we move to marketing and promotion, it’s important to say this loud and clear: You need to have actually built the app. The first step towards a successful marketing strategy is to understand the app store environment and ranking algorithms that can guide you the possible ways to market and promote your mobile application to the consumer world.

Secondly, it’s important to develop apps which support various mobile platforms like iOS, Android, Windows etc. Cross-platform apps have a lot of advantages like reduced development costs, greater reach and easy marketing which means you don’t have to create niche messages to promote for a specific set of people. But this means that you have to know your target audience closely.

Steps before launch

1. Choose a good name

It is very important to choose a name for your app that is both unique and memorable. Make sure you include the most important keywords of the app’s functionality in its name. Lastly, ensure you don’t infringe any trademarks.

2. Choose the right category

In the appstore, estimate the number of downloads you will need to rank in each category. You will need to play to your strengths. Choose the most relevant category for your app. The more competitive a category, the more downloads you get.

3. Create an amazing icon

Your icon matters...a lot! Make sure it delivers the app’s purpose in style. Make it appealing and eye-catching. Users may not even look at the description of the app if the name and the icon reveal enough.

4. Good title, description and keywords

This is a decider. A lot of the users are going to look at your description of the app though a majority will actually land up by virtue of word of mouth. You need to include keywords, make it actionable and spy on your competitors to find out where you need to push harder. Finally, keep it simple. Brevity is much appreciated.

5.  Get featured on review sites

Open a spreadsheet and get ready to look for target sites and contact information. Start collecting data well ahead of your launch and contact everyone once the app goes live. Prepare your press kit (Pictures, Press release, Bio of the founders, Screenshots, logos, etc.) Target journalists and editors that cover your field. Keep collecting data and do a thorough analysis before you take hit the ground running.

Last but not the least, encourage users to share your app on social networking sites and to rate and review the app!

How to build a mobile app

At a time when everyone wants to jump on to the mobile bandwagon, it’s essential that we pause and ask ourselves the important question: “Do we have the skills necessary that go into making a killer app?” Because remember, there are tens of thousands of apps in the appstore but only a hundredth of them are actually used across the globe. So let us first look at what you need to build an app.

1. The learning curve:

Every job needs certain skills and app development is no different. It demands knowledge of Systems programming, internet security, database management etc. So, a bachelor’s degree in CS/software development or a specialized associate/degree in mobile application development too, would be okay. But it is essential to build on the skill set and education you already have by receiving further education and training in development languages(C#, Swift) and mobile user interface design.

2. Certification:

This is not a must-have and certainly not one you can’t-do-without. But having one on your resume might be of use just in case managers or companies require additional certification beyond postsecondary education and training.

• Microsoft offers entry-level certifications through its Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) program. Because of what a Microsoft certification brings to a resume or portfolio by itself, MTA certifications carry an instant appeal to workers looking to ply their trade in another career or to enhance their current skillset.

• Another certification that has become popular over the years is the certification of the Mobile Development Institute(MDI). It offers three entry-level developer certifications for Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry. But this is not for newbies as the certification requires that the candidate must have published at least one app on one of the platforms(iOS/Android/Blackberry)

• Building a mobile app also requires you to manage and support mobile environments, integrating mobility with wired and wireless LANs. That means a skill set that includes everything from mobile device management, to security to network infrastructure. All of which are covered under the CompTIA Mobility+ certification. It carries no prerequisites but recommends that individuals have 18 months experience in a mobile environment.

3. Building the app

Now, to creating the app. The first thing to do before you start building an app is to choose the platform. Once you’ve chosen the OS, you need to track the major players in the market of your niche, the functionalities and techniques they are using to make their businesses better.

The next step is to brainstorm. Find a killer idea. This is really important as there are a plethora of apps already available in the market and your app needs to be distinct and serve a unique purpose in the same league. The key question to ask is: What is your app going to have that other apps in the market do not?
Lastly, analyse and understand user behaviour. This requires a lot of research and insight and might also consume a considerable amount of time but this is where you identify what key ingredients your app needs to win the user’s mind.

Common Mistakes that every Ios developer should avoid

 
Building a successful iOS application is no easy task. It requires solid systems programming knowledge coupled with boundless creativity and some hard-selling. It also demands that you have better debugging skills than your competitors. This is because even the best of developers are bound to make mistakes as they churn out tons and tons of code. This is why it is important to identify common mistakes and look for them during the development stage itself. In this article, we present to you some common mistakes that you, as developers should avoid when building applications in iOS.

