Flash and the Smartphone

I recently had a back and forth with @LouisGudema about Flash on mobile devices. I was complaining to restaurants that if they wanted my patronage they shouldn’t have built a site completely in Flash because I was out and about and my iPhone doesn’t support Flash. Flash and I go WAYYYYYY back. As a matter of fact was listed as an expert resource on Scalable Vector Graphics by the W3C back in 1999. I was and still am a big fan of Flash and have created some great Flash-based  pieces for Microsoft, Amazon, EMC, to name a few. However, I believe that Flash is only appropriate in very specific instances. Your main site is not one of those places. Mobile devices now outnumber PCs, making them one of the primary ways that consumers are interacting with the Internet and YOUR BRAND. Why shut them out by building your entire site in Flash? There are plenty of SEO reasons why Flash is not a good idea. Mobile is another reason.

There has been a bitter feud between Apple and Adobe over Flash. Apple says it’s a bandwidth hog (true), a security risk (true), and not a good UI for mobile devices (wrong, Flash scales). The real reason Apple doesn’t want Flash on iPhones is it would allow game and app developers to avoid the app store when getting their products to consumers, cutting off Apple’s control of software on their devices and cutting out their cut of the profits.  While the later is certainly selfish, it is business after all. Control over software on their products is more interesting: having a company like Apple approve and disapprove of every app, means they are ensuring the highest level of interaction possible on their devices, on the other hand, well, they’re in  control! Of course Adobe’s side of the argument is that Apple are jerks. I’d back them up on that except they haven’t exactly been working hard on a good mobile plugin. Flash Lite requires that you actually create an entirely different Flash file, for Lite in order to be read. That still leaves out every single Flash site out there that wasn’t created for Flash Lite, i.e. most of them.

The most important part of the Flash on smartphones argument is saturation: how many smartphones support Flash. Well, it took some digging and is still not likely a complete list, but the following, from Adobe themselves, is a list of all smartphones and tablets that support Flash. Not “will support Flash in early 2011, or by 2012. Despite the numerous press releases and interviews, if it’s not shipped, it’s not relevant to this discusison.

Smartphones:
Acer Liquid
Acer Stream
Acer Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition

HTC Desire
HTC Desire HD*
HTC Desire Z*
HTC Evo 4G
Nexus One with Google
T-Mobile G2 with Google
Droid Incredible
HTC Inspire*
T-Mobile myTouch*

Motorola Droid
Droid 2 Global*
Droid R2-D2*
Droid X
Motorola Cliq2*
Droid 2*
Droid Bionic 4G*
Droid Pro*
Motorola Milestone 2*

Nexus S with Google
Samsung Epic 4G
Samsung Fascinate a Galaxy S

Tablets:

Dell Streak
Dell Streak 7*

Samsung Galaxy Tab*

* signifies devices that ship with Flash preinstalled.

Of the hundreds of smartphone models available, the 27 devices above represent those that CAN support Flash, the 13 asterisked models above are the only ones that do out of the gate.

Supposedly the Blackberry Playbook tablet will support Flash, but it hasn’t shipped yet and as far as I can tell NO RIM devices support Flash.

As of January 2011 the smartphone market was broken down thus according to Canalys:

Since neither RIM, Windows Mobile (including the new Windows 7 phone) nor Apple support Flash, we’re talking 33% of the market. Symbian only supports Flash Lite, which, again, doesn’t support most Flash sites. That’s 64% of the smartphone market that does NOT support Flash.

Tablets

Apple has sold 14.5 million iPads. Galaxy Tab with Android has sold 2 million. That means 75% of the tablet market, also important to this discussion of mobile saturation of Flash, does NOT support Flash. “But 25% does” you say. Yes it does, but not well:

Advent said it was pulling Flash from it’s tablets due to poor performance. Poor performance is also seen with Droid 2 devices.

It’s clear that the processor heavy needs of Flash simply do not make it a good fit for mobile devices. As mobile devices have begun to outsell PCs, developing your brand’s messaging in Flash is leaving out an enormous majority of customers. As tablets begin to replace laptops anf HTML5 becomes a growing solution for rich media sans Flash, it will be interesting to see on which side of the argument  software and hardware manufacturers like Google, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola fall on. What will be MORE interesting is which side of the argument marketers, developers and designers fall on.

Joe Versus the Volcano

One of my favorite Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movies (that is a category right?) is Joe Versus the Volcano. Hanks plays Joe, an ordinary guy with an ordinary life until he’s told by his doctor that he is terminally ill with a “brain cloud”. A wealth benefactor offers to make his dreams come true in the final stages of his life in exchange for sacrificing himself to the god of tropical islanders. The god is of course the island volcano and the wealth benefactor would get oil or mineral rights from the islanders in exchange for appeasing it’s god. Meg Ryan is in the film merely for comic relief and eye-candy.

The premise of that film has nothing to do with this post but it’s still a fun movie I recommend.

I’m using the title as an illustration of 2 very different geographic locations: Hawaii and Wyoming (and to a degree North Dakota).To me, Wyoming and North Dakota are home to the Average Joe, while Hawaii is of course home to big men with little ukulele’s and tan beautiful women in grass skirts, living at the base of a volcano. Let me qualify the previous generalization by saying I’ve never been to any of those states.

A recent Webtrends overview of Facebook advertising performance offered a few interesting numbers, specifically around the difference in users from Hawaii and those from Wyoming and ND. It found that the Click Through Rate (CTR) of Hawaii was .05% while that of North Dakota was 2.25% and Wyoming 2.9%. That is a pretty wide statistical gap. How else to the 3 states stack up?

