Pressy to test with Apkudo 

September 17, 2013 – Baltimore, MD – Apkudo, the Android innovation company, today announced the launch of Apkudo Approved for Accessories. The program – an extension of Apkudo Approved device analysis – will test pre- and post-market accessories in the context of Android devices to provide wireless operators, distributors, and retailers a comprehensive experience assessment above and beyond the limited testing done today. This analysis will expose likely areas of consumer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, providing the data to identify poor experience risks prior to approval to carry, stock, and sell.

Apkudo Approved for Accessories will cover everything ranging from screen protectors, covers and cases to new wearable technology like smart watches and other innovative accessories entering the market. Every accessory has the potential to dramatically impact the user experience of a device – even accessories as simple as carrying cases and screen protectors, which for example can alter the display, touch screen, and audio experience. Because Apkudo already deeply characterizes the experience of Android devices before launch, they are uniquely positioned to assess how accessories modify those experiences.

In conjunction with the launch of Apkudo Approved for Accessories, Pressy – the Almighty Android Button! has teamed with Apkudo to test the experience of their new plug-in accessory for Android devices. Pressy is a perfect example of pairing the innovation the Android platform allows with the smart solutions Apkudo is providing. Pressy, a button that lets you perform any action on your Android smartphone with a click, is currently funding on Kickstarter to mass produce http://kck.st/12MV2Jj.

“We are excited to work with Apkudo to characterize the performance and experience of Pressy over the hundreds of Android devices in the marketplace,” said Nimrod Back, Co-founder of Pressy. “The open and free Android ecosystem has provided us the environment in which to innovate and Apkudo will help us overcome the challenges naturally inherent in that environment.”

“Because accessories have the ability to change the device experience, it’s important to consider the impact an accessory has on a device rather than approving on specs and price alone,” said Josh Matthews, CEO of Apkudo.

“With Apkudo Approved for Accessories, wireless operators, distributors and retailers can improve customer satisfaction, reduce returns, and optimize accessory portfolios. Apple has ‘Made for iPhone’, and now Android has Apkudo Approved for Accessories.”

With smartphone penetration moving past the mass market and into the laggard category, many are getting their first taste of smartphones on free and lower-power Android devices, and they’re not thrilled. The core reason for customer device returns at Cincinnati Bell was poor user experience.

Continue reading…

Apkudo wants to address fragmentation by becoming the gold standard of smartphone hardware and software testing

Ever wonder why not all carriers release their mobile devices at the same time? Or how about Android updates? While Google is now at version 4.2.2, some smartphones are still getting updates older than this one. It all boils down to carrier testing and certification. Carriers that have the resources would require testing whether devices meet their specifications — in terms of performance and compliance with their specific needs. This is also the reason why manufacturers have to release separate updates for each carrier.

But testing does not come easy. According to Apkudo, it’s usually normal for tier 1 carriers to have the resources to run a battery of tests before declaring a device or update fit for their needs. Everyone else might not have the clout nor the resources to do so. This testing can be outsourced, however, which is exactly what a startup called Apkudo is doing. Apkudo aims to become the gold standard of device and application testing, so that developers and carriers do not have to waste their time and resources in doing the testing themselves. Keep reading…

Apkudo Wants to Handle Android Fragmentation so Carriers and Developers Don’t Have To

Baltimore-based Apkudo is debuting its “Apkudo Approved” program this week, extending its existing work with making sure that Android apps and devices perform well for consumers. The company has positioned itself in a growth market, to act as a layer both between developers and devices, and between devices and carriers, to help both parties deal with the fractured and often maze-like landscape of the Android hardware market. Keep reading…

Fragmentation Fix: Apkudo on how it plans to make Android developers’ lives a little easier

And for free, too

Fragmentation has been an albatross around the figurative neck of Android for years now.

Although the increasing popularity of certain Nexus devices has helped to some extent, the problem remains a pertinent one for mobile game developers operating on the platform.

It’s an issue that Apkudo is looking to solve, both for developers and OEMs. Keep reading..

