Getting the plan changed

Irritant #1: I had to go in person to the BSNL customer service center and submit a letter stating that I would like to change my plan. This is extremely frustrating to me that a large broadband provider would not have a simple online plan management mechanism. Anyways, I justified to myself that all this effort is worth it if one indeed got a data rate of 8Mbps.
Irritant #2: The plan comes into effect only from the 1st of the following month. So it was quite a long wait since I decided 15 days before the end of the month.
Irritant #3: The billing plan gets promptly updated on the 1st of the month but the ADSL link speed was not updated till almost the end of the 1st week. I should mention that the update happened after relentlessly calling the BSNL office.

What about the broadband speed?

At the outset, it would have been worth all this trouble if I indeed got 8Mbps data rates. The answer to that is “No”. I have run speed tests of various forms. I’ve used www.bandwithplace.com, cnet internet speed test, speedtest.net and of-course a simple download of a large file. I have pretty much got consistent results with all these methods. With the 8Mbps plan, I consistently get download speeds of 5 to 6 Mbps within India. However, when I access servers outside the country (let’s say the US), the download speeds range between 500 Kbps to 1 Mbps. Please remember most of the content one would typically access is not residing on servers located within India. Atleast for me, possibly 90% of my traffic are directed towards servers outside the country.

The picture above is a download test from the Mumbai server. Nice 6.62 Mbps download speed. But look at the picture below.

The above picture shows a 570 Kbps download speed from the server in San Francisco. San Francisco neighbors the silicon-valley and I get a mere 500 Kbps download speed with an 8 Mbps connection. Wake up BSNL, you need to improve the internet backbone! Airtel on the other hand provides only a modest 4 Mbps plan as their fastest connection. I’ve done some initial tests at my friend’s place and they seem to provide a 3 Mbps download rate, even for servers outside the country. But, I will only know for sure once I make the switch. I will post an update on my experience with Airtel once I have my Airtel broadband service active.

I’m based in Bangalore near the Bellandur-Outer Ring Road area. I’ve heard a similar story from a friend of mine who lives in South Bangalore. But then again everything written here is my personal view and I would love to hear your experience with BSNL broadband.

The issue seems to be related to how the OS is handling sleep and idle conditions. Users have mentioned that they see battery life improvements if they change the WIFI sleep policy or by disabling WIFI when it is not in use. There is a thread being discussed related to this issue at the Google Code site as Issue 15057. Workarounds are being discussed but there doesn’t seem to be a solution yet. This has been classified as a Medium priority defect. I find that surprising. What is the use of having a cool smartphone with Gingerbread if you can’t keep it powered on?

Any Nexus One users experiencing a similar battery performance issue after the Gingerbread update?

The above two pictures are two screen shots depicting the two forms of mobile advertising available for advertisers today. This article concentrates on the later form of mobile advertising which is In-Application advertising. The secound picture above is a screen shot of the popular game angry birds. On the top right hand side you will notice the banner of the Audible Ad. When the user clicks on this banner he/she get navigated to the audible site in the browser. Following this, money is deducted from Audible’s advertising account in the CPC (Cost Per Click) payment model. But is the advertiser really getting the bank for the buck with this form of advertising?

Issue of Mobile Application Advertising

Google acquired AdMob for their “In-Application” advertising. This service is promoted by Google as “Mobile Display Advertising”. Using this service publishers of applications can choose to promote Ad content within their applications there-by being able to monetize their applications via Ads. The Ads get displayed like a banner as shown above in the angry birds picture. However, advertisers don’t seem to be getting value today from this form of advertising. So what are the problems involved.

1. Clicks because of confusion or curiosity: This form of advertising is very new and users are still not used to seeing Ads within applications. Some of the users sometimes assume that the banner is part of the application itself and click on the Ad to explore the functionality. They quickly realize that it is an Ad and close the browser window when it takes the user to the respective advertiser’s page.
2. Clicked by mistake: The phone display is definitely much smaller than a PC screen. Users tend to click on the banner by mistake. For example, when I play the Angry Birds game, I end up clicking on the Ad banner purely by mistake. I’m trying to negotiate the movement of the bird in the game and end up clicking the banner when I had no interest in the Ad itself.
3. Non context based Ads: This form of advertising is currently not context based. Why would a gamer of Angry Birds be interested in audio books from Audible? It is indeed possible that the gamer would be interested but the probability is quite low.

