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To Schmidt, today’s smartphones are pocket-size supercomputers. And their core is Android.

1.3 million Android devices come online every day. Nearly 70,000 of them are tablets, an area that Schmidt admitted Android fell behind in relation to the competition (Apple’s iPad, which he did not mention by name). The installed base of Android devices is pushing 500 million, with 480 million active Androids in circulation. It is an ecosystem, Schmidt said, that went beyond anything Google had ever imagined. 

Facebook confirmed to me it quietly unlocked the new device and OS mobile ad placement options when it officially launched its new mobile app install ads two weeks ago. These ads let developers pay to show links to their App Store or Google Play apps in the Facebook mobile news feed. Facebook needed a way to make sure devs were reaching users on the devices they build apps for.

Device and OS placements are somewhat similar to Facebook’s “broad category” device targeting that lets advertisers reach people with specific makes and models of phones like LG Androids or iPhone 5s. However, these ads can show up on both desktop and mobile. Placement targeting lets advertisers choose where they show up, not just to who.

there’s also the Android vs iOS socio-economic divide. A recent Forrester study found that iPhone-using households had an average yearly income about $16,000 higher than Android households. That means operating system and device type could augment data like biographical info, interests, and work and education history for targeting high or low-end products via Facebook ads.

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

According to IDC, mobile web browsing will soon eclipse desktop browsing in the U.S. and worldwide. This consumption of mobile content isn’t just happening on the go; 93% of people are now using their mobile devices to browse the Web from their homes, according to a study from Google.

The main development methodology behind responsive design is the use of media query functionality in CSS3. Media queries target not only certain device types (e.g., Android vs. iPhone), but actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device that renders the page. For example, the code below “asks” the device if its max horizontal resolution is equal to 480px: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css", media="screen and (max-device-width: 480px)", href="http://uxmag.com/iphone.css" /> If it is 480px, the device will load iphone.css. If not, the link is ignored. You can also include media queries in CSS as part of an @media rule:

a responsive design approach does not involve putting all of your content in front of the reader. Responsive design is about putting the right content in users’ hands according to the context of their interaction.

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

Google+ is catching up on a lot of fronts to Facebook, but it's still lagging in one key metric: Time spent.

The average visitor to the social network spent 6 minutes 47 seconds on Google+'s site in March vs. 6 hours, 44 minutes on Facebook.com according to figures Nielsen supplied to Mashable. However, that number is down for Facebook. In March 2012, the average was 7 hours, 9 minutes per person. For Google, the figures are a substantial jump over the 3.3 minutes visitors spent on average on the site in February 2012, according to comScore. The figures do not include traffic via apps.

Nielsen reports that 20 million unique visitors in the U.S. used Google+'s Android and iPhone apps, a 238% rise over March 2012. On desktop, G+'s monthly uniques jumped 63% vs. the year before to 28 million.

Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device

Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.

Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern

During “primetime,” which for apps also includes those “after-work” hours of around 7 to 10 p.m., app usage among the top 250 iOS and Android applications spikes to a peak of 52 million consumers, the company found.

App usage tends to drop off overnight, and weekends see higher daytime app usage through the day (9-5). During the normal workday, people use apps at least 75 percent as much as on weekends

reaching the key 18 to 49-year-old demographic using traditional media will become increasingly difficult as they turn towards digital media more. Flurry cited a report from Morgan Stanley, which showed that there has been a 50 percent decline in TV audience ratings since 2002

Google Now aggregates the information Google already collects about you on a daily basis: accessing your email, your calendar, your contacts, your text messages, your location, your shopping habits, your payment history, as well as your choices in music, movies and books. It can even scan your photos and automatically identify them based on their subject, not just the file name

Google already knows where you live, for example, and constantly plots out the time it will take to return home. Google even knows your favorite routes to work and can suggest alternatives based on congestion. And it will figure out your favorite sports teams by the number of times you ask about them, without you ever having to explicitly identify them. Google’s recommendation engine, meanwhile, uses the information to suggest new content to purchase.

Google Now tries to proactively provide information via “cards,” or vertical tabs, that present information it thinks you might want. For example, if you’ve entered a home location via Google Maps, a card will constantly update with the estimated time to drive home.

The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55–64 year age bracket.

The 45–54 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic on both Facebook and Google+.

Keep older users in mind when using social media, particularly on these three platforms. Our age makes a difference to our taste and interests, so if you’re focusing on younger users with the content you post, you could be missing an important demographic.

A new chart from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, shows that over 86% of the time spent in iOS and Android apps is taking place inside applications. That’s up 6% from just last year.

In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet. 

The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin. In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.

Location-based consumer apps didn't let me down; as predicted, they remained stagnant this year. Foursquare and its kindred just are not hot anymore, even if Foursquare did just raise a funding round this week.