Ah, fragmentation. The Android application developers mortal coil. Different UIs from different OEMs, divergence in hardware, look and feel, behavior, APIs, etc, etc, we developers need a hero. Enter Ice Cream Sandwich. While ICS is a step in the right direction for fragmentation in some respects (e.g. unifying Honeycomb and Gingerbread), there are some ways it makes things a bit harder:

Screen Resolutions
The launch of ICS coincided with the new Galaxy Nexus touting an unprecedented 1280 x 720 display compared to the ‘ordinary’ 800 x 480 displays of the past. Plucked against Gingerbread, ICS also brings along a new method of reporting screen resolutions and adds a new kick with on-screen ‘hardware’ keys for phones. On devices without dedicated hardware keys, a portion of the screen is allocated to providing on-screen hardware keys, thus slightly altering the remaining available display region. Previous methods to report the screen resolution, display.getWidth/getHeight have been deprecated and replaced by display.getSize.

These differences may lead to complications with unusual object placement/layouts and simple incompatibilities. For example, the popular 3rd party keyboard, ‘Swype’ is problematic on the Galaxy Nexus with a message explaining an unsupported screen resolution. A temporary solution has been discovered by users by modifying the config file, ‘display0_SwypeScreen.ini’ to suit the appropriate screen size.

Menus
For devices without physical hardware keys, ICS programmatically displays a virtual menu key depending if the application requires it. A new ‘Action Bar’ has been brought over from Android 3.0 which is included if the activity uses the Theme.Halo theme – which is the default theme if either the targetSdkVersion or minSdkVersion is set to 11 or greater. In the presence of the action bar, a menu key will appear typically near the top right of the display. In absence, a menu key appears among the row of soft keys to the bottom of the display. However, even between standard Google applications like Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Gallery, Market, etc, which make use of the new Action Bar, the location of the virtual menu key varies making the user search around for three little dots.

In addition to the differences in the virtual menu key’s location, the operation of the menu key can occasionally be problematic. In certain apps such as Gravity Guy, Guerrilla Bob, and Market Enabler, a virtual menu key appears at the bottom next to the row of soft keys, yet it doesn’t serve any purpose. Pressing the menu key yields no response leading the user to think something has gone awry. Similarly before being updated, the popular application ‘Facebook for Android’ did not have any menu key appear at all despite the undoubted existence of a menu page.

Hardware Acceleration
As the display resolutions of Android mobile devices reach PC levels (many 13″ laptops are only at 1280 x 800), the demand for offloading screen rendering to the GPU is ever more important especially when a fluid 60fps experience is desired. ICS incorporates the level of hardware acceleration that existed with Android 3.0. Dianne Hackborn from Google:

“The implementation [of hardware acceleration] in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0… The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put android:hardwareAccelerated=”true” in their manifest.”

This similarity brings forth drawbacks for developers who may want to use hardware acceleration. A number of operations such as Canvas.clipPath, Canvas.drawPicture and Paint.setLinearText are not supported by hardware acceleration at the moment. Tiny Towers crashes with logcat citing ‘E/AndroidRuntime(20581): java.lang.

UnsupportedOperationException at android.view.GLES20Canvas.clipPath’ when GPU acceleration is forced. Whilst this may be a non-issue for Bob and Jane, developers may find it difficult and frustrating to have to re-develop their application to take advantage of hardware acceleration in order to improve user experience. In the case of new applications, a dilemma may arise between using a certain operation but not being able to gain hardware acceleration, against a possibly less favorable operation but able to be accelerated.

New API’s
Often with a major OS release comes a number of new additions. In the case of Android 4.0, one of these is a new set of documented APIs for accessing Calendar data. However, as this was only released with Android 4.0, a number of developers had previously developed their applications using old undocumented Calendar APIs, some of which use low-level access to the calendar database.

As mentioned here http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/10/ics-and-non-public-apis.html, some developers may find that their apps won’t run correctly on ICS without some updates being made. Applications such as SMS Backup+ were initially broken after ICS first released owing to a change in Calendar APIs, with recent specific changes just made in order to have Calendar features working once more. https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus/pull/206. It is without a doubt that these new API’s ease the task for future apps and developers, but in the mean time in order to support older releases, a bit of extra work needs to be done.

With all new OS version and device releases, there’s going to be some good and some bad. Google is trying to steer the Android ship away from fragmentation by offering a common base for all mobile devices and providing more official APIs for developers to use. However, changes need to be made. As developers we can’t rest on our laurels and wait for Google to figure it out, and we definitely can’t wait around for every OEM to push ICS updates for every Android model – some of the most popular devices may not even get it. We need to write code and then it to make sure it actually works on real devices. Unless everyone starts churning out code according to the books and the professors who jabbered on about ‘tightly coupled code’, certain things are going to break one way or another.

If only there were a way to see my app run on all of these devices so I could know with confidence that it works…oh, wait.

-Benjamin Tseng
Apkudo Engineer