Jumping bounce rates

A bounce rate for an advertiser is the number of visitors to his advertisement landing page who leave almost as soon as they visited the page. This is an indicator to the advertiser that he/she is attracting visitors who are not potential buyers. The higher the bounce rate the more ineffective is the Ad. So when advertisers investigate the results of their ad campaigns, they would realize that their bounce rates are going high. This means wasted money on Ads. An advertiser is only interested in advertising if the company can help improve sales. If this does not happen it is a de-motivation to advertise in the respective form.

Context based advertising

Mobile advertising in applications need to become more context based. For example, an Ad for a game similar to Angry Birds when advertised in the Angry Birds application could generate serious interest in the target audience. Of course, this would definitely raise concerns of privacy. Mobile advertising is still very premature and has to be more targeted for it to gain popularity with advertisers.

Compatibility definitions before Gingerbread

The compatibility definition is a requirements document to which an OEM (device manufacturer) has to comply, in order to call a device Android. The primary focus of the compatibility definition is to make sure that there is conformance to all public APIs. The document apart from addressing the software aspects also covers specific hardware features that a device MUST, SHOULD or MAY have. The definitions of MUST, SHOULD and MAY are as per RFC 2119 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt). In short, MUST means mandatory, SHOULD means recommended but not mandatory and MAY means optional. In view of not going way back into the past, I have limited the analysis to Éclair and Froyo definitions. Now let’s talk more about the mandatory hardware components mentioned in the compatibility definition since they impact the BOM. OEMs typically produce similar devices varying across different price segments. These are typically known as variant devices. For example the variant devices may not have GPS or Bluetooth or even a camera. Such hardware features is what I call as auxiliary components. By reducing the auxiliary component list the OEM can reduce the BOM cost which then reduces the per unit price that a buyer finally pays. Let’s examine some of these auxiliary components in the Éclair and Froyo compatibility definitions. GPS, accelerometer, digital compass or magnetometer, camera, and Bluetooth are all mandatory components. Each of these components cost money. So as per the Éclair and Froyo compatibility definitions there is an element of control that Google exercises over handset manufacturers.

Google’s stand during previous versions (Éclair and Froyo)

Before the advent of the concept of an app-store, users bought a phone and were content with the applications that came built in. This behavior started changing with smartphones. The credit goes to Nokia for popularizing Symbian based smartphones. However, Apple and now Google have taken it to the next step with the Apple App Store and the Google Android Market. Nokia has also followed with the Ovi Store. Application developers use the SDK of the respective smartphone OS and develop innovative applications and games. It’s now not only about what a smartphone offers with its default built-in applications but the variety of applications that users can download from the respective app store. In the context of Android, Android Market is a huge success which offers a large range of applications and games. Google took it one step further, by enabling application developers to monetize via ads in their applications. So in a sense, application developers are revenue channels for Google. In view of the above context, Google felt it was important to make the Android platform homogeneous across various devices. This included making a bunch of auxiliary hardware components mandatory. This way a developer could assume that such hardware components were present on all Android devices, thus making their code paths simpler. In my opinion, this was Google’s way of helping control fragmentation in Android.

Compatibility definition in Gingerbread

Gingerbread is the most recent release of Android from Google. It was released late December 2010. Along with the release of Gingerbread the Gingerbread compatibility definition has also been published. It is interesting to see that all the auxiliary components which I have mentioned earlier have been marked as “SHOULD” in the document. This means that such auxiliary components are now not mandatory but rather recommended.

What does this mean?

