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Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."

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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

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. 

audience for mobile apps has hit 58 million in primetime — 8 p.m.

The IAB estimates that the U.S. mobile ad market brought in $3.4 billion in 2012. The IAB didn't break out revenues for apps vs. the mobile web, but Flurry has estimated that 80% of mobile activity occurs on apps

Kantar Media calculated that TV advertising accounted for $74 billion in ad revenues in 2012. Even if apps generated 100% of mobile ad revenues, the market would still be just 4.5% that of TV.

there’s a flaw in the “app for everything” ideology: now every single website these days wants to be an app. This is a bad because… Not everything needs to be an app If every site has an app, app stores will just end up like worse versions of the Internet (poor discovery, gatekeepers, etc.) Apps are high-friction (require more bandwidth, passwords, etc)

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

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.

Facebook has created a new way for businesses and developers to target ads to users who have taken an action on Facebook or in an app within a more specific time range. Using the “action spec” targeting capability, which allows advertisers to reach users by the actions they take in Open Graph apps and on Facebook directly, an advertiser could designate a time range shorter than 14 days

a local business might want to reach users who checked into their store within the past week. A developer might want to target users who installed their app in the past three days. A page owner might want to retarget users who viewed one of their page tabs the day before.

Action spec targeting is still a beta feature limited to advertisers working with Preferred Marketing Developers

Twitter’s re-written Trending Topics algorithm called Tailored Trends is especially clever because it doesn’t directly discourage stupidity, it just funnels it back to people who find dumb things entertaining. Now rather than seeing just the most popular terms and hashtags in your area, you see Trending Topics based on who you follow. So you’ll only see horrible trends like “#UnusualNamesForWhiteGirls” or “#ReplaceBandNamesWithRape” if you follow people that tweet them. Everyone else will get trending topics that don’t make us embarrassed to be human.

Facebook’s taking a similar approach to its new apps marketplace. It recommends apps based on what your friends Like and use rather than the oft-misguided wisdom of the masses like Apple and Google’s app store charts. It also highlights apps based on quality, which is calculated according to true engagement, positive reviews, and the absence of spam reports rather than the number of installs. This editorial philosophy could minimize the spread of pointless, spammy, click-bait apps.

The big risk of insisting on relevance and safety is that we create a filter bubble where we become isolated from those different from ourselves. Facebook and Twitter need to be especially careful that they don’t completely hide critical Trending Topics or novel apps just because they’re not popular in closed little networks. That might require human input, or an algorithm that recognizes when something’s important enough to show to everyone.

Within each contact, you also now have an expanded relationship view that integrates all of the interactions you’ve had with a particular person over the different networks that have been integrated, along with any reminders that you have set yourself to connect in the future. This is a pretty nifty feature in that it doesn’t require manual updates for past events; instead it automatically aggregates whatever has happened already into a timeline of events

mobile is its fastest-growing consumer service at the moment, with 27% of its 155 million monthly users visiting LinkedIn via mobile apps (up from just 8% two years ago); and weekly mobile page views jumping 250% year-over-year.

Defining Skeuomorphism This obscure word describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. Examples include pre-recorded shutter noises on smartphones to remind us of film cameras, or calendar apps that feature torn paper and metal rings. Or, as Wikipedia tells us [1]: A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.

the digital world has seen skeuomorphism popularized in the past couple years mainly thanks to the recent iOS-inspired trend of rich textures and life-like controls.

By opposition, the other side of the coin would be the newly popular "flat style", of which Microsoft's Metro UI is probably the main example. Flat Style embraces visual minimalism, eschewing textures and lighting effects for simple shapes and flat colors.

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. 

research suggests that readers prefer their tablets' Web browsers to the meaty, slow-to-update and even more slow-to-evolve native apps that publishers have been eagerly developing since Steve Jobs first held up the iPad on stage in 2010.

Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try. 

Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.

The music-listening part is only really worthwhile to those of us who pay for premium Spotify or Rdio accounts. Otherwise, we're going to continue to use those services' apps for the majority of your listening.

the "Me" and "Suggested" tabs of the app are of limited value if you don't follow a lot of musicians on Twitter. Indeed, using Twitter follows as a barometer for one's music taste is a curious choice. Sometimes musicians have worthwhile Twitter accounts, sometimes not.

Unlike the Facebook "like", the Twitter "follow" is not an explicit statement saying "I enjoy listening to this band." Instead, it's saying, "I think this band, whose music I happen to enjoy, might have interesting things to say, so I'm listening."

In February, comScore reported that the site had passed 10 million monthly unique users faster than any standalone site ever.

But numbers from third-party sources like Facebook app tracking service, AppData, are pinning a slightly different picture on the image and link-sharing site. Pinterest’s monthly active users on Facebook — or the number that has connected to Facebook over the past thirty days — have dropped to 8.3 million, from around 12.2 million a month ago when the site did a major redesign. Daily Active Users are also down but not by as much: on April 21 they were 930,000, from 1.1 million on March 22.

A couple other sources including Google search trends, Compete and mobile app tracker App Annie are also showing a picture of decelerating growth

social media use on mobile devices rose 63% between native apps and the mobile Web in the United States in 2012.

Between PCs and mobile devices, Americans spent 121 billion minutes on social media in July 2012, an increase of 37% (88 billion minutes). 

In the United States, 152 million people accessed Facebook from their PCs against 152.7 million through either native apps or the mobile Web.

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.

the company launched a similar sponsored content pilot for its desktop and tablet apps. Participating brands can promote their status updates so they appear in feeds of users who aren’t following them, much like a promoted post works on Facebook.

LinkedIn's 200 million users are increasingly logging in through their mobile devices.

Marketing Solutions, the name LinkedIn gives its group of advertising products, accounts for less than a third of the company's revenue. Recruiting products make most of the money--almost twice as much as ads

Instagram manufactured a predictable response inside Yin’s brain. Her behavior was reshaped by a reinforcement loop which, through repeated conditioning, created a connection between the things she sees in world around her and the app inside her pocket. When a product is able to become tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing habit, it creates an “internal trigger.” Unlike external triggers, which are sensory stimuli, like a phone ringing or an ad online telling us to “click here now!,” you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in the mind and creating them is the brass ring of consumer technology. We check Twitter when we feel boredom. We pull up Facebook when we’re lonesome. The impulse to use these services is cued by emotions.

o get users using, Instagram followed a product design pattern familiar among habit-forming technologies, the desire engine.

The minimalist interface all but removes the need to think. With a click, a photo is taken and all kinds of sensory and social rewards ensue. Each photo taken and shared further commits the user to the app. Subsequently, users change not only their behavior, but also their minds.