Implementing a Mobile Working Strategy for Your Organization

Having an enterprise mobile strategy – once optional – is now business critical. Companies are building mobile applications with three main objectives:

Enable employee productivity

When employees can access important sales, customers, products, or operations data via mobile business applications, they spend more time working and making decisions on the go, and less time catching up in the office.

Improve customer experience

Mobile customer applications increase brand preference by enabling customers to shop, compare, buy, and access services at any time.

Increase partner collaboration

Mobile applications offer instantaneous communication, making it easy for all stakeholders in the supply chain to stay looped into exactly how, where and when to turn their cog in the machine.

If a company needs to manage workflows across multiple applications, simply buying applications that support mobile will not be enough. Mobile IT strategies have to support different business groups, each asking for multiple applications. As each group changes strategies and systems, IT must also be able to update mobile applications, quickly and seamlessly. A line-of-business can't wait six months to a year for an application to be developed or updated if it is to remain competitive. Enterprises need to run fast on their first mobile initiative, and just as fast on the next hundred.

Success for a mobile IT strategy is very tightly tied to the speed at which mobile applications can be created and most importantly, updated. Companies find that their mobile apps become digital channels and quickly want to invest more in improving the capabilities they offer through mobile. Speedy mobile deployments come from fast front-end development and fast back-end access.

On the front-end, mobile developers and architects are focused on deploying functional mobile applications with easy-to-use interfaces for immersive and responsive experiences – as quickly as possible.

However, speed on the front end is the easy bit compared to what it costs to power the application. Front-end speed doesn't matter if an application's intended content is locked away in systems across the enterprise. Custom code and point-to-point integration not only slow application development, they cripple the ability to make changes to applications.

Exposing an enterprise's assets is risky business, and the greater the number of applications, users, and systems, the greater the risk of assets being compromised. Moreover, systems that aren't built to handle the volume of data requests that might be expected from mobile applications are prone to failure or downtime, which ultimately results in a bad user experience.

This creates a conflict between the mobile application developer's need to access data quickly, and the back-end developer's need to ensure access to enterprise data is well secured, governed, and managed.

The solution is API-led connectivity. In order to support front-end speed while having robust back-end governance, enterprises need to provide mobile developers with self- service access to data across the organisation.

An early success came from the development of a mobile application to automate and digitise wholesale ordering and streamline operations with partners. The company was able to track external assets in the field, enabling them to know inventory stock situations and begin to address them on a timely basis. The next step for the company is to extend its mobile strategy to consumer facing applications. Full visibility and governance of all integrations makes it possible to do so quickly.

The API-led approach provides a layered model that unlocks back-end system data while providing security and control over the data being used. It enables developers to to build great mobile applications without having to understand back-end systems.

PayPal is shutting down its Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Amazon Apps

PayPal is thinning the number of mobile operating systems supported by the company's flagship app down to just two: Android and iOS. The PayPal mobile apps for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Amazon's Fire OS will be discontinued as of June 30th.

It's fairly common to see these decisions for Windows Phone and BlackBerry, but a little less regular to see a company of PayPal's stature just up and abandon Amazon's fork of Android, which runs on Kindle Fire tablets and the failed Fire Phone. PayPal doesn't offer much of an explanation for the decision, but claims it'll lead to better apps for the remaining platforms. PayPal's VP of consumer product Joanna Lambert in an announcement on the company's blog said that it was a difficult decision to no longer support the PayPal app on these mobile platforms. But they believe it's the right thing to ensure we are investing our resources in creating the very best experiences for our customers.

PayPal is quick to point out that despite being left without a native app, affected users will still have full access to PayPal's mobile website for account management and money transactions. There are other options, too; BlackBerry users can still send peer-to-peer payments with PayPal through BBM. And on the Windows side, Outlook.com users can enable the PayPal add-in to send payments right from the email app.

"We remain committed to partnering with mobile device providers, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers," Lambert said. PayPal claims that putting a sharper focus on just the two apps will allow the company to "innovate and make enhancements to PayPal's mobile experiences to give our customers the best possible ways to manage and move their money."

The Future of Customer Engagement

Marketers will understand customers better in the future. Data-driven marketers will be better equipped to draw from the wealth of information available through sources such as mobile, social, and the Internet of Things. But that won't make marketers' jobs any easier. Customers will have different and higher demands. They will expect their preferred brands to be available in every channel and to be transparent about service and price.

Marketers need to prepare for that future reality today. Mobile retailers stand at the vanguard of the connected customer evolution. The average consumer's life is increasingly lived online and there are almost hourly revolutions in technology. With more sophisticated mobile apps, cloud technology, big data and the Internet of Things, we are becoming more and more symbiotic.

To stay relevant, retailers need to evolve their mobile platforms and strategies how to foster 1-2-1 relationships with clients through these connected channels. They have to re-think and enhance their existing processes and be prepared to stay agile.

One of the most integral skills for a business is to master data management and analysis and ensure that the right processes are in place. Research shows that less than one percent of customer data is analysed by business. Companies ignore the data available on their connected consumer at their peril.