This move by Google might not delight application developers. However, OEMs can now produce Android handsets catering to various price segments. OEMs can now make devices with a subset or none of the auxiliary components thereby reducing the BOM cost. A market research firm isuppli estimated the Google Nexus One BOM to be $175. Let’s hypothetically speaking get rid of these auxiliary components from this BOM list.

The revised Nexus One BOM cost would now be $146. Please bear in mind that we are not talking about the per unit price that a user would pay but only the BOM cost. Per unit price also includes R&D, testing, certification and manufacturing related expenses. With these BOM reductions, there will be other direct cost savings related to R&D, testing and certification which is not factored here. OEMs can further optimize BOM costs by reducing application phone storage memory. This is because; in Gingerbread the applications storage shared memory minimum in the compatibility definition has been reduced from 2GB to 1GB. I believe the year of 2011 will see a lot of low cost Android devices being launched, especially in the India-China markets. Of course, there will be high end devices like the Nexus S, but, there will also be devices which a common man of the emerging India-China market can afford. This will make Android not only a high end smartphone but also a device for the mass market.

Reference: http://developer.android.com

What is causing fragmentation?

In order to understand Android fragmentation we need to understand the software upgrade R&D cycle of a device manufacturer. Shipment of devices by Handset manufacturers or OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) can be broadly classified into two categories: operator specific devices and non-operator specific devices. Operator specific devices are devices shipped in an operator network like Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, etc. These devices are tied to the respective operator network. Non-operator specific devices are not tied to any specific operator and usually sold as “unlocked” devices. Unlocked devices are most popular in countries where the operator does not subsidize the device costs and bundled with a voice and data plan or contract. In Q3 2010 the total shipment of phones with Android was 20 million devices, which also makes it the 2^nd largest smartphone OS in the world in Q3. Out of this shipment, 9.1 million devices were sold in the US operator market, which makes it 45% of shipments for operators in the United States alone. From this it is clear that the volume of operator specific category of devices is a large. Further, operator specific devices entail more R&D and hence this category is discussed in more detail below.

Operator Specific Features: When a phone is to be shipped in a North American or European operator network the OEM has to comply with the specifications published by that specific operator. These specifications are usually related to some specific nuances of an operator network configuration or more commonly services that are provided by an operator. An example of the former is AT&T. When AT&T and Cingular merged, a feature called EONS was made mandatory. Broadly this feature allows for a user with an AT&T SIM card to lock onto to Cingular and vice-versa. Another example is Verizon with its service of LTE and CDMA. This service has lot of specifics, related to telephony of two different types of network access standards. Such features are not provided for in the plain vanilla version of open source Android. They have to be implemented by the OEM. The second type of operator specific customizations is related to services provided by the operator. For example, Verizon provides the “Visual Voice Mail” service, Vodafone provides the “Vodafone Live” service and so on. Each such unique services provided by an operator requires a specialized application which complies with the respective operator specifications. Once again, these features don’t come as part of the open source Android release. They have to be implemented by the OEM. All the above described customizations typically impact Android vertically through its various OS layers. Hence, to upgrade to a new version of Android, OEMs have to migrate all these operator specific customizations to the new version. This entails time and R&D costs.

OEM Specific UI: The UI that comes along with the plain vanilla open source version of android is commonly known as “Stock Android UI”. The UI is one of the most differentiating factors of software. UI is what can make a man to machine interaction simple and intuitive or rather complex. Obviously, every OEM wants to have a much richer and enhanced UI compared to what is available in stock android UI. So each OEM has their differentiated UI. To name a few, HTC’s UI is branded as HTC-sense, Samsung’s UI is branded Touch-Wiz and Motorola has branded their UI as Moto-Blur. When an OEM wants to upgrade a device to a newer version of Android, all custom UI modifications also need to be migrated. Once again, it entails time and R&D costs. One key factor we have to bear in mind is that once all the changes are migrated to the new release all functionality and performance needs to be re-tested to make sure nothing is broken.

