Best Practices for 3G and 4G App Development

[#1]

In January 2011, a Forrester research paper titled “2011 Mobile Trends” wrote, “The attention paid to 4G will vastly outweigh the impact of these new networks,” and, “We recommend that you ignore the hype.”

LTE (Long Term Evolution), marketed as 4G LTE,  is a mobile broadband communication standard based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA network technologies. 4G LTE brings four key benefits to mobile devices: higher bandwidth, lower latency, improved security, and prioritized QoS.

In January 2012, a Pyramid report on “LTE Devices and Applications; Next-generation mobile networks driven by video services"  pointed out in one of their key findings that “LTE is gaining strong momentum and has already overtaken mobile WiMAX subscriptions during 2011. To date, 35 mobile operators have launched commercial LTE networks, a range of 197 devices have become available and the technology is maturing since the first network became live in late 2009.”

AT&T 4G LTE is now live in 51 markets and 74 Million Americans have access to AT&T 4G LTE (as of January 2012). AT&T expects its LTE deployment to be largely completed by year-end 2013. Quite a few LTE devices are available and consumers are excited to take advantage of the speed of 4G LTE.

As a developer, ignoring the LTE trend in 2012 would be unwise. It is to your advantage to be familiar with LTE technology and it will be beneficial to understand its implication for app development. The white paper “Best Practices for 3G and 4G App Development” addresses best practices that can help developers leverage the benefits of LTE.

While you are developing apps for Nokia Lumia N900, Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket, HTC Vivid, Samsung Galaxy S III ...etc,  please remeber to apply the best practices so that your apps stand out in your targeted market.

[#2]

LTE is cool, but it seems like all the LTE devices available get disappointing battery life. Futhermore, with rate caps being the standard across the industry, how much are users going to be pleased if our apps make use of all this data?

[#3]

It is true that the LTE radio uses more power than the 3G radio. For this reason, developers must be careful about how they use the radio.  Minimizing connections, and reducing redundant data inside applications will lead to improvements in battery life.

One major point of this post (and the whitepaper) is that with LTE you can send down oodles of data at once, rather than slowly trickle the data through to the device.  By sending 2 MB of data in 5 seconds instead of  100KB in 0.1 seconds *20 times you reduce power drain  by a huge amount.

The Applicatoin Resource Optimizer is a great way to look at how your application is using radio connections, and figure out ways to reduce the amount of data and energy your application uses. (developer.att.com/ARO)

[#4]

In the whitepaper on "Best Practices for 3G and 4G App Development", https://developer.att.com/home... ARO (Application Resource Optimizer) is mentioned as a tool to support developers to optimize their apps.

To learn more about ARO, you might want to consider to attend DevLab, a one-day hands-on programming workshop on September 25th. http://www.2012devlab.com/