9 Things Only iPhone Power Users Take Advantage of on Their Devices

9 Things Only iPhone Power Users Take Advantage of on Their Devices

Hardik Gandhi   January 25, 2018

For many, it’s difficult to imagine life before smartphones.

At the same time, it’s hard to believe that the original Apple iPhone, considered a genuine unicorn at the time thanks to its superior experience and stunning, rainbow-worthy display, released over 10 years ago.

Even though the iPhone is older than most grade school students, some of its capabilities remain a mystery to the masses.

Sure, we all hear about the latest, greatest features, but what about those lingering in the background just waiting to be discovered?

Getting your hands wrapped around those capabilities is what separates you, a soon-to-be power user, from those who haven’t truly unleashed its full potential.

So, what are you waiting for? Release that unicorn and let it run free like the productivity powerhouse it was always meant to be.

Here are 9 ways to get started.

1. Get Back Your Closed Tabs

We’ve all done it. While moving between tabs or screens, our fingers tap the little “x” and close an important browser tab.

With the iPhone, all is not lost. You can get that epic unicorn meme back from oblivion!

The included Safari browser makes recovering a recently closed tab a breeze. Learn more about the process here: Reopen Tabs

2. Smarter Photo Searching

Searching through photos hasn’t always been the most intuitive process…until now.

Before, you had to rely on labels and categories to support search functions. But now, thanks to new machine learning supported features, the photos app is more powerful than ever.

The iPhone has the ability to recognize thousands of objects, regardless of whether you’ve identified them. That means you can search using keywords to find images with specific items or those featuring a particular person.

Just put the keyword in the search box and let the app do the hard part for you.

3. Find Out Who’s Calling

Sometimes, you can’t simply look at your iPhone’s screen to see who’s calling. Maybe you are across the room, are driving down the road, or have the phone safely secured while jogging.

Regardless of the reason, just grabbing it quickly isn’t an option. But that doesn’t mean you want to sprint across the room, pull your car over, or stop your workout just to find out it’s a robo-dial.

Luckily, you can avoid this conundrum by setting up Siri to announce who’s calling. Then you’ll always know if you actually want to stop what you’re doing to answer before you break away from the task at hand.

See how here: Siri Announce Calls

4. Stop Squinting to Read Fine Print

In the business world, fine print is the donkey we all face on a regular basis. You can’t sign up for a service or look over a contract without facing some very small font sizes.

Thanks to the iPhone, you don’t have to strain your eyes (and likely give yourself a headache) to see everything you need to see when faced with fine print on paper. Just open the Magnifier, and your camera is now a magnifying glass.

See how it’s done here: Magnifier

5. Clear Notifications En Masse

Yes, notifications can be great. They let you know what’s happening without having to open every app individually.

But, if you haven’t tended to your iPhone for a while, they can also pile up quick. And who has the time to handle a huge listed of notifications one at a time?

iPhone’s that featured 3D Touch (iPhone 6S or newer) actually have the ability to let you clean all of your notifications at once.

Clear out here screen by following the instructions here: Clear Notifications

6. Close Every Safari Tab Simultaneously

iPhones running iOS 10 can support an “unlimited” number of Safari tabs at once. While this is great if you like keeping a lot of sites open, it can also get out of hand really quickly if you don’t formally close the ones you don’t need.

If you have more tabs open than stars in the sky, you can set yourself free and close them all at once.

To take advantage of this virtual reset, see the instructions here: Close All Safari Tabs

7. Request Desktop Site

While mobile sites are handy for the optimized experience, they can also be very limiting. Not every mobile version has the features you need to get things done, but requesting the desktop version wasn’t always the easiest process.

Now, you can get to the full desktop site with ease. Just press and hold on the refresh button at the top of the browser screen, and you’ll be given the option to request the desktop site.

8. Get a Trackpad for Email Cursor Control

There you are, doing the daily task of writing out emails or other long messages. As you go along, you spot it; it’s a mistake a few sentences back.