Kernel upgrade: Usually a new Android version is also accompanied with a newer version of the Linux kernel. Each device has its specific hardware components like LCD, GPS, WIFI, etc. So an OEM will have to make all the necessary kernel related changes to make sure that the new version of Android can be ported onto the device. It typically takes and OEM anywhere between 3 to 4 months before they can make a public release of the upgrade. This cycle has to be done per device. Once a device has been shipped, it is usually gets a lower priority from the device manufacturers to get an Android upgrade going because they concentrate their efforts on the new devices which are on their roadmap. Sometimes devices never get a software upgrade because either, it’s too old a product for the OEM to spend R&D money or the hardware is just not powerful enough to run the new version of Android. Either way, it leads to fragmentation in the Android device market.

Impact to developers

A paradigm shift came along with the launch of Apple “App Store”. The equivalent application store from Google is “Android Market”. Developers quickly realized the potential of adapting to Android as it maximizes the user reach for their applications. This is because development is on one OS but the same application will run on devices manufactured by multiple OEMs. Google also enhanced the incentive for developers by providing advertising support within applications. This was a significant shift in paradigm where advertisements within mobile applications were previously unheard of. This enabled developers to publish their applications for free but monetize via advertisements. Most of the application developer community comprises of small companies ranging from being a single developer to a small team of 3 to 4 developers. With the fragmentation of Android, developers are strained with a balancing act. They have to make sure that their applications work on all different versions of Android across varying UI interfaces of OEMs. On the other hand they are in a constant race to add more features to their apps or develop new apps. A typical dilemma is when a developer is planning to use some new APIs of let’s say Gingerbread while wondering how many users will actually get to use it. Statistics show that even in December 2010 approximately 40% of devices still run Éclair. So there-in lies the dilemma; whether the company should concentrate on features that would give maximum user access or develop features based on the new version and wait till it gets a bigger install base. What has been described so far is only related to new feature development. There is still the part where developers have to make mandatory changes to support their applications on newer or different versions of Android. Given below is an example of the frustration a developer has expressed on a Slashdot discussion.

Android 1.5 has a Java NIO bug that forces me to copy data to a temporary array on its way to buffers to be rendered via OpenGL. This hurts performance on older phones that often need it the most. It also means I have to do more testing to make sure both code paths are well exercised. I bet many developers don’t even realize the bug is there an just have broken OpenGL apps on Android 1.5. The bug fix would be trivial to port back to Android 1.5, which would make it drastically more likely to get on to these older phones, but there’s no sign this will ever happen. Do I keep code paths like this? Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5? Neither is desirable.

Emerging Markets

While I visited one of the Google office lobby’s I noticed that they had a large LCD screen displaying a spinning globe. It was afternoon by Indian time. This globe had certain regions of the globe lighting up in different colors. Each flashing dot on the globe indicated a Google search being invoked from that particular region. The dots also flashed in different colors indicating the language of the search. The United States was brightly lit up with the California region being especially bright. This was followed by Europe. The regions of Asia especially India and China were sparsely lit. Regions of Africa pretty dark. Watching this display, a realization of the emerging market potential dawned on me. Most of the access to the Google applications is currently accessed via a PC. However, the PC market is not growing at the same pace of the mobile market. This means the growth of internet accessibility is going to be via mobile devices. But, the large part of the emerging handset market is based on feature phones which are not internet rich. If more and more users start using smartphones, I would expect the globe lighting up faster in the emerging markets. Therein lays the power of open-source and Android for Google. One of the key driving factors of mobile phones in the emerging market is the price point. In India the sweet spot is between $100 and $150. But there are always users who are willing to pay more for more features and even more for getting the most advanced device. What this means, is that there is an inherent fragmentation enforced by the consumers and this is more proclaimed in the emerging markets. One of the key factors in the driving the device price point is the BOM (Bill Of Materials). Newer releases of Android have a more and more demanding need of hardware from the device. For e.g. the latest release of Android Gingerbread incorporates features like NFC and Gyro. These additional hardware components increase the BOM cost, thereby increasing the device cost to the user. So, OEMs have to find ways to decrease the BOM One example is to use the Android Éclair or even the Donut version with lower powered hardware. It is becoming a trend of consumers who were buying high-end feature phones to switch to low end smartphones. The price point being referred to is $150 to $200. Users who were considering a top end Nokia S40 phone are considering low priced Android phones from Samsung. Semiconductor companies like MediaTek based out of Taiwan primarily focuses on the China and India markets. This trend will only increase the fragmentation in Android. India and China being large population markets, this trend cannot be ignored. Developers will have to be more and more innovative to come up with efficient ways of addressing varying Android segments.

