Why HTML5 is killing Flash: it’s the devices, people!
Mobile ad UX: how to use ads and alienate people
PWA Minimus: A minimal PWA checklist
May 29, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Now that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are supported on all major browsers, and are becoming first-class installable citizens on mobile and desktop platforms alike, and with the launch of Google’s PWA .app domain, we thought it would be useful to outline a PWA checklist to meet the minimum requirements of a PWA. The result is... Read More
Latest DeviceAtlas report shows feature phone use still widespread
May 15, 2018, by James Kielty
The latest DeviceAtlas Mobile Web Intelligence Report explores statistics for smartphone usage around the globe. Feature phones The data showed that 13% of all traffic from feature phones came from devices released in 2011. Of the rest, those released in 2005, when Nokia was king of the hill, were responsible for a disproportionately high volume... Read More
Sharing buttons and the Web Share API
May 15, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
We’ve written a bit in the past about the negative impact of sharing buttons on performance. What if there was a better way? Let’s talk about the Web Share API. What is the Web Share API? The Web Share API offers something of an alternative. It’s an API developed by Google to expose the native... Read More
ZTE market share – how much “suspect tech” is out there?
May 16, 2018, by Martin Clancy
Updated: On the back of ZTE’s announcement that “the major operating activities of the company have ceased”, many are wondering just how much of the market ZTE commands. We looked the data for the answers... Read More
Amazon Internet Browser: What is it?
April 26, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The latest web browser to hit your phone comes from Amazon, and it’s called Internet. It follows the recent trend of “lite” versions of products aimed at emerging markets and patchy networks—India in this case—and joins other “lite” products like Google Maps Go, and Facebook Lite, that offer slimmed down versions for these markets. With... Read More
A standards-based AMP is fulfilling its goals
April 11, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Significant steps are being taken by the AMP team to address the main criticisms that are repeatedly cast at the project. Plans are in place, or at least forming, to allow non-AMP technologies to enjoy the same search results page benefits as AMP pages. Is it too good to be true? Let’s take a look... Read More
Google Analytics, bots, and ghost traffic
May 23, 2018, by James Kielty
As we discovered in a 2016 DeviceAtlas Mobile Web Intelligence Report, up to 50% of all website traffic can be attributed to bots, dark traffic, spammy referrals and all sorts of ne’er-do-well actors. Removing these sources from your reporting suite not only gives you a more accurate picture of where genuine traffic is coming from,... Read More
Latest Stats: The truth about ‘peak smartphone’
March 27, 2018, by Martin Clancy
With many recent reports suggesting that we have reached ‘peak smartphone’, we thought it would be useful to take a look at some hard data to see if the facts line up with the opinion. There is no doubt that a certain fatigue has appeared in coverage of the smartphone market in recent months. Whether... Read More
Adding favicons in a multi-browser multi-platform world
March 20, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Favicons: they used to be so easy. A simple 16×16 pixel favicon.ico bitmap used to do the trick. It was like a punctuation mark at the end of a project; the web developer equivalent of finishing a sentence with an exclamation mark or a full stop. That’s how it used to be. But over the... Read More
Safari and PWAs: Reaching critical mass
February 13, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
PWAs are here, or are arriving very soon, depending on which web browser you use. This isn’t really news if you’ve been following along with the PWA story. However, with WebKit’s implementation of Service Workers and Web App Manifest, one major lingering question over the future of PWAs has been answered: Will PWAs ever come... Read More