Trying to use a touchscreen to get back to the right place isn’t always easy, especially if the error rests near the edge of the screen.

Now, anyone with a 3D Touch enabled device can leave that frustration in the past. The keyboard can now be turned into a trackpad, giving you the cursor control you’ve always dreamed of having, the equivalent of finding a unicorn at the end of a rainbow.

Learn how here: Keyboard Trackpad

9. Force Close an Unresponsive App

If a single app isn’t doing its job, but the rest of your phone is operating fine, you don’t have to restart your phone to get the app back on track.

Instead, you can force close the unresponsive app through the multitasking view associated with recently used apps that are sitting in standby mode.

Check out how it’s done here: Force Close an App

Be a Unicorn in a Sea of Donkeys

Get my very best Unicorn marketing & entrepreneurship growth hacks.

No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X

No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X

Hardik Gandhi   January 24, 2018

When the iPhone X launched, a lot of designers were put off about the screen shape. Those complaints have mostly died down, but I haven’t seen much design-nerd talk about cool corner treatment details. Fortunately, deep nerd shit is my specialty.

iPhone X screen shape

What’s Your Angle?

When you’re starting a design like this, the obvious, and comically cheaper option is to make all corners square. Machines exist and/or are calibrated to make those screens, so keeping edges squared requires fewer manufacturing changes and less talent along the pathway to production.

Everyone knows how to make a right angle — designers don’t have to do math, engineers need fewer calculations, the people making the machine are clear on what to do.

And yet, let’s examine how crappy all-square corners would look:

I’m a pixelated bear cub. Rawr.

Once Apple knew they wanted to take advantage of new full-screen technology, that gave them the opportunity to alter screen shape because they would need to address the manufacturing process anyway. Presumably, the expense was mostly built in.

Still, there were lots of ugly ways to do this:

Meh.

This is where they landed:

That’s better.

Screen Corners

Here’s where the nerd part comes in, iPhone X rounded screen corners don’t use the classic rounding method where you move in a straight line and then arc using a single quadrant of a circle. Instead, the math is a bit more complicated. Commonly called a squircle, the slope starts sooner, but is more gentle.

The difference is real subtle, even in gif-form, but here we go:

Difference between common rounded rectangle maths and Apple maths.

Apple has been doing this to the corners of laptops and iMacs for years, but this type of rounding didn’t penetrate iOS until version 7. This shape has classically been difficult to achieve, because it wasn’t available in 2D design editors, though that’s starting to change. Read about it more detail here.

The Notch

Now let’s talk about the notch itself. The left and right sides have two rounded corners. Because of the curve falloff, one curve doesn’t complete before the next one starts — they blend seamlessly into each other. As a result, no tangent line on this edge actually hits a perfect vertical.

Ooo. Fancy.

Come Correct

iPhone X templates I’ve seen out there don’t 100 percent duplicate the official shape, probably because it was either too hard to make or they haven’t noticed. This is why it’s good practice to use official assets from Apple, found in the design resources section of the developer site for creating icons and mockups.

Future iterations of this design will surely alter these sizes, so it will be interesting to compare how hardware sensor evolution impacts design shifts.

Overall, these decisions seem minor, but from a design viewpoint they’re fairly opinionated. Even when designers are willing to spend social capital to push these ideas, most organizations won’t put resources behind them.

Rounding the Bend

One of the things I love about indie apps is their ability to be opinionated. It’s nearly impossible to ship strong viewpoints from larger companies where there are fifty people in a room examining angles. So it’s cool to see Apple still has the ability to take a strong stance in this way.

Sweating thousands of minor details is what separates Apple from other companies. Their ability to do that is hard-won, but damn it’s pretty to watch.

The iPhone is Dead

The iPhone is Dead

Hardik Gandhi   January 24, 2018

I’ve switched back-and-forth between iPhone and Android in the past and I’ve always felt the iPhone edged out any Android phone, but not any more.

