Mobility

Mobile WAP Tool Attracts European User Base

We made our desktop mobile testing product, MITE, free a few weeks back and we've been really happy by the great response we've gotten.  It's confirmed for us that testing the mobile Web has been no walk in the park.  Posts from the community regularly surface difficulties in building high performing and compatible WAP pages for so many device-OS-browser combinations.  If MITE can make a difference, it'll benefit the overall quality and adoption of the mobile Web.

Thanks to the pick-up we've gotten from Europe in German pubs like Heise Mobil, Inside-IT, Content Manager.de and the French developer pub like Programmez and InfoHighTech we're getting the word out to  mobile developers and Web masters. We're eager to get feedback as we look to the future roadmap for MITE (and boy is there a lot in store in the coming months).  So we welcome our European colleageus and look forward to hearing your stories.

Free Mobile Content Testing Tool

There are a lot of WAP sites out there - or mobile Websites if you'd rather - and despite the surge of native mobile applications, these sites will continue to play a major rule in the migration of Web sites to mobile screens and the adoption of mobile broadband.

That's why it's so surprising that there has been so little available in the way of testing tools to help mobile Webmasters and developers test the compatibility of their WAP sites across devices. 

So how are WAP sites being tested for compatibility across mobile devices?  It's not pretty but browser plug-ins are doing the heavy lifting today.   The awkwardness of a plug-in for WAP testing comes from the nature of the mobile ecosystem.

The combination of devices and operating systems creates a vast combination of user agent strings in the neighborhood of 11,000 (compared to only a handful for desktop browsers).  Depending on which user agent string you use, the results you see on your mobile phone will vary.  

Because browser plug-ins have no single repository of user agent strings for mobile site validation (only the ability to add them) you need to spend considerable time searching for mobile user agent strings online.

Some QA and dev teams also rely on real handsets which are necessary when you are testing applications or functionality on the device itself but overkill for WAP content.  And real devices do not provide the source code of the downloaded mobile site nor the syntax warnings in the code - both critical for development and ongoing maintenance by Webmasters.  As with the Web, it's important to know what's underneath what you're seeing to know where the problem is.  If you can't see the target URL on the screen of a real device, you won't know it's broken.

Take a quick tour of MITE and see how easy it is to get started with mobile content testing from your desktop.  And as of today you can also download a free copy.

Who cut the cable?

You might have heard about the incident last week where a fiber optic cable was cut in San Francisco and it caused an outage across many homes and businesses. Maybe not a big deal for most, but for one of our customers it was a big deal because it knocked out their monetized mobile service for several hours. In this particular case, automated alarms were sent out when the problem was detected. This allowed the owners of this service to at least be proactive in informing the consumers of their service that an outage was taking place. The graph of the outage looks like this:

Some customers have told us that before they had mobile monitoring, an outage over the week-end might go undetected until mid-morning on Monday. Not only did they not capture revenue for those days, but they might have damaged their brand by not being able to inform their customers of the problem.

Occasionally Keynote picks that individual mobile carriers will have regional or national outages for a particular service like SMS or WAP. Owners of a monetized mobile service that don't monitor may find themselves asking questions like: "Why did my mobile revenue drop 5% yesterday?"

What is true is that a mobile connection is more prone to have errors and problems than a reliable desktop internet connection. By not understanding outages occurring on the carrier networks, you can't rationalize unexpected revenue changes from one day to the next. If a national carrier has a problem, maybe you can't "fix it" with a phone call, but if you have some type of visibility into what is going on, at least you can reconcile carrier and service problems with business results that you are observing.

Maybe you have a SMS or WAP service and it doesn't look like it was working in either New York or San Francisco for the last 5 hours over one or more carriers. Do you want to know that or are you OK just wondering why your revenue has dipped, but you can't explain it?

Mobile app dev (and testing) made easy

[Follow up on my earlier post.]

One of the more interesting companies I came across at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week is a smart company with an awkward sounding name: MotherApp.  MotherApp is marketed to Web 2.0 developers (which explains their presence at the event) as an easy way to get into the burgeoning mobile apps market.

The company says there are 2 routes for Web developers/companies to get into the mobile space today: setup a mobile Website or hire a programming team to build native apps on the iPhone, Android or Win Mobile.

A mobile Website leaves a lot to be desired when compared to a native app on the iPhone (think Loopt) and doesn't use the phone's features such as GPS or camera. On the other hand hiring a programming team for each platform is expensive and you have to retain the team for maintenance and updates.

The 3rd way is MotherApp.  A Web developer sets up a Website based on the MotherApp HTML specification and MotherApp creates the app for you.

There's some advanced mobile capabilities already supported such Geo location identification on the iPhone and accelerometer and vibration are on the way.

Here's an example of TED videos ported to 3 platforms by a Web developer.

[Images courtesy MotherApp.]

MotherApp will let you try out the app risk-free.

And there is a way for you to test how your app will run on the phone before you decide to buy it.  Stop by our both at Web 2.0 Expo (#300) and ask for a demo of our upcoming mobile testing service.