Mobile Web Advertising - HTML5 Advertising - page 188

The following few sections will deal with the top devices in the market at the time of writing and we'll review
some of the emerging competition that could be here at any time. There are various screen sizes and operating
systems, tons of browser versions, and hundreds of device models that ad units will all have to be displayed on.
The next sections are geared to help you navigate the landscape and make sense of it all.
Apple iOS
Once Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007, the smart phone market really took off. Phones have never looked the
same since, and users have become accustomed to rich, touch-enabled features on their handheld devices. Through
the years Apple's had multiple hardware and software iterations; developers and users have benefited greatly from
faster hardware, more device APIs, and overall performance gains. For example, with the recent release of iOS 6,
users can access the camera and photo library from web browsers and utilize a new feature called the Web Audio
API (More on that in Chapter 12). For developers, iOS provides a great developing environment, with rich tools
and simulators for testing native application and web content. Apple pretty much reigns as king in the smart phone
market, as far as developers and advertising spending goes, even though its main competitor, Google, has a larger
overall user base worldwide. JiWire ( www.jiwire.com/insights ) outlines the number of ad requests per device in the
United Kingdom and the United States. The 2012 results show that iOS has the largest market share in advertising.
This information demonstrates a few things, one of them being that advertisers seem to have taken a liking to the
iOS market for developing content since it's such a structured environment, whereas Android, for one, is much more
fragmented because of its openness. A second thing is that it could mean that many more people are viewing online
content and applications with advertising-supported models on iOS devices. Whichever way you view it, the numbers
don't lie.
Google Android
Google firmly believes in open source, and it holds fast to that belief with its mobile operating system, Android.
Android is by far the largest OS within the mobile landscape, with installs on a wide variety of devices. Openness in
this case is both a good and bad thing though. It creates a lot of innovation and competition but also, conversely, a
lot of frustration for developers who need to build in this landscape. Being that there are upward of 2,000 different
Android products in the wild (and growing), developers are faced with various levels of HTML5 compliance in their
browsers, different screen resolutions, varying pixel densities, and even legacy Flash Player support. But the Flash
Player support will offically be gone with full Android 4.1 adoption. Visit http://opensignalmaps.com/reports/
fragmentation.php , and you'll get an idea how fragmented and confusing developing for Android is. You might
find the results of this study shocking! As the study states, it makes the most sense to test and develop content with
Samsung or HTC devices, as they're the most prominent in the market today. Yet if you're a developer, you cannot
escape developing for Android devices. Since most of the phone and tablet market uses versions of this OS, advertisers
have all the more reason to want to be on their screens.
Others
Some of the other devices in the market are Galaxy Tablets, Blackberry Playbooks, Nooks, and Kindles, all of which
support various blends of the Android operating system—with the exception of the Playbook, which uses Blackberry's
own Tablet OS. Amazon's Kindle Fire is said to have 54.4 percent of US Android tablets as of April 2012, a fact that
justifies creating content that displays and works correctly for the device. Most of these devices offer very HTML5-
compliant browsers, with most OSs getting frequent updates. (You can view these results at http://html5test.com .)
Other open source browsers and platforms are being developed, among them Tizen ( http://tizen.org ) , said
to have one of the best HTML5-compliant browsers at the time of this research ( http://itworld.com/mobile-
wireless/262120/tizen-pops-html5-winner ) . In the end, the world of mobile may really be fragmented, but it's still
necessary to support advertising on these devices so be sure to discuss with your client which OS platforms they wish
to target within the allotted time and budget for the campaign. This could save you hours if not days of development
and debugging if you know out of the gate that your client wishes to target.