I switched to a Galaxy S8 months ago and I don’t see myself going back to iPhone, even the X. The iPhone is dead to me. Here’s why.

iPhones don’t age well

On my iPhone 6+, most apps crash on first open. Apps freeze for 5–10 seconds whenever launched or switched to. I lose 3–4%/min on my battery and Apple Support insists that my battery is perfectly healthy. I went through “apps using significant power” and uninstalled most of them.

On top of all of this, it was recently discovered that Apple is intentionally degrading the user experience based on your battery quality. Yes, they’re releasing a software update to give transparency to users and reducing the cost of a battery replacement (which is on a months-long backlog — more on Apple support later), but it feels like planned obsolescence and they’re just trying to avoid losing a class-action lawsuit.

The video app is busted. Many times I record a video and all I see is a zero-second-long black frame saved. I’ve given up on taking photos because the camera app takes forever to start up and has seconds of shutter lag.

This phone worked just fine three years ago. The minimal benefits of the previous iOS updates are far outweighed by the horrible user experience it’s created.

I have the original Moto X (from 2013) and it still runs buttery smooth.

AppleCare and Apple support are incompetent

This isn’t related to my previous iPhone, but it illustrates the lack of quality of Apple.

Recently, a bottom rubber foot on my MacBook came off. It was still under AppleCare so I took it into the store, my first time to the Apple Genius Bar. They told me that AppleCare wouldn’t cover the replacement because it was cosmetic. How the rubber foot isn’t part of the laptops utility is astonishing. When you typed on it, it would wobble. To fix it, the entire bottom chassis had to be replaced, which would cost $250.

I told the Apple rep that I was surprised and I’d call Apple Care later. I asked him to file a ticket for tracking and he replied that he had.

Later, I called Apple Care and they assured me that the replacement was covered. They also said they didn’t find a ticket in the system from the Apple rep that I had spoken to earlier. They told me I would have to go back into the store to get a rep to look at the physical laptop again and verify the foot was missing. Frustrated, I asked them to call the original store I had visited to confirm. They agreed and and eventually confirmed it.

Before this, I had asked them to send the part to an Apple store that was closer to my house and not the original Apple store that I had visited. A week later, I received a call confirming the part had arrived at the store furthest away. Surprised, I asked them to send it to the other store (which was ~15 miles away). They said that they’d have to send it back to the warehouse and then the other store would have to order the part.

A week later, the other store finally receives the part. I visited the store, they took my laptop, and I waited a couple of hours to replace the bottom. The rep came back with the laptop telling me that it’s ready. I inspected the bottom and the rubber foot was still missing. Confused, he sent the laptop back. The rep returned five minutes later with a new chassis, fixing the rubber foot. So not only had they some how not repaired the bottom originally, in reality it only takes a tech five minutes to repair it, not hours.

The cascading incompetence at Apple support was mind blowing.

Related to the battery issue above, if you try to replace your battery you’re facing months-long delays. On top of that, you have to mail your phone in or take it into a store, with both options facing the risk that you’re without a phone for as much as a week. Who can really live without their phone that long? Is this incompetence or intentionally meant to drive people away from replacing their batteries?

iPhone’s hardware design feels dated

Even the iPhone X feels dated compared to the S8. This is much more of a personal opinion, but the S8 feels damn sexy in your hand. When I watch a movie, the true blacks of the OLED screen just blend in to the body. It feels like a bezel-less phone from a science fiction movie. Whereas the iPhone’s design still separates the screen from the chassis with bezels.

More objectively, even thought it was released after the S8, the screen on the iPhone X isn’t as good. It’s lower resolution and it has more bezel.

Here are the specs: Galaxy S8–5.8-inch Super AMOLED, 2960 x 1440 pixels (570 ppi pixel density), 1000 nits, 83.6% screen-to-body ratio vs iPhone X — 5.8-inch 18.5:9 True Tone OLED, 2436 x 1125 pixels (458 ppi), 625 nits, 82.9%, screen-to-body ratio.

Plus, iPhone X has that notch. As a developer I abhor it. As a user it’s annoying to have wasted space when, for example, I’m browsing the web.

