Category: Tech news

Dots, a game launched just last week out of betaworks, has reached over 1 million downloads in just one week of availability.

According to a blog post, the app hit number 1 in eight countries, and went into the top five in another fifteen countries. Right now, in fact, you’ll find Dots as the number three free app behind Hardest Game Ever 2 and Falldown2, two worthy opponents.

Of course, backing from betaworks is always a smart way to get off to a good start, but dots stands on its own as a quality piece of mobile gaming software.

It’s a simple, digital take on the classic connect-the-dots game. You connect as many of the same-colored dots at once, and ultimately aim to make a square, which erases that entire color from the board.

In true mobile game fashion, users can earn power-ups and advanced tools by scoring “dots,” which are also available as in-app purchases. betaworks’ Paul Murphy relayed to TechCrunch that people are both earning and buying dots in a way the team is pleased with.

But the magic isn’t just in the gameplay, which is highly addictive to say the least. Hacker-in-residence and co-founder Patrick Moberg brought his experience with design, illustrations, and developing to create a truly beautiful game, with all the right aesthetic nuances and animations.

Plus, the social component of the app has made it quickly viral. “The app is heavily, heavily supported by the social mechanics in the game,” said Murphy. “So that’s working, and we suspect it will continue to work well.”

The question now is whether or not dots can keep up the momentum like a true classic or become the next Draw Something. For now, however, the team is focused on incremental improvements like expansion from iPhone to iPad, and support for colorblind users.

What is Yahoo? Marissa Mayer just laid out the company’s identity and future at Wired Business Conference. The key words she repeated over and over was “Every Day”. That’s when Yahoo wants you to use it, and it’s why it’s now developing for Google Glass, acquiring app talent like Astrid, and relaunching products like Yahoo Weather she’s sees as part of your “daily dozen” activities on mobile.

Mayer explained to Wired’s Steven Levy on stage in New York City that the company wants to help you do all the core mobile activities you do each day, including checking news, email, sports, finance, and weather. While other companies are more focused, she said “it’s okay for us to have an overall offering”.

It hasn’t worked too badly. Yahoo now has 300 million mobile users per month, and 700 million on desktop. “Yahoo has an amazing brand. I’m Midwestern and the brand is really strong there.”

The only problem with having so many apps is the switching costs. It takes time to do each of your “daily dozen” activities, but they shouldn’t interrupt your life. That’s why Mayer says Yahoo is developing for Google Glass, which could make its offering a seamless part of your day. Special apps may have to wait, though, as first and foremost she wants to make sure Yahoo’s homepage and other existing products work flawlessly on the tiny Glass screen.

That’s also one reason Yahoo was so excited to acquire news condenser Summly in March. ”Summarization will be a core technology in mobile. Short summaries add value”, especially when you’re trying to keep moving, or are imbibing information through a wearable computing device like Glass.

The renewed focus on the user experience is what ties together Yahoo’s strategy. Rather than just throwing content at people, it wants to make that content enjoyable to consume. It’s not abandoning content by any means, and is planning original programming plus more licensing deals like buy Saturday Night Live clips. But it’s UX that will bring Yahoo back into the spotlight. For example, Mayer says Yahoo hopes to innovate in search by returning results pages in more creative and helpful formats than just lists of links.

Mayer took a moment to tout her new policy against working from home as critical to building enjoyable apps, and despite industry hubbub, she says it was well received internally. She mentioned that the new Yahoo Weather app that integrates Flickr photos couldn’t have been built so fast without the team in the same room. The result was a hit app, that she says got all the downloads they expected for the quarter in the first four days after launch.

Close collaboration is what will let Yahoo move fast and make products for all of us. “The moonshot for Yahoo is being on every smartphone, every tablet, every PC for every Internet user. For me the word portal is somewhat limiting.” Yahoo doesn’t want to just lead you to utility, it wants to be that utility.

