Sony

Last Wednesday, I went along to Day 2 of Apps World 2012, at Earls Court 2. I went for the full day, as there was more of interest during the morning session, especially around the area of Mobile Testing.

My photos from the day are below, some of dodgy quality as all are via my iPhone. There’s also the official photos available at Apps World blog

Here’s my findings, on the days events:

• I saw several presentations at the Developer Zone and some of these presentations are now available on the Apps World website, either as Audio and/or Slides downloads. The ones I saw on the day included the following:
• - At 1040, the presentation on Mobile Testing, by Becky Wetherill of Borland. This dealt with both areas of Mobile Testing and also Borland’s Silk Mobile testing product. One of the interesting points was that due to the number of different devices, screen sizes and O/S combinations, there’s over 100,000 possible device combinations – obviously impossible to test all of those! Therefore, the Edge Strategy is used, to test minimum and maximum O/S versions, on different devices, with minimum and maximum device screen sizes. There all also many factors which affect an Apps performance and behaviour, including O/S Versions, Screen Size and Chipsets.
• - At 1110, the Applicasa presentation was interesting and eye-catching – their idea being to take Zombie users out of developers Apps and turn them into active/paying users
• - At 1120, Tim King, the CTO of 5app, gave his forthright presentation on the amount of cowboys in the world of App development.
• - At 1130, there was a presentation from Grant Skinner, on Building the Atari Arcade in HTML5 & CreateJS. His company got this projects from Microsoft and Atari and was a way of showcasing HTML5, in this case for games.
• - After lunch, at 1300, there was then a panel from AQuA – the App Quality Alliance –  which is a non-profit organisation created by Sony, Orange, Oracle, Samsung and many others with the aim of promoting App Quality, mainly in the Android area.
• - At 1330, there was a presentation from PayPal, on simplifying the payment experience. Part of this covered the Mobile Payments Library (MPL) for iOS and Android, which allows developers to build PayPal payments functionality right into their Apps. Another interesting fact I picked up was that PayPal provide a global test platform at developer.paypal.com where developers and testers can test the whole payment process – including multi-currencies and multi-countries. This allows all use cases to be tested before going live. Dev resources can be found at x.com/mobile and x.com/developers/paypal. Tech support is also available at paypal.com/mts.

The whole area of Mobile Payments is an interesting and intriguing one, as it seems to be where everything is heading more and more. With so many competing Mobile Payments technologies it will be interesting to see who’ll be left standing after the coming period of consolidation – surely it won’t just be PayPal? I think testing these different types of Mobile Payments is an interesting challenge, made more difficult by the sheer variety of payment options.

At Apps World, I talked to the following Mobile Payments companies briefly, some of which I’d heard of, some of which I hadn’t:

• Zooz – they provide an SDK to developers, so they can then choose which payment options to enable for their users. They provide a sandbox for testing.
• iZettle – similar to Square, they use a dongle to read card details and an App on the Mobile device to do the payment processing.
• Payoneer – they provide global payment solutions, where payments are made to a prepaid Mastercard, ideal for international freelancers etc who need to be paid for their work via different online work platforms.

Overall, Apps World was well worth attending, a good way of networking and finding out the latest trends and news in the Apps World, with areas of interest for both developers and testers.