User experience and speed is of the essence. Connected customers value their time – 55% of US online users say that they are very likely to abandon their purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their question, with 77% saying that their time is one of the most important things a company can do to provide them with a good service.

Communities rule for e-Commerce as well as customer delivery:  By 2020, 30% of all purchases will be made through an online community. Marketing will take an important role within companies in building these communities and ensuring that purchasing is part of a customer engagement life cycle.

What is Mobile Deep Linking?

The mobile app ecosystem is still new – a fact that's easy to forget until you remember that there are things that we take for granted on desktop that just don't exist in apps.

Deep linking is one of these things. Its spread and adoption is one of the factors involved in the app becoming more like the rest of the internet.

Deep linking is a link to a part of a site or app that is somewhere on the inside – if we think of the main page or launch screen as the front door, then this is a link to the living room. It's a simple concept and one that we are so accustomed to on the internet that we may not know what it's called.

Most links you see are deep links, but that's usually on desktop. Web pages have the advantage of all being written in the same language – HTML. That means that links everywhere have the same format and are easily standardized. In apps there are different operating systems and programming languages at play.

Overcoming this problem means an incredible amount of functionality is opened to the app ecosystem.

Why is deep linking important for mobile?

As with most things we take for granted, we may not realize what deep linking enables.

Social sharing relies on deep linking. Search engines also rely on deep links. They go through websites and deliver relevant pieces of content – specific answers to search queries, not websites that might have content that might interest the searcher.

Deep links create a system of apps that works like the desktop web. An app is no longer an isolated program. Instead, there's an environment of programs that talk to each other, broadening the utility of the entire network.

Mobile deep linking is mostly used for marketing. If you have a mobile store, it's valuable to be able to bring a potential customer to a transactional page where they can buy rather than a storefront.

Ease of use is central to a good user experience, which leads to better results. Deep linking simplifies promotions across the board. Taking new users directly to a particular screen can make their experience more relevant and interesting. From sharing (via text message or email) to paid promotions, you have a greater variety of screens that they can land on.

If you plan events, spread information about your company's promotions, or just want to share one piece of news, a deep link is the simplest way to do it from an app.

The largest marketing platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) were among the first to adopt deep linking.

What is the future of deep linking?

If you remember what the early internet was like, you may understand what deep linking can do for mobile.

The web was dominated by large sites that tried to be universal – Yahoo may be the only (barely) surviving one. They gathered an audience and then tended to stagnate, resting on their laurels because users couldn't find alternatives. The current app market is similar.

Once deep linking on apps becomes as easy as it is on the desktop internet, this will change. With stable ways of finding content, you'll be able to search apps and find specific functions or pieces of content. It will make it easier to find and be found.

App Store Optimization - Make your app visible in search‎

Millions of people are spending more time on their mobile devices and inside mobile apps. Mobile apps are rapidly replacing websites as the digital hub for businesses and brands. But how do you get your target market finding and using your app?

For companies or brands with existing channels, like a morning TV show or a popular web service, acquiring mobile users starts with activating their current fans or users. Businesses without a TV air time or without large user bases like Pandora, Facebook or Twitter still usually have email lists and a website with visitors.

Promoting a new mobile app through these channels is essential, but fails to address the biggest source for new users – people searching for your services in the app stores.

User Acquisition Channels

With the explosion of mobile app usage comes an increasing competition for users. The most popular channels for acquiring mobile app users are app store search and advertising.

For all but the very biggest mobile apps, advertising spend is allocated to a paid install campaign, on a cost per install (CPI) basis. Between an increased competition for mobile users, and non-mobile brands competing for mobile ad inventory, CPI costs have skyrocketed over the last 36 months.

Because both Google Play and Apple include downloads and download velocity in their app store rankings, CPI campaigns are also used in "burst" campaigns.  The goal being to "buy" a burst of installs to rise up the charts and hopefully acquire users organically due to increased visibility.

Achieving Visibility In the App Stores

The number one source of app discovery and app installs is app store search. More users find apps to address their immediate needs by opening the Apple App Store or Google Play and searching.  When a user enters a search, the results and rankings are largely determined by:

• The app store listing and its relevance to the search

• App performance metrics including conversion from search, downloads and ratings

Building a strategy for creating and managing an app listing for visibility and conversion is called app store optimization or ASO.

An app listing optimized for visibility and conversion from relevant traffic signals to Apple and Google that your app is a good result for a given search. Combined with the resulting increase in downloads and ratings, your app will start to climb the rankings for those search results. An optimized app provides a defendable, long-term position in the app stores for traffic from your target audience.

How to Optimize an App Listing

Our data tells us that people are searching the app stores for features using two to three word phrases. The app stores are huge; with each store each housing over 1.5 million apps.  Vague or short searches result in irrelevant results, so we have been trained to be specific when searching.

By identifying your app's most essential and differentiating features, you get an idea of how your target market is likely to find your app in the app stores. It is important to understand not only how you would describe important features, but how your target audience would describe and search for them.