[Image Credit: Wcerrudo]

It’s been a while since the TechCrunch TV team has taken a tropical vacation, but we were able to take a walk on the wild side (no passports required) while shooting this latest episode of Cribs at open platform-as-a-service startup DotCloud.

DotCloud’s office is smack in the middle of the financial district of San Francisco, but when you step inside it feels like you’re in the middle of a jungle — albeit a very well-connected jungle with desks, computers, and intensely-focused programmers. That’s because DotCloud has decorated its office with dozens of plants in every space possible, on the floor, on desks, and even hanging from the ceilings. The greenery provides a very cool juxtaposition with the cityscape outside DotCloud’s 16th floor windows — a blend of Gordon Gekko’s office and Jurassic Park that somehow works really well.

And it’s not just people who enjoy DotCloud’s leafy oasis. The company’s staff also includes an adorable baby tortoise named Gordon who I may or may not have tried to abduct adopt. What can I say, we bonded.

Check it all out in the video above.

Earlier today, I had a chance to sit down with Adobe’s David Wadhwani, the senior vice president and general manager for Digital Media and public face of Creative Cloud at the company’s MAX conference in Los Angeles this week. Adobe announced a number of product updates this week, but the most important and wide-reaching announcement was obviously the move to subscription services with Creative Cloud and the fact that the company will stop developing its Creative Suite. While there has been some pushback against this move, Wadhwani believes that most of the community is ready for this move and that it will help Adobe innovate faster and serve its users better.

Creative Cloud

As Wadhwani stressed when I talked to him, the company currently plans to sell Creative Suite 6 “indefinitely.” For him, it’s important to look at where the company sees the creative evolution going. Adobe, he believes, has to look at “where do we see the creative world going and the evolution that we think is going to take place.” Adobe’s strategy, he said.” To effect and lead some of these changes, he believes, Creative Cloud is the way to go for the company. What’s often missing in the creative workflows today, he said, “is that element of connectedness. Creativity today is too often done in isolation.” Connecting you to your co-workers and a larger community on, for example, Behance, “is a very empowering thing for a lot of creators.”

If that’s where creation is going, he said, “it’s become very obvious for us that the best way for doing that is to create a truly integrated experience for creatives from their tools to all of these services and communities.” Adobe, he said, wants to put its resources into where the company can add the most value. In this context, the focus on creative cloud becomes a natural step in the company’s evolution.

The fact that the early reaction to Creative Cloud has been positive and that the company is seeing “good strong accelerating growth” has given Adobe the confidence “that as a whole, the creative community is open and obviously interested in moving in this direction.” He did, however, also acknowledge that not everybody will be ready to go this way and that it’s a big change that will take a bit to sink in. Adobe wants to have an open dialog with its users about this change and will also take its message on the road in the next few weeks. So far, he’s been very happy with the response from the creative community at MAX.

One aspect of Creative Cloud that Adobe hasn’t really talked about publicly is also that this change could prevent quite a bit of piracy. Making Photoshop and its other creative tools more affordable means that it’s now often easier for users to just pay a monthly subscription fee than to pirate the software. He also believes that all the extra services, including Behance, storage, syncing and many of the new tools the company has in store will get people to see that the value in subscribing to Creative Cloud goes beyond the tools.

The transition to Creative Cloud, to him, is not just about the business model, but also a cultural change. “The culture of Adobe has always been to appreciate the work that’s created by our customers,” he said. Going forward, Adobe wants to help amplify its users reach and it’s clear that Behance will play a central role in this. The tool wasn’t just showcased extensively during both MAX keynotes, but Wadhwani also talked about its role at great length during our conversation. To him, this is clearly an exciting and new aspect of what Adobe can do.

But What About Developers?

In return, however, the focus at MAX this week was clearly on designers and creatives and far less on developers than in previous years. That’s something Wadhwani also acknowledged in our chat. Going forward, Adobe isn’t taking its focus away from developers, “but refining where we focus in the stack.” Going forward, Adobe will put an emphasis on tools for user interface designers and user interface developers, especially as Adobe will continue to work with browser vendors. For enterprise developers and with regard to backend tools, he said, there are lots of other options out there and going forward, Adobe won’t devote all that many resources to them.