Price

Not only is S8 a better phone than iPhone X, it’s significantly cheaper. I just bought my S8 and a 256GB SD card for less than $700. The equivalent iPhone X would have cost me $1,252, plus another $10 for a dongle to use my headphones. That’s nearly the price of two S8s.

Android and S8 has better features

Where to start? Here’s an incomplete list in no particular order.

• LastPass auto-fill. Sure, this is an app feature, but it’s impossible to build on iPhone. This felt like a game changer when I switched, shaving a ton of time setting up my phone.
• NFC for two-factor auth. You can use a Yubikey on an iPhone but it requires a dongle (like everything else these days).
• SD card slot. I ran out of space on my previous iPhone and had no way to deal with it other than buy a new phone or delete apps.
• Trusted locations for unlock. It’s a huge time saver to not have to constantly unlock my phone at home or in the office.
• Samsung Pay works on any credit card reader, Apple Pay doesn’t, which hamstrings its use case massively.
• The notifications are better. Interactions are great, they actually work, and the overall design is better.
• I don’t have to buy a dongle for my headphones.
• Androids unlocking mechanisms are generally faster than iPhone X’s facial recognition. And there are more options. And the fingerprint scanner feels better on the back.
• More battery saving options.
• GearVR.
• Built-in call spam detection. Call spam has been ramping up in the United States so this is very welcome.
• A free hardware button. Yes, that side hardware button on the S8 that’s dedicated to Bixby sucks at first. However, with BXActions, you can make it do whatever you want, like triggering the flashlight. Now I wish every phone had an extra hardware button.
• Google backs up your data. I’m thrilled not to have to use iTunes any more (which deserves a completely different post) or be forced to pay for iCloud.
• An option to keep the phone on if you’re looking at it.

iOS is suffocating

On Android, you can install apps that automatically update your wallpaper, change your entire app launcher (I’m using Evie) including a dedicated search bar, start Google Now by swiping up, handle your SMS. Also custom phone dialers, Facebook Messenger chat heads, Samsung Edge (surprisingly I like this feature). You can even download apps outside of the app store.

Did I mention that Google Photos actually always syncs in the background? Versus the iPhone, where you need to open it every 10 minutes to make sure it’s syncing. Custom keyboards are reliable, whereas on iOS they still crash randomly.

iOS doesn’t offer any of this because they restrict what developers can build.

Even if you eliminate all of the “power user” features above, I think the S8, and Android broadly, is a better choice for the average user.

Siri is still next to useless

Google is just hands down better at search, including things that you would imagine Siri would be good at by now, like dictation. I think everyone already agrees with this point, so moving on.

Apple doesn’t feel like Apple

Apple has generally been a fast-follow copier, perfecting features that that have already been released. Lately they’ve just felt like a slow follower that has the same or fewer features.

For example, Samsung devices have had wireless charging for a while now and Apple is just catching up with the same feature set. The charging speed is the same.

Samsung is also experimenting with fascinating things like VR and DeX. Are they perfect? No. But I also don’t believe that Apple is capable of swooping in and perfecting them now.

Apple’s “new and innovative features” aren’t impressive either. Animoji could be done with a standard camera, but they’re locked the the iPhone X. It’s pure marketing to sell more Xs. I’ve had force touch for years now and have never used it. And the list goes on.

---

AI Innovation: Security and Privacy Challenges

AI Innovation: Security and Privacy Challenges

Hardik Gandhi   January 23, 2018

To anyone working in technology (or, really, anyone on the Internet), the term “AI” is everywhere. Artificial intelligence — technically, machine learning — is finding application in virtually every industry on the planet, from medicine and finance to entertainment and law enforcement. As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand, and the potential for blockchain becomes more widely realized, ML growth will occur through these areas as well.

While current technical constraints limit these models from reaching “general intelligence” capability, organizations continue to push the bounds of ML’s domain-specific applications, such as image recognition and natural language processing. Modern computing power (GPUs in particular) has contributed greatly to these recent developments — which is why it’s also worth noting that quantum computing will exponentialize this progress over the next several years.

