Monthly Archives: February 2010

iPhone User Statistics

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Quite often I get questions relating to the average iPhone user, such as “What’s the average age of an iPhone user”, “What’s the download ratio between paid and free apps”, and “How many applications does a user download by average per month?”

Admob’s recent Mobile Metrics Report answers these questions and much more. Below I have pasted in the five graphs I found the most interesting. In summary:

  • Android is mostly used by men aged around 30 years. 80% of all Android users do not buy applications on a regular basis.
  • iPhones are used equally by men and women in all ages. 50% of all iPhone users buy one or more applications each month.
  • iPhone users are very happy with their devices. 91% of all iPhone users would recommend it to others.

Apple – a focused company

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Apple’s COO Tim Cook in an interview about how Apple chooses what products to bring to the market:

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was $40 billion.

Outlook PST Security

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Do you use Outlook with PST files, and have you bothered to set a password to your PST files to protect your data? As of today you might as well just remove that password.

Today the official PST specification was released as a PDF document, and it’s now up to anyone to easily create applications that bypass the PST password security and retrieve all the PST contents. From the official specification:

“PST files support a password-protect feature that requires an end user to enter a pre-defined password before the PST can be opened. In practice, the PST password is just implemented at the UI level, meaning that the password is only required to gain access of the PST through the UI. The password itself is not used to secure the PST data in any way.”
From the Official Outlook PST Specification

But, you might say, wasn’t there an option to encrypt the PST contents? Yes there is, but it doesn’t really secure the data in any way.

“This protocol uses two keyless cipher algorithms to encode the data blocks in the PST. These algorithms only provide data obfuscation and can be conveniently decoded once the exact encoding algorithm is understood. Moreover, only end-user data blocks are encoded in the PST. All the other infrastructure information, including the header, allocation metadata pages and BTree pages are stored without obfuscation. In summary, the strength of the encoded PST data blocks provides no additional security beyond data obfuscation.”
From the Official Outlook PST Specification

In other words – don’t even bother setting a password or trying to encrypt to your PST files from within Outlook anymore now when the official specification is out in the public. If you want to keep your files safe use EncFS, SATA password or a Whole Disk Encryption solution such as PGP or TrueCrypt. The PST files are now open for everyone to browse, regardless of the security settings you might have chosen.

iPad Graphics = iPhone 3GS Graphics

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In the latest iPhone OS 3.2 SDK beta 3 for the Apple iPad it has now been confirmed that the iPad is using the same graphics hardware as the iPhone 3GS.

Using OpenGL ES on iPad is identical to using OpenGL ES on other iPhone OS devices. An iPad is a PowerVR SGX device and supports the same basic capabilities as other SGX devices. However, because the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance meets your requirements.

What this means is that the graphic chip used for the iPhone 3GS will now have to power a display that is over 5 times larger ((1024*768)/(480×320)). While the CPU and MMU is faster on the iPad than the iPhone 3GS (the iPad uses ARM Cortex A9 at 1 Ghz where the iPhone uses an ARM Cortex A8 at 600 Mhz) it still remains to see exactly how much slower games will run on the iPad in native resolution than on the iPhone 3GS.

App Store Morale

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Not sure if you have heard the news, but Apple has recently banned thousands of “bikini” applications from the App Store. The following standard email was sent out to numerous developers last week.

“The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. [...] We have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.  We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.”

The developer of iWobble, one of the banned applications that has been downloaded almost one million times from the App Store, spoke with Apple last week and received the following new rules:

  1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)
  2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)
  3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)
  4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic)

Not sure if you have heard about “iWobble”, but it is in my opinion a fairly harmless application which only contains one picture of a female – a silhouette image in the main menu. Now one might think that the App Store is completely void of all sexual nudity, but that is not true at all. Nude content from big publishers is still actively being approved by Apple, such as:

  • GQ Magazine. Their February issue contains “Victoria’s secret hot model alert”
  • Playboy. No comment on their content

Now someone please tell me the morale for keeping applications such as GQ Magazine and Playboy, while removing applications such as iWobble (which only contains a silhouette of a female)? The only reasons I can find for keeping those applications are (a) they come from major publishers, and (b) they generate huge amounts of revenue for Apple. In either case the App Store rules just became even more complex, especially if you are into the swimsuit business.