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Mobile technology news reveals user loyalty is to operating system

| March 21, 2014

Consumers are far more likely to want to stick with an OS than to a handset brand, says a new study.

According to a mobile technology research report issued by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, smartphone and tablet users have a greater likelihood of remaining loyal to a specific operating system than to an actual brand of handset.

This is only confirming news that many brands, such as Samsung, have already realized.

Many manufacturers have already worked this mobile technology knowledge into the way that they design and market their products, in order to ensure that they continue to appeal to the areas in which consumers will become – and remain – loyal. They have found that it is exceptionally important to build brand relationships with their customers in order to boost and maintain sales, instead of focusing exclusively on products.

The mobile technology report found that only 41 percent of consumers stay loyal to their device brand.

At the same time, that same report indicated that while less than half of consumers will stay loyal to their brand of mobile device when it comes time for an upgrade, a massive 68 percent will prefer to use the same operating system to which they have become accustomed.Mobile Technology - User Loyalty

The Kantar report stated that “Apple is, of course, unaffected by this – iOS is Apple, Apple is iOS.” It pointed out that if those customers wanted to bail out on the operating system and choose Android, Windows, or even BlackBerry, instead, then they would be required to re-purchase all of their apps and would need to copy content from one type of operating system to another while they have to learn an entirely new operating system.

The Kantar Worldpanel global insights director, Dominic Sunebo, released a mobile technology news statement that indicated that manufacturers of mobile devices that are based on the Android operating system should be aware of not only the user experience that consumers are enjoying through the use of the product, itself, but also the emotional connections that are being built with that experience as opposed to the rational links. This can help them to better develop and maintain relationships with those consumers.

Mobile ads are Facebook’s latest lure for developers

| March 20, 2014

The social network is working on appealing to this market through a promise of successful advertising.

In an effort to become more appealing to app development firms, Facebook has been testing an entirely new form of mobile ads service since at least the end of January, which provides advertisements directly to a certain handful of smartphone and tablet applications.

Now, that social network is starting to indicate that an official launch of the service may occur in April.

The suggestion has been made that the mobile ads service could be launched at the F8 developer conference, next month. This would make an offering to all app makers for an entirely new revenue source that had not previously been available through the social media giant. Until now, the platform simply wasn’t in a position to truly assist developers in being able to monetize their apps.

Facebook has now taken its time to develop a mobile ads service that it believes will promise success.

According to Ilya Sukhar, who is responsible for the oversight of developer efforts at Facebook, “That had to be figured out.” He went on to say that “There just generally was a period of time when the company, as has been widely reported, has been figuring stuff out [on mobile]. This is a signal that we think we’ve figured it out.”Mobile Marketing - Facebook Mobile Ads

He explained that assisting developers in being able to monetize their applications will be a central focus of the announcements that will be made next month at the conference. In the past, the F8s in the past were primarily focused on rolling out features on Facebook that were more consumer facing. This will be different, this year, as developers will be nearly the only focus of the event, according to Sukhar, who also added that it will “help folks build, grow, and monetize their apps.”

Monetizing is one of the largest struggles faced by mobile app development companies. As Facebook has considerable strength in monetizing attention, they are hoping to be able to combine those two environments through their mobile ads service, for mutual benefit between themselves and developers.