Opportunities arising out of fragmentation

Each new version of Android comes with new enhancements and cool features. Android being open source all new features of a particular release are known to the world. Every user is keen to have the greatest and newest Android version on his or her device. User buying behavior also indicates that the availability of the newest version on a device is a key factor in the device buying decision. Hence it has become a necessary evil for OEMs to continuously provide software upgrades to their existing shipping devices to help improve their volumes. This is compounded by the fact that operators also impress upon the OEMs to release upgrades to the devices shipped on their network. In the earlier part of this discussion it has been highlighted that OEMs are starved of R&D bandwidth and are in a balancing act of new devices vs. support of already shipping devices. This fragmentation of Android has led to interesting potential business opportunities for the professional services industry. Since OEMs would prefer to concentrate on R&D work for new device launches, they have started looking for external help on maintaining and upgrading Android OS versions. Further, OEMs are pushing this pressure down the chain to semiconductor companies. Semiconductor companies are in the business of creating newer and faster processors and not in the business of software support. Companies like Sasken are in uniquely positioned to cater to such new opportunities. Partnerships with semiconductor companies, deep relationships with OEMs and an experienced Android pool make companies like Sasken Communication Technologies are positioned right for such business potentials.

The Google factor

Google’s primary source of income is advertising. Almost every product of Google displays context sensitive advertisements. Their income comes typically through a pay per click model. If a product or service does not directly generate revenue via advertisements then its purpose is to help improve products which generate revenue to become more efficient, thereby making those products or services generate more revenue. This can be best explained via an example. The Google DNS service is a free service. When users adopt to this service, Google has access to almost all data traffic patterns of a user. This kind of stats will then enable Google to model users on a various parameters. They can model based on region, language, etc. The better the prediction of what an user is looking for, the more efficient the Google search results can become. Advertisements can then become more directed. This means more people will choose to advertise with Google Adwords and hence more revenue. Let’s look at how this applies to Android. Android is free and open-source. Is it really? The Google app-suite in Android is not part of the open-source package. By Google app suite, I’m referring to Google Maps, Gmail, etc. The most important of them all is Android Market. These applications have to be licensed by the OEM. These applications have a two part agenda. One of course is to generate direct revenue via advertisements. However, a more unstated reason is to collect stats of an user. An individual typically carries a mobile phone through-out-the day. Further, an individual uses a phone for various activities from email to shopping lists. If someone has to model an user pattern using the device he or she uses, the mobile phone is ideally suited for this purpose. Android as a platform works perfectly for this purpose. Using the stats collected, Google can model this data and improve their services in various ways. One of the rumors is that the “instant search” in Google search was developed based on the stats received by Google mobile apps. So, how is Google trying to control fragmentation today? The answer lies in what is called a compatibility test suite. If a device is to be branded Android, the device has a pass a bunch of tests as defined by the android compatibility definition. This compatibility is defined at http://source.android.com. The compatibility definition also defines mandatory components in hardware. For e.g. an OEM cannot make an Android device without GPS. The reason stated is to reduce fragmentation. Google has to play a careful role with controlling fragmentation. If they decide to tighten control over Android, the China-India market might create an open source derivative which means that Google loses control.

The future

Whether the fragmentation of Android deepens or not, it is not evident right now. What is definitely true is that Android has opened multiple business avenues for companies participating in various aspects of the wireless industry. What does lie in the future of the Android market space is something one just has to wait, watch and experience it with time.