Alongside enormous growth in this space, however, has been increased criticism; from conflating AI with machine learning to relying on those very buzzwords to attract large investments, many “innovators” in this space have drawn criticism from technologists as to the legitimacy of their contributions. Thankfully, there’s plenty of room — and, by extension, overlooked profit — for innovation with ML’s security and privacy challenges.

Reverse-Engineering

Machine learning models, much like any piece of software, are prone to theft and subsequent reverse-engineering. In late 2016, researchers at Cornell Tech, the Swiss Institute EPFL, and the University of North Carolina reverse-engineered a sophisticated Amazon AI by analyzing its responses to only a few thousand queries; their clone replicated the original model’s output with nearly perfect accuracy. The process is not difficult to execute, and once completed, hackers will have effectively “copied” the entire machine learning algorithm — which its creators presumably spent generously to develop.

The risk this poses will only continue to grow. In addition to the potentially massive financial costs of intellectual property theft, this vulnerability also poses threats to national security — especially as governments pour billions of dollars into autonomous weapon research.

While some researchers have suggested that increased model complexity is the best solution, there hasn’t been nearly enough open work done in this space; it’s a critical (albeit underpublicized) opportunity for innovation — all in defense of the multi-billion-dollar AI sector.

Adversarial “Injection”

Machine learning also faces the risk of adversarial “injection” — sending malicious data that disrupts a neural network’s functionality. Last year, for instance, researchers from four top universities confused image recognition systems by adding small stickers onto a photo, through what they termed Robust Physical Perturbation (RP2) attacks; the networks in question then misclassified the image. Another team at NYU showed a similar attack against a facial recognition system, which would allow a suspect individual to easily escape detection.

Not only is this attack a threat to the network itself (i.e. consider this against a self-driving car), but it’s also a threat to companies who outsource their AI development and risk contractors putting their own “backdoors” into the system. Jaime Blasco, Chief Scientist at security company AlienVault, points out that this risk will only increase as the world depends more and more on machine learning. What would happen, for instance, if these flaws persisted in military systems? Law enforcement cameras? Surgical robots?

Training Data Privacy

Protecting the training data put into machine learning models is yet another area that needs innovation. Currently, hackers can reverse-engineer user data out of machine learning models with relative ease. Since the bulk of a model’s training data is often personally identifiable information —e.g. with medicine and finance — this means anyone from an organized crime group to a business competitor can reap economic reward from such attacks.

As machine learning models move to the cloud (i.e. self-driving cars), this becomes even more complicated; at the same that users need to privately and securely send their data to the central network, the network needs to make sure it can trust the user’s data (so tokenizing the data via hashing, for instance, isn’t necessarily an option). We can once again abstract this challenge with everything from mobile phones to weapons systems.

Further, as organizations seek personal data for ML research, their clients might want to contribute to the work (e.g. improving cancer detection) without compromising their privacy (e.g. providing an excess of PII that just sits in a database). These two interests currently seem at odds — but they also aren’t receiving much focus, so we shouldn’t see this opposition as inherent. Smart redesign could easily mitigate these problems.

Conclusion

In short: it’s time some innovators in the AI space focused on its security and privacy issues. With the world increasingly dependent on these algorithms, there’s simply too much at stake — including a lot of money for those who address these challenges.

Simple App Ideas: How to Find the Next Big Thing

Simple App Ideas: How to Find the Next Big Thing

Hardik Gandhi   January 23, 2018

Originally published on http://www.appsterhq.com/

When it comes to building mobile apps, app makers tend to overcomplicate their ideas and strategies.

The app winds up becoming a clunky Swiss Army knife — one that offers too many features, is difficult to learn and use, and costly to maintain.

But when we think about successful apps, it’s often the simplest ones that come to mind — apps like Dropbox and Evernote that address a pressing pain point, yet are effortlessly easy to use.

