D’Alesandro’s $2000 a month revenue high didn’t last. In 2018, there was a “very sharp downfall”. Advertisers started to crack down. “I think the people putting money into it weren’t exactly sure how it was being used,” he added. In December, D’Alesandro posted his last video to YouTube. In the video description he wrote, “It’s been a great ride, but I feel I need to quit now and focus on other things to grow as a person.” Other farmers have felt the dip too. Goat_City, the farmer who had over 100 phones, is only making around $10 a day now. CallMeDonCheadle took a break after the profits over the past couple of years decreased dramatically. “It has a lot to do with it being less passive and admittedly I can sympathize now that I have a job. Not everyone wants to spend their free time clicking at screens to make fractions of pennies every hour, especially if they have families, friends, and living life in general to attend to.”
Tag: mobile
The Ubuntu embarassment
on the utter failure, on all levels, of ubuntu touch, a attempt to build a new mobile os.
I feel like the announcement of a new and independent mobile operating system platform was a good reason for the architects to say: “Yeah, let’s do this, but let’s do it The Right Way™ and be better than all the others”. Ubuntu wouldn’t just have a graphical user interface, it would have one that could work on all devices and adapt to all form factors. It wouldn’t just isolate applications against each other the way the Linux kernel or Android did, it would have full-blown confinement which also protected your data and privacy. It would magically prevent apps from draining the battery. And so on. Whatever the others did on the technical side, Ubuntu would do it better and in a more elegant way.
Smartphones Ruining Distance Running
While he welcomes the new breed of runners to the sport, Hirsch suggested that some may want to reconsider their technological baggage, lest they miss the full experience of the race. “I guess I’m just old-school”.
Facebook Lite
We rolled out Facebook Lite, our version of Facebook for Android built for emerging markets, in June of 2015. The app has hit 100M monthly active users. It’s the fastest-growing version of Facebook to reach 100M users in under 9 months. It has an APK that is less than 1 MB in size, meaning people can download it in seconds on slow connections.
To reach the APK size target, the Lite APK doesn’t have the product code and resources found in a typical Android app. The Lite client is a simple VM that provides various capabilities to interact with the OS (such as read a file, open the camera, create an SQLite database, and so on) and a rendering engine to drive the Android UI. Product code is written on the server and is expressed in terms of the capabilities the client has. Resources are sent down from the server as needed and cached. So it has infinite scalability for building additional product without bloating the APK.
16 mobile theses
this is a good way to anticipate 2016.
- Mobile is the new central ecosystem of tech
- Mobile is the internet
- Mobile isn’t about small screens
- The future of productivity
- Microsoft’s capitulation
- Apple & Google both won, but it’s complicated
- Search and discovery
- Apps and the web
- Post Netscape, post PageRank, looking for the next run-time
- Messaging as a platform, and a way to get customers.
- The unclear future of Android and the OEM world
- Internet of Things
- Cars
- TV and the living room
- Watches
- Finally, we are not our users
Power Bank phone
You couldn’t be further out of touch with your “iphone”. Uhe interesting developments aren’t going to happen in the places pundits obsess about.
1 thing that quickly became clear when I spoke to people is that the number 1 reason they bought the phone is to use it as a power bank. Ghana is currently experiencing a severe power crisis — city-wide blackouts of 36 hours or more have become the norm in the capital, and a brisk business has grown around selling power banks, which are small portable rechargeable batteries that can be used to charge small electronics such as MP3 players and, yes, phones.
Location Exfiltration from Power Consumption
Our approach enables known route identification, real-time tracking, and identification of a new route by only analyzing the phone’s power consumption
Tolerating flakiness
this is very true, and i wonder if there is a longer term equilibrium. it has become nearly impossible to plan an event where you have expenditures without asking for money down from people, or you’ll end up holding the bag.
After multitouch
it’s been nearly 8 years since the seminal jeff han multitouch demo. we have made some progress with smartphones (but far less than suggested back then), and now james patten shows how you might approach this in 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WI6ZqCUNk0?t=230
Microsoft should become a services company
WHAT SHOULD MICROSOFT DO?
- Choose between devices and services.
- Abandon devices.
- Embrace services.
- Fork Android and offer a version of AOSP (Android Open Source Project) with Microsoft services, app store (more on this below), and, most importantly, patent protection to Chinese manufacturers.
- Build an AOSP Play Store with word-for-word copies
this is very insightful, especially the part about patents being a moat against chinese manufacturers cleaning up worldwide: once they leave the lax IP of china behind, they are vulnerable to lawsuits. this is perhaps the real reason behind “rockstar”, a coalition of google competitors huddling together for protection.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 