State	Hawaii	North Dakota	Wyoming
CTR	.05%	2.25%	2.9%
FB  Population	519,000	287,740	217,940
Population*	532,796	267,621	220,683
HHI	$61,055	$49,450	$52, 010
College Educated	29.7%	25.6%	22.7%
Average Temp	83.9°	53.1°	57.5°

*represents the population 15-44 as the average population on Facebook is 36.

So, there are more people on Facebook in Hawaii than in Wyoming and North Dakota combined. This pretty much matches their population density. Hawaiian household income (HHI) is about $10,000 higher and their percentage of college educated is higher by 4.1% (North Dakota, and 7% (Wyoming). None of these are much of a gap. The largest gap is in the temperature which averages about 30° higher in Hawaii than with of the other states. Could it be that the folks in North Dakota and Wyoming click on more ads because the weather outside sucks and they have nothing better to do (like surfing, swimming, ogling the opposite sex in swimwear and other natural delights)?

Other fun stats include:

• Fans that didn’t attend college click more.
• Fans that attended college are twice as likely to click if a friend does.
• Women are women likely to click on an ad than men, especially as they get older.
• BTW, you know that golden target of 18-24 year-olds that everyone targets? They have the lowest CTR. The highest is 45-64. But that’s another post.

I’m often asked where I get my statistics. Usually for one of two reasons: so someone else can let me do the work of tracking all of this stuff down then posting it on their site without a link back to me or because they think I’m making it up. I’m not sure which is more insulting. Either way, other than the links included in the content, here are the rest of the sites I used for statistical reference:

Facebook usage stats by state
Average weather by state
Household Income by state
College education by state
Population by state

Creative Rules

I’ve been in the business of being paid to create things that help sell stuff for well over a decade, actually, coming up on two decades. So, I may be a bit biased. It always seemed to me that the most creative marketing was the most effective. After all, who stands around the water cooler talking about the direct response commercial they saw on the History Channel at 1am? But, the Old Spice guy gets an interview on Ellen. The “pass around effect” is a legitimate measure, at least in my mind, of the effectiveness of a spot. No commercial, website, billboard, or Twitter engagement is going to guarantee a sale, but, if it changes consumers’ perception of a brand or product, helps them remember it hen they’re filling up their cart at Target or picking vacation spots, you’re half way there.

How often does anyone buy a car based on those commercial spots where they just show a bunch of driving footage and pitch you on the low price and warranty? I’d bet alot fewer than buy a vehicle based on the spots showing a hipster rodent in a little car or a truck pulling a yacht. If it’s not memorable, it’s not effective. If it’s not creative, either through humor, sex, visuals, cleverness, then it’s not memorable.

This has been proven in a couple of recently released studies by IPA, the University of Toronto and Ryerson University:

http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=144942

Apple’s Big Mistake (and the solution)

Apple’s recent release of the iPhone 4 saw the Cupertino company make a blunder usually seen from other consumer product companies, rarely seen from Apple. The first rule of successful product development is to design your product the way people will use it, not how you want them to use it. It is an ongoing argument I have with most developers I’ve worked with. They see a simple solution to a user interface issue that will require users to learn how to use the interface in a different way than they had been. My retort is always: “But that’s not how they will use it”. We consumers are not stupid, but we don’t like to learn new things. When we do learn new things we want it to be a seamless approach, otherwise we balk. Apple forgot this lessen sometime in the last year.

Apple’s iPhone was certainly a new class of product; it used multitouch, it had sliding screens, no multi-tasking. But it was intuitive. My 1 1/2 year old’s favorite pastime is flipping through pictures or typing on both my iPhone and iPad. Despite the fact that multitouch was new, it was intuitive Even turning the device on for the first time was intuitive: you click on the big button, slide the button that says slide, and you’re in. Flipping the pages of your iPhone was like flipping the pages of a book.

The recent release of the iPhone 4 goes against the intuitive design sense that we’ve come to expect of Apple: if you hold it wrong, you’ll lose signal.

Now, according to Apple this is only happening to .5% of users and the media is blowing it up. (The takeaway from this should be that early adopters have big mouths, hate when things don’t work and are very adept at showing their displeasure through social media.) Steve Jobs says all mobile devices suffer from the same issue of signal degradation when a user cups the phone in it’s hand. Well, it didn’t have that much effect on my old Sony Ericsson that I discarded 5 years ago. Even if this is true as many antenna experts claim, the signal degradation was minimal or this would be old news. Apple’s second claim is that users, when holding the iPhone incorrectly, bridged the 2 antennae that make up the infrastructure of the phone. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is Apple’s assertion of users holding the phone wrong. This goes back to user experience and intuitive design: users will hold the phone the way they want, designers must make allowances for this behavior. Whether you’re a lefty or a righty we all hold a cell phone in a similar way. This doesn’t come from comScore or PEW, just a brief survey of people I know with cell phones, Apple or otherwise.

For some reason Apple decided to break up their 2-antenna frame at a key point where human hands would be gripping their product, thus causing the signals to be bridged and not work effectively.

It seems to me that common sense, with a healthy dose of real world observation would have given them a pretty obvious solution to the problem: change where the antennae break is located to a location that isn’t normally a point of contact for the human hand. Now, I don’t know much about mobile device development or antennae, but the problem, at least from reports from techblogs and Apple itself, seems pretty simple: avoid bridging the antennae. Does this help?