Adobe’s Hardware

The other major announcement at MAX was obviously that Adobe is experimenting with hardware products. As much as I tried, though, I couldn’t get Wadhwani to say whether Adobe plans to turn these prototypes into actual products (my feeling, however, is that the company is definitely leaning in that direction). What Adobe wants to do with its hardware, he said, is to fill some of the gaps that it sees in the toolset right now. He’d be very happy, he said, if other hardware manufacturers made similar products or wanted to participate in the process, too, but in a way, it seems like Adobe is taking a similar approach as Google is with its Nexus devices by creating reference points for others. The tools the company showed today, he believes, will complete the profile that can turn touch devices like the iPad into full-blown tools for creative professionals.

It also sounds as if Adobe is working on other hardware ideas, too, as Wadhwani described project Mighty, its stylus, as “the tip of the spear” of what Adobe is doing in terms of forward-leaning innovation. Tonight, at the MAX closing event, Adobe plans to show some sneak peeks at other projects in its labs, so it’ll be interesting to see if there will be more hardware announcements at that event, too.

BitTorrent is taking a new step today in its efforts to help creators make money (and make money itself) — it’s releasing a new content packaging format called the BitTorrent Bundle in alpha mode.

The company has already been working with different creators to launch promotional bundles. For example, author Tim Ferriss packaged chapters of his book with other supplementary media material as a way to promote sales of his newest work, while musicians like DJ Shadow have used BitTorrent to promote new tracks and albums. However, spokesperson Christian Averill told me that today’s announcement signals the company’s intention to move beyond one-off experiments and actually “productize” these efforts.

Averill also said that today is the first time BitTorrent has actually “gated” one of these bundles. Specifically, it’s partnering with music label Ultra to promote the behind-the-scenes documentary of Kaskade’s 2012 Freaks of Nature tour. Users can access half the content (a remix and a tour trailer) for free, but to get the rest (a digital tour booklet and unreleased footage of Kaskade’s Staples Center show), they need to enter their email address. In his blog post announcing the bundle, BitTorrent’s vice president of marketing Matt Mason described the package as a “functional record store.”

“This is a completely new way to look at monetizing content,” Mason said. “Instead of putting the content in the store, what if you put the store in the content? What if the interaction happened in the unit of content in itself?”

Mason said that the first bundle focuses on collecting email addresses, because for most musicians, email is “the most important way to connect with fans.” At the same time, he said BitTorrent will be experimenting with other ways to structure the bundle, including ones where users actually pay money to. (When he spoke to us last fall, Mason said that the music business has become more relationship-based, meaning that musicians usually have to build a relationship with their fans before they can start asking them to pay.)

The ultimate goal is to release a publishing tool that will allow any artist to create their own bundles, and to structure those bundles however they like — that’s probably coming in the fourth quarter of this year.

“BitTorrent users are clearly fans,” Mason added. “It’s now up to us to build the right sort of publishing tools so that that relationship between artists and fans can just be completely optimized.”

Page views served to #Syria via @CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3.

—
Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013

War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world.

“Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today.

Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the Internet know how to get to a certain IP address.” Continuing, ” Shutting down Internet access to and from Syria is achieved by withdrawing the BGP routes from Syrian prefixes.”

Last December, we interviewed Cloudflare about how exactly a government can cut off its citizens from the web. Watch the interview below:

This is a breaking story and we will update readers as more information comes in.

“Where did my Android go?” is the common refrain of Facebook Home user reviews. We want the widgets and old homescreen we’ve meticulously curated. That’s why Facebook needs to preserve and offer quick access to the phone we’re used to if it’s going to make Home a hit. Facebook’s reading the reviews too, so bet on the early Home updates to make it more of a bonus than a trade-off.