If you are serious about organic app store traffic, ASO and the ROI of acquiring organic app store users, working with an app store intelligence platform specifically designed for app store optimization is recommended.

With a list of relevant phrases, we can now start to build our app store listing.  Apple and Google Play have different app listing fields, but there are some similarities.

Both have an app name or title.  This is the best place for your most important features or targeted phrases. Apple provides a space of 255 characters for a title while Google only allows 30 characters. Choose your app's core features for the title – Your title is one of the first things a user will see. If you list what they're looking for, they will be more inclined to click through to your full app listing.

Apple has a private/hidden keyword field limited to 100 characters that is used to help Apple understand what keywords the publishers thinks the app is relevant to. Break phrases into words, and separated by commas without spaces and remove duplicate words.  For example, if we had a features list as follows:

• Cheap flights

• Airline deals

• discount vacations

• travel deals

• discount airfare

We would build the keyword field as follows:

Cheap, flights, airline, vacations, travel, deals, discount, airfare

Apple would then index this app listing for searches including "cheap airline", "discount travel" and several other combinations. Together with the keywords used in the app name, a "keyword matrix" is created and indexed by Apple.

Google is similar but instead uses the publicly visible fields of short and full description instead of a private keywords field for determining how to index your app. Google Play's indexation process uses the description; Highlight the your apps' key features using the phrases people would be looking for.

There is much more to building and executing an on-going app store optimization strategy that delivers results. Optimizing an app listing is only the beginning of a long-term ASO process, but it is also the start of organically gaining more and more traffic in the app stores.

Google issues biggest Android security

Google has just released the latest Android Security updates. Since last year's Stage fright circus, Google and other companies vowed to roll out monthly updates. For Google, Nexus updates are released every month to ensure there will be no compromises. Not every Android device may need security patches but the latter may still fix a number of known issues. The Internet giant is true to its promise that software updates will be available to fix any current and potential security issues on Android devices.

The offending application was never available for installation via Google Play Store and is now blocked for installation outside of the Play Store by Verify Apps.

Practice healthy mobile security hygiene and ensure that devices that connect to the enterprise and access enterprise data are secure by following these simple recommendations:

1. Enable root detection on all Android devices. This can be done by connecting to the Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)

2. Limit the devices in your organization that can run in "developer" mode to only those that need to run in this fashion.

3. Encourage users to download applications from trusted application stores, like the Play Store, where Google blocks malicious apps through a number of steps, including Verified Apps, Malware Scanning, Manual Review and more.

4. Educate your end users on the importance of running the most recent versions of mobile operating systems and updating all related security patches as they become available.

5. Consider integrating some of our Mobile Security Alliance (MSA) partner solutions to provide additional levels of mobile security.

Evolution of Mobile Test Automation Tools

With the evolution of mobile phones platforms from basic feature phones based on J2me/BREW to current date smart phones powered by Android, iOS and WP8, the mobile applications have evolved along with from simple few screen interactions to complex integrated business solutions.

In the feature phone day's as the app's were smaller in size and were built as few screen interactions to solve a particular business problem all the functional testing was done manually. As the underlining business logic started becoming complex, some of the developers started writing unit test scripts for the mobile app business logic classes & methods using the frameworks derived from J Unit such as JM Unit, B Unit and OC Unit. These unit test scripts were checked-in into the source control with the source code and integrated with continuous integration (CI) systems, to execute automatically on every built.

As the complexity and size of the mobile applications increased with device capabilities and processing power, the apps require testing of large number of test cases that cannot be tested manually in every release cycle and this created a need of UI test automation for mobile applications. This need gave birth to Image comparison (OCR based tools) powered by VnC based tools and hardwired mobile phone docks with cameras mounted over the device screens. These tools provided basic record and playback capabilities, with initial scripting support based on manually created on-screen Image Object mapping repos. As these tools had the capabilities of pushing key events and relaying the mobile screen content on a connected computer for execution of automation scripts, they are also used for testing automation of mobile application on remotely available device connected over internet i.e. the services like device-anywhere.

With the increase in popularity of iOS & Android platforms, people started using Instruments support provided by the iOS platform SDK xcode and Robotium for Android. Testing with Instruments required developing unit test type 'scripts' and executing then on emulators or usb/wifi connected devices. QA engineers have to often revert to development team for modification of these scripts to represent the modified or required new test scenarios as none of these frameworks provided the capabilities of recording the test scripts. These frameworks were able to fulfill the need of functional test automation for the mobile apps, but were not able to support with the need of UI test automation or execution of test scripts on remote devices in different geographies and operator networks.

Next came in the wave of Object comparison based test automation tool for mobile application; these tools require instrumentation of the application source code with their automation library. This library captures all the application objects, their properties and user actions at the time of recording and replays user actions at the time of execution to assert the object properties and give results. Some of this of tools allow to execute test scripts only on USB/wifi connected devices, while some others provides the capabilities execute test scripts on remote devices connected over internet and hosted anywhere across the globe. Few of them allow simulating desired environmental conditions at the time of recording and execution along with senor data simulation. They also provide features like adding assertions and regressions and editing of recorded test scripts for advance users.