With 50 percent of the mobile browser market in its home market of China, UCWeb is now looking across the Pacific. UC’s next target is the U.S., where the company released localized Android and iOS versions this past week, and plans to open up a Silicon Valley office later this year. (It has already made inroads into India, where it has 20 percent share and is close to knocking off market leader Opera, execs said.) UCWeb's Roy Rong and Yu Yongfu visit AllThingsD. UC Browser is more than a just dumb container for Web sites; in China, the browser includes its own virtual currency accounts, identity system, social network and navigation services. In a way, it’s more like a mobile-only Facebook platform than the pure Chrome or Safari browsers. Plus, UC browser is quite fast, because the company maintains local data centers from where it compresses Web sites and sends them to phones. Opera Mini and Amazon’s Kindle Fire Silk browser use similar techniques. Bridging to the U.S. market won’t necessarily be easy, but UC’s design and experience across the spectrum of low- to high-end phones could be instructive. CEO Yu Yongfu — who’s on a grand tour of Silicon Valley Read More
Over the past six months, the folks at Staircase 3 have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their OpenSignalMaps network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers. For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell. It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against Staircase 3 — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user. That there are gobs of Android devices floating around Read More
Over the past six months, the folks at Staircase 3 have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their OpenSignalMaps network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers. For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell. It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against Staircase 3 — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user. That there are gobs of Android devices floating around Read More