As Steve Jobs famously said:

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Below, I’ll share about tried-and-tested strategies that I’ve used to help startups and entrepreneurs at Appster come up with simple app ideas effectively.

1. Train yourself to become an idea machine:

How do you get better at coming up with app ideas?

The answer, according to entrepreneur, best-selling author and podcaster James Altucher is to become an idea machine.

In Altucher’s words, it’s akin to being a superhero, where you’re never at a loss for ideas — regardless of whichever situation you’re in or whatever questions you’re thrown at.

If this sounds unrealistic, it isn’t — but it does require plenty of practice. Here’s a quick roundup of Altucher’s tips for becoming an idea machine:

How many ideas should you come up with each time?

10.

Why 10 ideas?

Most of us wouldn’t have much difficulty with conceiving a handful of ideas, even if it’s centered around topics that we don’t usually ponder about.

But after the fifth idea is just about when it gets challenging — where we find ourselves at a loss for ideas.

The point of the exercise is to break through this stage in order to build up your idea muscle.

How can you assess your ideas?

You can’t, and evaluating your app ideas isn’t the priority at this point in time. Says Altucher:

“You have to try multiple ideas and see which ones gets the excitement of customers, employees, and you can see that people are legitimately using it and excited by it.”

What are topics you can start brainstorming on?

The key here is to have fun with the ideation process, so don’t limit yourself to business-related ideas.

It helps to think out of the box, and conceptualize ideas around topics like “10 ridiculous mobile apps I would want”, “10 ways an app can solve a problem that I’m facing”, “10 mobile apps that I can reinvent” or “10 mobile apps I would improve”.

How long does it take to become an “idea machine”?

Altucher suggests doing this daily for at least six months.

2. Hone your problem-solving skills

How can app makers go about finding the right idea for their startup?

Daniel Kempe, founder of hand-curated content suggestion platform Quuu elaborates in a Forbes article:

“It’s not about the search for ideas, it’s identifying problems or gaps with existing products or services. Ideas are tough to come by, at least good ones are. But problems, they’re everywhere! Almost every product or service you use on a daily basis was created to solve a problem.”

Here four strategies you can use to hone your problem-solving abilities:

2.1. Review problems you face on a day-to-day basis

The first place to start is by identifying problems that you encounter on a day-to-day basis.

It can be difficult to come up with ideas in a brainstorming session, so start by observing any moments of frustration you have throughout the day — whether it’s an interruption or delay that occurred at work or a problem that crops up in your personal life.

At first glance, these issues may appear to be minute or mundane — but resolving a personal problem has been the launching point for apps like Dropbox and Summly.

The idea for Dropbox arose out of co-founder Drew Houston’s frustration with the absence of a seamless storage solution for his files, while Summly was conceived when founder Nick D’Aloisio found it inefficient to click through Google search results while preparing for his exams.

2.2. Pay attention to everyday conversations

Everyday conversations and seemingly banal complains can become a source of inspiration.

Try carving out a block of time — say five days to a week — where you pay close attention to and note down problems that crop up in conversations all around you. “I wish this could be better”, “I hate this…”, “Why does this keep happening…” are some phrases you’d want to prick your ears up for.

2.3. Tap on social media

Social media platforms are a great way to find out about larger scale problems encountered by individuals and communities all around the world.

There are different ways of conducting a search via social media: you may create hashtags around the problems you’ve picked up on through the above methods, or come up with a list of hashtags around topics or problems that you’re concerned about.

2.4. Go to where your potential users are at

Blog articles, blog comments, forums, discussion boards, Quora — apart from being a useful source of information, these sites are also a great way to interact with potential users or target audience.

Take note of common problems and issues that are being discussed, and don’t hesitate to post comments or start a new thread around any questions you might have — this could spark off conversations that will shed light on problems that you weren’t previously aware of.

3. Keep a close watch on your competitors

A competitive analysis should be carried out at several stages over the lifetime of a mobile app: during the ideation process, before significant changes are made to your app or business strategy, and at regular intervals to keep up with changes in the competitive landscape.