Facebook proclaims “Home is a completely new experience that lets you see the world through people, not apps.” But that completely new experience disrespects the work we’ve done to personalize our phones — arranging apps and putting them into folders, choosing what goes in the coveted first screen spots, and building widgets of real-time information we care about. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice so much to get Home’s added benefits.

Luckily, Facebook has committed to releasing monthly updates for Home, with the first one expected on May 12th. There are plenty of “nice” features it could add, but before Facebook decorates Home, it needs to get the foundation cemented.

Opening The Doors

I spent some time poring through hundreds of Home reviews to get a sense of the public’s perspective. Journalists and techies, including me, focused on features like Cover Feed and Chat Heads. The somewhat complicated install process didn’t faze them much. But the average Joe got quite confused when he downloaded Home only to find his familiar Android experience had been evicted.

Plenty of people like it, and say they get used to it after a while. But many of the 1-star reviews dragging down Home read like this [sic]:

• “Ugh! Not an intuitive app. Made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours. Unless major changes are made including an easy way to get to my home screen I will not reinstall.” – Victoria Wiley
• “It literally took over my phone. Its almost as if it a whole new OS and not user friendly.” – joe smith
• “Where are my widgets, not impressed” – David Marner 
• “It gets rid of everything u have and have to reset it” –J Erickson

Judging from these reviews and hundreds more I read, the first change Home needs is to do a better job of walking us through the transformation our phones are undergoing. Many people won’t be sure they’re supposed to select Home when asked which app to “Complete Action Using”. That should be explained up front. Then once Home is fully installed, Facebook should do a deeper tour not only of its own features, but of explaining what happened to the other parts of our phone and how to get back to them.

Preserving Personalization

Home has no widgets and no app folders, and users hate that. It won’t stay that way for long, though. Facebook Director Of Product Adam Mosseri told me when Home debuted that “There’s a lot of stuff we wanted to do in the launcher like folders and widgets. But that’s the beauty of the update cycle. We’re already working on stuff that will come out [in later versions of Home.]“‘

So is Facebook going to build its own foldering and widget-building system? Perhaps, but that doesn’t actually solve the problem prevalent in Home’s negative reviews. Users don’t want to do redundant work to re-personalize their phone.

That’s why I suspect Facebook will look for a way to integrate our existing folders and widgets within Home. This is a pretty fundamental shift for Home from a replacement launcher to a layer that rides on top of what we’ve already done to our phones. Ideally we’d be able to temporarily push Home aside to reveal our old homescreen and all our customization. Importing the folders and widgets we’ve already made into Home’s own app drawer would work, too.

Right now from Cover Feed you can swipe left for Facebook Messenger, right for the last app you used, and up to open your app favorites screen. I’d imagine Facebook would either add a down swipe to surface our former homescreens lying in wait underneath, or swap in this action for the app favorites up swipe.

With these fixes made, Facebook would get most of the prominence and immersive experience it wants from Home without forcing us to ditch our old system. That erases a huge barrier to installing and enjoying its “apperating system” and could help it grow beyond the 500,000 to 1,000,000 downloads it currently has. There’s a lot of people out there who want people to come before apps, just not instead of them.

[Image Credits: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP, Dashburst]

As the days go by and developers get their hands on Glass, the basic apps that we need to survive in the wild and share our photos are popping up. Today, Glass To Facebook is available for those who want to post the moments captured with Glass to the social network. It’s the first third-party app that allows you

The setup is similar to that of other third-party apps like GlassTweet, but requires you to give Facebook permissions to post to your timeline. It only takes a few seconds to get going:

After you’ve turned on the Glass To Facebook sharing contact within MyGlass and approve the permissions on Facebook, you’re ready to start posting:

Just take a photo and choose the Glass To Facebook option:

The nice thing about the app is that it creates a photo album for you that will start piling up your Glass-taken photos:

Your photo shows up like any other one would in your friends’ News Feed, too. This means that all of those annoying baby pictures that you see on the daily will now come from the vantage point of the parent’s face. Exciting, I know. On a serious note, it’s nice to see photos from Glass being brought to networks other than Google+, which was the only out of the box option.