One of the most common mistakes that every iOS developer makes while he/she develops apps is memory errors, which many new iOS app developers often do commit when designing and developing applications. These mistakes are highlighted below for you to be aware, as upcoming iOS developers of such critical iOS memory mistakes.

• Most developers forget to include the dealloc method in each class, which causes memory management problems during development. Ensure that you make appropriate dealloc calls in each class to avoid such issues.

• It also happens that developers, many a time, do not call the super dealloc method from dealloc, that later on results in crash and serious issues in your app development. Remember that you cannot directly call a dealloc method. You should first call the super dealloc and that, only in your dealloc method.

• NSLog Statements can be extremely helpful in debugging an app, but overuse it and you could slow down the performance of the app as a whole. The more you use NSLog statements, the more memory it will consume and in the end, you may end up getting a memory warning from the app itself. Try to avoid such mistakes and bypass NSLog statements if you don't really need them.

• Underestimating iOS debugging commands: New developers are often unaware of the power of iOS debugging tools and never use them during development. MallocStackLogging, NSDebugEnabled and other environment variables can help you identify common causes for crash etc. So, try to familiarise yourself with iOS debugging commands and use them within your app development to avoid memory issues.

Apart from these major memory errors, many developers also forget to set pointers nil after releasing them, preferring to use retainCount of the objects which causes memory issues later.

What explains PHP’s popularity?

What is PHP?

PHP is short for Hypertext Preprocessor. It has grown over the years to become a widely used, server-side programming language that produces dynamic web pages. This article looks at why PHP has grown to become the language of choice for programmers and the features make it a language of the future as well.

Advantages of PHP 

The first advantage of PHP is that it’s open source i.e., it is free for personal and commercial use. In addition to this comes a large community of open source applications that work to fix bugs, security threats and other issues. One can also set different security levels in the.ini file to defend the system from attacks of users.

The second advantage is PHP’s interaction with databases. PHP interfaces very well with MySQL, widely-used as a database component of LAMP systems and used for web applications like Wikipedia and PHP-Nuke. This is why the PHP-MySQL combo has been so successful in the web world.

Thirdly, PHP is easy to use and runs very fast. Even if you are a developer with little experience, you can learn the basics of PHP and start working in a very short period of time. PHP is simple to the extent that even HTML coders can integrate PHP code straight into their pages. This is also the reason why PHP has become the language of choice for building mobile applications. If you're looking to create responsive mobile apps, PHP is your obvious choice.  To the experienced, the extensive features of PHP have unlimited potential.

PHP web hosting? 

PHP web hosting is a type of web hosting service that provides support for PHP. Most web hosting companies offer PHP hosting solution as a lot of demand exists. But make sure that you are provided with the latest version of the PHP script when registering.

Affordability

When you begin to search the internet for web hosting services, you will find PHP hosting to be much more affordable when compared to other hosting solutions. Apart from the reason that PHP is Open Source, the other main reason is that it usually comes with the popular database, MySQL, also free. Since these technologies are available for free their hosting fees too, are lower.

 How to Find Ideal PHP Web Hosting 

If you are running a small business and have begun your search for a PHP web hosting service, you need to know the three basics of web hosting: Firstly, ensure that the service has enough bandwidth to meet your requirements. Second, ensure enough disk space for not just your current needs, but also the future. And third, the hosting package should also provide you with databases whose size meets your web site requirements.

How Android Devices Are Transforming Our Lives

 
Vendors around the world are customizing Android to their needs, providing rich user experience and access to third party apps on connected devices. It is expected that by 2020, 22 billion embedded systems and other portable devices will be connected to the internet with the help of Android, thus revolutionizing the workplace. We take a look at Android powered devices and their possible impact at the workplace.

You can customize Android to meet your enterprise policy, functionality and security needs. If a device uses Android as its base operating system, developers will start building innovative apps on that platform that can be used at your workplace.

So, say Goodbye to conference room smartboards, VGA projectors and LCD TVs, and say hello to
Smart displays- 65” touch enabled smart displays that run embedded Android, providing not just white-boarding and power point facilities, but integrated multi party video collaboration and more.

