- Every feature phone, smartphone -- or even tablets with 3G, LTE, etc. -- has a baseband processor that runs proprietary, closed software. That software implements standards and uses code from the '80s and '90s. Thus it has weak security measures, is missing a lot of checks and often trusts data received from base stations blindly, resulting in the presence of many bugs and vulnerabilities -- over the air! It is often possible to enable auto-answer, turn on microphones or cameras, send SMS or execute arbitrary code. But this component of modern devices is not only poorly understood and really low-level, it does also require certification and is protected by lots of patents.
- Would people want to put your app on their home screen? If yes, you should build a native app for the particular platform. If not, you should build a website. Most often, this is true when the customer needs occasional connections to the business, such as finding the opening hours. People will search for that information on the web, they don't want to install an app just to find that piece of information once.
- Do you need a good estimate of your app's potential ad revenue? For an estimate per month, try:
({DAU} * 365 / 12) * ({SESSION_LENGTH} * (60 / 30)) * ({E_CPM} / 1000). Replace{DAU}with the average number of daily active users (DAU) for your app.{SESSION_LENGTH}is the time in minutes that users spend in your app on average. Finally, for{E_CPM}, insert the expected CPM (eCPM) for your ad network, which may be 0.50 USD, for example. The currency of your eCPM value does also define the currency of the result, of course. - "Mobile was always bigger than PCs, but separate, and not really part of the computing market. Smartphones broke down that wall." (Benedict Evans)
- "An iPhone 6 CPU has 625 times more transistors than a 1995 Pentium." (Benedict Evans)
- "In 2007, Nokia was the biggest and most fashionable name in cell phones, with an unassailable lead in hand-held technology. Things had been so good for so long that company executives saw little chance for any competitive challenge -- phones were a tough business, they said, and Nokia was reaping the harvest of decades of hard work that no one else could hope to match. That June, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. And seven years later, Nokia -- worth a quarter of a trillion dollars at its apex -- abjectly sold off its much-diminished phone division to Microsoft. The price was $7 billion, less than 3% of its former value." (Steve LeVine)