While we haven’t heard anything recently about an official Facebook Glass app, we’ve heard that there’s a team of four working on something. What could Facebook look like for Glass? We know that there won’t be ads, since Google isn’t allowing them on the Glass platform as of right now. Aside from that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Poke pop up on the device.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Google+ Hangouts allow for groups of friends or colleagues have an intimate face-to-face conversation, but the “On Air” feature of the service allows you to broadcast to the masses. The President Of The United States Of America has taken part in these conversations, but anyone can set up their own. Today, the Hangouts team has introduced some new functionality that make participating in a live On Air a little bit easier.

Up until now you haven’t been able to do anything other than watch the live broadcast as it happens, which is nice until you have to run to the kitchen to grab a drink or pause to take a phone call. Today, viewers can now rewind your broadcast no matter where they are during the live filming process.

Additionally, On Air videos will immediately be published instead of carrying the normal waiting period where you’ll get the infamous “processing…” dialogue.

The only negatives that I see to this is that it slows down the ramp up time it takes to start your broadcast, so you should buffer some time in to get started before your actual scheduled “live” time:

Other tweaks in this push include higher quality versions of a Hangout On Air via your mobile device, which is nice since these can be kind of grainy, depending on your connection at the time. Additionally, live broadcasts will now start without having to refresh a page, which was a real pain in the ass. Now if you visit a page that has the embedded On Air player, it will just automagically start playing.

The Hangouts product has made its way into many of Google’s services, including its mobile offerings on Android and even Glass. The usecase for Hangouts widely vary, but Google has been dogfooding it way before its release. The “On Air” option has the attention of both local and national broadcasters, giving them away to connect to audiences in a way more intimate way.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Windows Julie Larson-Green was at WIRED’s Business Conference today, and she was put on the spot when asked by interviewer and WIRED Senior Editor Michael V. Copeland about the apparently sluggish start for Windows RT. RT’s failure is a consumer education problem, according to Larson-Green, since it’s very different from what’s come before.

Windows RT, for those unfamiliar or confused by the new familial breakdown of Windows following the introduction of version 8, is a lightweight version designed for ARM-powered devices (vs. x86, the architecture which full Windows OS runs on), which doesn’t offer access to the full suite of Windows software. According to our own Matt Burns, that has resulted in a big app gap, and made the Surface RT essentially a glorified web browsing tablet, which sounds like something different from a simple matter of properly framing the product.

“I think we have some work to do on explaining it to people because it’s different,” Larson-Green said. “They’re just so used to Windows meaning backward compatibility in all the programs that you use today. I use Surface RT as my main computing device, I connect to a corporate network using my virtual smart card and VPN when I need to, Office is already on there […] it’s just a simpler experience and then the Surface Pro has the flexibility if you want to work on the details.”

“I love my Surface RT,” was a common refrain from Larson-Green even into the Q&A, who later characterized it as a device for casual consumption mostly, especially filling a niche for “weekend” use. Even the dual nature of her defense of the Microsoft tablet shows that it still needs work at Microsoft itself in terms of fleshing out its role in the consumer ecosystem, which probably isn’t helping the company properly explain its purpose to the buying public.

The Surface RT is estimated to have sold only around 1 million units total since its launch late in 2012, far under its reported initial estimates of 3 million or so. Other OEMs have balked at the RT line in the meantime, with Acer waiting on launching its RT slate until at least Q2 of this year.

Windows 8 launched to mixed reviews just over half a year ago, and Microsoft has dutifully pushed out nearly 740 tweaks and updates over the intervening months. Even so, rumblings of a sizable update (codenamed “Windows Blue”) have been making the rounds for months now, and we’ve finally got a firm idea of when to expect the first public preview.

Microsoft Windows chief Julie Larson-Green confirmed at the Wired Business Conference today that developers would be able to download and install the Windows Blue update preview in late June to coincide with the company’s BUILD developer conference.