Below, I’ll be focusing on competitive analysis conducted at the ideation stage.

Pay attention to user feedback and comments

User feedback and comments are a treasure trove of information. Start poring through reviews and ratings left by users of your competitors’ apps — from app store reviews to social media comments and forum posts — to obtain a clearer idea of features and strategies that resonate with your potential users.

If you’re in the midst of sounding out your ideas with friends and family or testing your MVP, keep an eye out for remarks like “I’ve tried out the ABC app, but didn’t like a particular feature they had” or “This feature reminds me of XYZ app” — you’ll know that these are competitors to keep track of.

Dig deep into your competitors’ strategies

By delving deep into the strategies implemented by your competitors, you can then break these down into simpler elements, and reverse engineer the processes to replicate their success.

The objective here isn’t to imitate what your competitors are doing, but to combine their strategies with your existing ideas to create concepts and features that work for your app.

Here’s a checklist of questions to help you get started on your research process:

• Which strategies have produced the best results for your competitors?
• What were unsuccessful strategies implemented?
• How can you improve on strategies your competitors implemented?
• How can you adapt these strategies to make it work for your mobile app?
• Don’t forget about indirect competitors

While your indirect competitors may not have launched a mobile app, they are still targeting a similar set of users — so it helps to pay attention to how they’re attracting your potential users with their products or services.

Here are key questions to guide you in your analysis of indirect competitors:

• In what areas are their products or services similar to yours?
• What are successful strategies and ideas that have helped them target and retain their users?
• How can these strategies be improved on?
• Can you adapt these ideas or concepts to make it work for your mobile app?

4. Stay on top of the latest trends

The ever-changing mobile landscape is a challenging space to navigate.

App makers are up against the intense competition — a 2017 Statista study indicated that Android users were able to choose between 2.8 million apps, while the number of apps on the App Store totaled at 2.2 million.

In addition, the emergence of trends like augmented reality, virtual reality and chatbots are revolutionizing the way users engage with mobile apps.

Strategies and features that are effective now may easily be rendered irrelevant in a matter of months. Generating ideas that resonate with today’s users requires a constant pursuit of keeping up with the trends.

Here are a few tools and websites you can use to stay on top of the latest developments:

• Google Trends
• Google Alerts
• App Annie: App market data and insights company producing consumer and competitive information on downloads, revenue, ratings, usage, search terms and more. App Annie’s Insights Blog and webinars are also great resources for app makers.
• Priori Data: App Store intelligence company providing market data and competitive benchmarking information on the global app economy.
• Forrester Research: Market research firm providing advice on existing and potential impacts of technology.
• Trendwatching: Independent trend firm scanning the global market for promising consumer trends and insights.
• Springwise: Provides information on innovation intelligence. Springwise sources for the latest innovation, startup, and business ideas from around the world.
• Trends and mobile apps outside of your industry

Too often, startups and businesses fall into the trap of living within the industry bubble. In adopting a myopic focus on industry trends, benchmarking and best practices, companies eventually wind up providing run-of-the-mill experiences that fail to stand out.

This can be prevented by studying and introducing ideas and concepts from industries, businesses or mobile apps that differ from your own.

Here are key takeaways you can gain from studying mobile apps across different industries:

• Zappos: Zappos is known for delivering stellar customer experiences, and its mobile app is no different. App makers can learn about providing top-notch experiences through studying features like Ask Zappos, a feature that helps users find any product with just a tap of their camera, and Handover, which enables users to shop seamlessly between their Apple devices.
• JetBlue: Pesky push notifications are a bane for smartphone users. Learn from JetBlue’s timely and thoughtful communication, which includes providing flight check-in reminders 24 hours before a flight is scheduled to take off, as well as notifications to let passengers review flight entertainment options in advance.
• Venmo: App makers can learn from the convenience and efficiency that mobile payment apps like Venmo provides — from the way user information is saved for easy access, to how a complex process like sending out money or making purchases can be completed in a few quick taps.