Virtual desktops- A remote virtual desktop that is touch-enabled, running full Android and web apps, seamless application and data connectivity between Android phone, Android tablet and laptop.
Android screens- A touch panel that installs over a standard LCD display or TV, turning it into a big Android tablet with a remote, pointer and keyboard.

Android Sticks- Dual-core Android systems on a USB stick that plugs into an MHL-enabled display or TV and runs any Android app, web or remote Windows app/desktop, using Wifi for connection and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Android enables the portability of enterprise features. Not confines to the desktop, employees can access the same work on mobile devices.

Not only the workplace, Android is truly transforming the healthcare industry too with its wide range of monitoring and imaging equipments. Apps and mobile phone add-ons for Android phones let patients automatically report their vitals and long-term test data over 3G and 4G mobile networks.

Android for therapeutic and imaging equipment

Devices with built-in displays streamline the magnifying and X-ray processes. Remote monitors and surgical displays help surgeons perform delicate surgeries using tele-surgical robots. Personal health monitor devices collect and analyze data from various body sensors, and are only the size of a small phone.

How Mobile Apps Invade Your Privacy

               
There is no doubt you’ve heard about privacy issues related to Google, Facebook, and other prominent websites. But have you thought of the private data theft that could be occurring right now, on your mobile device? In this article, we discuss the major issues that affect privacy in mobile apps and how third-party ad libraries play a vital part in it.

More than 70 billion apps were downloaded last year from Google Play and iOS. With the popularity of mobile apps growing every day, we discuss the privacy concerns that should users must be made aware of.

 There are four levels of potential risk:

• Application layer: Vulnerable apps and malicious code gain access to your data and devices sensors.

• Hardware layer: Attackers take advantage of memory corruption defects in firmware to gain
administrative access to your firmware.

• Network layer: Information can be intercepted over the air now. Mobile Wifi has all the same problems that laptops have on Wifi.

• Operating system layer: Android and iPhone jailbreaks make use of defects in your phone’s operating system.

Application related risks:

Some mobile apps upload users’ contact lists and store them without permission. It has also been discovered that a fake version of the Instagram app for Android installed malware on users’ devices after being downloaded from third-party sites.

Also, fake applications are a common method used by attackers to spread malware. So, download apps only from trusted app stores.

Ad libraries

Smartphone users should also be aware of the risks that some mobile ads pose. In-app ad libraries can retrieve ads remotely and some ad libraries have the same permissions that users grant the app during installation. Remote access to ad libraries introduces a security risk by allowing third-party ad libraries to bypass general security.

Some ad libraries can access a user’s location, list of all apps on the phone, phone numbers and call logs.
So make sure you find your own balance of Privacy vs Functionality. Delete apps that do not allow you to change privacy or sharing settings. Make sure you read user’s responses and feedback before you download an app. Do not say yes to all the permissions that the app elicits from you. Read them carefully and download the app only if you are convinced.

APACHE CORDOVA WITH HTML5 FOR MOBILE

         
All of us know that Apache cordova is an API that allows access to native device function. Cordova is not complete in itself and requires HTML, CSS and Javascript to build apps with it. Simply put, Cordova is an open source framework for packaging mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Cordova wraps the HTML, CSS and JavaScript web app using the native shell. In this article, we look at what make Cordova exciting as well as the new features that make it attractive.

1. Cordova provides a set of uniform JavaScript libraries that can be invoked, with device-specific native backing code for those JavaScript libraries. Cordova is available for the following platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian.

2. The advantage that Cordova offers is that it can be built without any native code. Instead, web technologies are hosted locally in the app itself. Because Cordova is all about cross-platform mobile development, you’re aim would be to target multiple mobile device platforms. In that case, if you were building an app for Android and iOS, you would have to open a terminal window and create a new Cordova project structure with projects for both Android and iOS.

3. It is here that the CLI simplifies matters for us as mobile web projects have  icons, screen graphics, CSS, and/or JavaScript files that are unique to each target platform. Since each mobile device has its own theme and icon requirements, it’s likely that at a minimum of those will be required. In older versions of Cordova, one had to manage all of that manually. But with the CLI all that has been taken care of.

4. Apps using Cordova are still packaged as apps using the platform SDKs, and can be made available for installation from each device's app store.