The update will be “available to everyone that has Windows 8 in the Windows 8 store,” she noted to Wired senior editor Michael Copeland. “Just click on it like you would any app and it’ll update your system.” It’s hardly a shock considering that a June preview release date has been rumored for over a month now, but it’s likely welcome news for users who haven’t quite fallen with Windows 8 and its dramatic design changes.

At this point, many of Blue’s juiciest details are still shrouded in mystery — we don’t even know what the update will even be called. People are already bandying about the name Windows 8.1 and Larson-Green wouldn’t refer to it as anything the “update to Windows 8,” though she may have just been dodging the question as the onstage conversation was just about to wrap up. Microsoft seems content to keep most of Blue’s changelog under wraps for the time being too — CFO Tami Reller pointed to a slew of necessary (if vague) changes in a Q&A that was recently posted to Blogging Windows:

It will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem. It will provide more options for businesses, and give consumers more options for work and play. The Windows Blue update is also an opportunity for us to respond to the customer feedback that we’ve been closely listening to since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT.

That said, it seems very likely that at least two major Windows 8 sticking points will be addressed in the coming update. According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, the traditional Windows start button is expected to make its triumphant return, as is the ability to boot directly into the Desktop view rather than having to futz around with the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro.

As it happens, June is going to be a pretty busy month for Microsoft and its hardware partners –Larson-Green noted that the era of smaller Windows 8 devices is nearly upon us, and that portability mavens will be able to get their hands on the first such device in June as well.

Nest proved that energy monitoring can be tantalizing. And it’s about to get even better. The company just announced that it has acquired MyEnergy to further enhance its suite of monitoring tools. Terms of deal were not released.

Originally called Earth Aid, the startup launched its online dashboard in 2009 as one of the first energy monitoring solutions. Similar to EnergySavvy, Google’s Powermeter andMicrosoft’s Hohm, Earth Aid, and now MyEnergy, provides consumers with information on how much electricity, water, and natural gas they use and how much they spend on these utilities. Simply connect your online utility accounts with the platform, and the system imports all the necessary bits and displays them on the beautiful web dashboard.

Spend a few quick minutes on MyEnergy.com and it’s easy to see why Nest wanted MyEnergy in its corner. The system is wonderful. Just like the Nest Learning Thermostat.

In 2011 the startup raised $4 million in Series A funding from Point Judith Capital, the Clean Energy Venture Group, and Capital-E. According to today’s announcement, MyEnergy has users in all 50 U.S. states and spans more than 1,500 utility territories.

“Giving our customers more in-depth access and analysis of their energy usage has always been part of the Nest vision,” said Tony Fadell, Nest founder and CEO said in a released statement today. “We’ve made great strides in the past year and a half; by bringing MyEnergy into the Nest family, we can reach our goals even faster. The MyEnergy team is incredibly like-minded and we’ve already begun working with them to find ways to integrate their technology into Nest products.”

The Nest Learning Thermostat is beautiful. But the web dashboard is lacking in depth. There is plenty of room for improvement. MyEnergy will likely not only make it look better, but dramatically enhance the tool set by giving the homeowner information from their neighborhood.

Nest is charging forward, simultaneously building out consumer aspects and partnering with utility companies. This acquisition clearly fits within Nest’s vision. It’s unclear exactly what Nest plans to do with MyEnergy, but as a Nest user myself, I’m rather excited to see what Tony Fadell and team does with the beautiful MyEnergy platform.

Google Docs, now Drive, have always had an option to create forms that would drop data right into a spreadsheet. This is super handy until you tried to do something like…collect date and time information.

For whatever reason, those structured fields were never an option with Forms, but the team has finally added both as an option today. The product has always been “there,” but not heavily promoted by Google. Mostly because of these types of limitations.

Asking a simple question like when someone’s birthday was a nightmare, as you couldn’t normalize and structure being dropped into the spreadsheet, making the form pretty useless. It’s good to see the option when creating a form now:

For dates, people filling out your form will now get a proper calendar picker:

The folks in your office who have to actually use the data that you collect with a survey can now breathe a sigh of release with properly formatted dates and times. It’s the little things that matter. Or in this case, the big things that made the product pretty useless until now.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Software quality assurance testing on Android devices is far easier than it was just a year ago, at least according to one of Asia’s largest mobile app developers, Animoca.

The Hong Kong company has produced over 300 apps since it started two years ago, and just shot past 150 million downloads collectively. It produces mainly Android apps.

Last year, Animoca’s testing process for its apps covered a whopping 400 Android devices. Today, this number has been slashed to just a quarter of that, largely because of standardization in the Android handset industry.

According to Yat Siu, CEO of Animoca’s parent company Outblaze, most phones have become standardized on Samsung’s base hardware, thanks to the Korean manufacturer’s cornering of the component market.

Besides making its own branded devices, Samsung provides parts for a huge array of other devices. In 2012, Samsung was the world’s biggest manufacturer of NAND Flash (31 percent), DRAM (38 percent), and display components (25 percent).

The evolution of Android’s platform over the years has also made it a lot more flexible for app developers on the software side of things, with fewer variants of Jelly Bean than Gingerbread, he added. Together with hardware standardization, this has really eased the amount of testing that Animoca has to do today.

“Japan is the outlier in all of this—they have the strangest phones, and each one is a little different from the other. The rest of the world is mainly quite similar, based on Samsung hardware,” said Yat.

Phones are also getting better. He said that the 400 testing devices from 2012 were mainly made up of low-end handsets. “You have to cater to low-end devices because otherwise, you cancel out your biggest audience. But all the new hardware is pretty kickass, and more and more devices are getting very capable,” he said.

Animoca employs about 100 people working just on its apps, and has operations in Korea, the Philippines, the US and China. Its strategy is to flood the market with apps hitting different niche markets, rather than try to create a “Supercell-style or Angry Birds blockbuster” hit, said Yat.

Some of its titles, Star Girl and Pretty Pet Salon have pretty much reached hit status, but the company is focused on churning out a higher volume of app varieties, in the hopes of casting a wider net for loyal fans. “Those become paying audiences,” he said.

While Star Girl is enjoying millions of downloads, it’s still a niche app. “It targets girls, you share clothes and virtually flirt with guys. It’s not a Candy Crush,” said Yat.

The company has grown about four times in the past 12 months, although he wouldn’t say how much revenue it brings in now. “Frankly, we grew because Android grew as well,” he said, referring to Android’s growing market share. “That’s why Korea and Japan are big markets for us, because they are strong Android bases,” he said.

Animoca produces iOS versions of some of its games, but remains focused on Android, where ARPU is “very comparable” to iOS. Users in Japan and Korea tend to spend most on apps, said Yat.

Google just reminded developers that they can use Chrome as the default browser for their apps and easily switch back and forth between app and browser. With x-callback, Google says, developers can open links in Chrome and once the page has loaded, Chrome will show a link back to the original app in the top left corner of the screen. This should make it much easier for developers to allow users to support Chrome in their apps.

Currently, Google says, developers have two options when they want to access web content from their apps: they can create their own in-app web browser frame – using Apple’s own WebKit browser, of course – or by sending users away from their apps to a browser.

Once users are in the browser, though, chances are, they won’t come back, so Google’s scheme will surely help to ensure that users remember what app they were coming from in the first place.

To get started, developers have to download the OpenInChromeControllerClass and add it to their projects. The class will check if Chrome is installed and, if that’s the case, you can start sending links to Chrome with x-callback enabled.

Given that Chrome is essentially just an app on iOS, it can’t be set as the default on Apple’s operating system. That’s obviously a problem for Google, because apps will always open links in Safari by default. Because of this, users have little incentive to switch to Chrome because they’ll always be forced back into Safari anyway.