Mobile App Development Scholarships

February 23, 2016
 
Ashley Rondeau

Followers of our blog may know that there has been, and still is, a severe lack of mobile app talent. As the industry grows, the world will need many more skilled developers and designers, and we’ve highlighted a few places to learn to code mobile apps for those interested in getting their feet wet. But wouldn’t it be great to learn on someone else’s dime? Sure!
So we’ve rounded up some scholarships for those interested in app development.
Samsung Mobile Academy Scholarship
If you’re in the 11th or 12th grade, once you attend a 5-day Academy and complete the requirements, you’ll be eligible for this Samsung scholarship towards college tuition. While you could then major in English or Philosophy with the prize money, obviously Samsung will be happiest if you continue your education in mobile app development.
http://www.scholastic.com/samsungacademy/index.aspx
Salesforce/Degreed App Scholarship
For college or grad students, there is a $1000 scholarship to be “won” every month after applying just once. Won is in quotes here because it goes to whoever “learns the most, as measured by your Degreed Score,” so it’s a way for Degreed to get new users. Still, a grand is nothing to sneeze at, and learning how to make apps for Salesforce is definitely a lucrative career path.
https://degreed.com/salesforce-app-scholarship
Code Fellows Diversity Scholarship
If you’re from a diverse background (women, minority, veteran) and have been accepted into a select list of courses on Code Fellows, some being mobile development courses, you can apply for this scholarship. Code 401 is Advanced Software Development in iOS, which looks to be a great course for aspiring app developers, so this scholarship is worth a look!
https://www.codefellows.org/scholarships
Bloc/Girl Develop It Women’s Scholarship
Bloc is a well known online coding bootcamp that has great courses in mobile apps. Each month, they give away $2500 to 2 women toward their Full Stack Developer Track or the Software Engineering Track.
http://try.bloc.io/girl-develop-it-coding-bootcamp-scholarship/
Meteor Web Development Scholarship
If you’re a young woman in high school in the NYC area, The Flatiron School has partnered with Meteor to give out 15 scholarships to a couple development courses. HTML5 is on the curriculum, so you’ll be creating web apps in no time.
https://precollege.flatironschool.com/meteor-web-development-scholarship
Mobile Makers Diversity Scholarship
Women and minority groups, as well as US veterans, are eligible to get about $1000 in scholarship money toward their Mobile Makers bootcamp, which is about 1/10 of the full tuition price. Not amazing, but not bad if you’re already planning on attending.
http://mobilemakers.co/
Google Focused Research Awards
If you’ve got a great mobile idea that has the potential to change the world, you can get tens of thousands in award money from Google… if they buy into your dream. Basically a research grant so they can piggyback off your genius, it’s still worth looking into if you have the next Tinder on deck.
http://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research-outreach/faculty-engagement
Kay Family Foundation
If you’re an “appreneur” still enrolled in high school or college, your cool app can win you $5000 for further education through the Kay Family Foundation. Sure, you need to have already made an app, but we just like the term appreneur.
http://appreneurscholars.com/about/
Ray Greenly Scholarship
Explicitly for students who have an interest in digital retail (which of course is all about mobile these days), this scholarship awards up to $25,000 for the top recipient. There are a lot of hoops to jump through including essays, a personal brand video, and school transcripts, but the biggest moneys always come with those hurdles.
https://nrf.com/career-center/scholarships/ray-greenly-scholarship/how-apply-the-ray-greenly-scholarship
These are the ones we could find that had some connection specifically to mobile apps. There are hundreds of other scholarships out there for STEM education in general, especially if you’re a woman. If you know of any we missed, please chime in down below in the comments section! And if you’re already an amazing developer, why not work for us?
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So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

The State of Windows Mobile

February 17, 2016
 
Ashley Rondeau

A friend of mine has a Windows phone, and it’s weird. Unlike me, an Android-devotee who obsesses over the latest and greatest mobile devices, she just went with a phone that was recommended by a sales person when she renewed her plan. I asked her if she liked her phone and she shrugged: “It makes calls, it texts, it has Facebook and Twitter. It’s fine.” She was eager to change the subject since she didn’t care. And I wondered: is this the user base for Windows Mobile smartphones? People who don’t care about the mobile experience?
Here at the Farm, Windows Mobile is almost a dirty word. No one uses it, and thinking about it makes us shake our heads. After all, the Lumia series is excellent hardware and a part of us really want to develop apps for it and the OS. But the clients requesting development for Windows Mobile has dried up. And as it takes time and effort to develop for a third OS after the big two, we’re hard pressed to recommend porting our clients apps to the also-ran. We can’t even say it’s an afterthought; Windows Mobile isn’t a thought at all.
Windows 10 Microsoft

A tiny, falling market share

The industry as a whole seems to agree. By late 2015, the market share for Windows phones dropped even further, to 1.7% in the 3rd quarter and 1.1% in the 4th. And remember, this is on the heels of a year of Windows 10 taking over the PCs of the world. Windows 10, which was optimized for mobile, was supposed to be the big push to get more people using Windows phones, but that hasn’t materialized.
In 2016, Windows 10 is predicted to reach 400-500 million PCs and sales of the Surface tablet will probably still beat out the iPad as it did in 2015. Some are pointing to these facts as signs of life, but we don’t buy it. Ok, let’s say that their market share doubles. That would bring it up to 2.2%. Still not anything to get excited over. Businesses still won’t spend the time or money developing apps for this OS, especially when Apple and Google are continuing to add more options to their stable with wearables, VR headsets, and even automobiles.

The vicious cycle of no apps

While my friend might have all she needs on her Windows phone, many other users lament the lack of apps:
• Number of apps available in leading app stores 2015 Statistic
And at this point, Windows isn’t playing catch up as much as trying desperately to hold on to the apps it has. In the past year, the Verge reported that American Airlines, Chase Bank, Bank of America, NBC and Pinterest have all discontinued supporting their apps on Windows Mobile. Their version of Instagram is still in Beta after two years on the market!
The cycle goes like this: fewer apps means fewer phones sold. The fewer phones sold, the fewer apps are made or maintained to a high quality. People frustrated with shoddy or non-existent apps switch to Apple or Android. And so on. Then, include the fact that fewer programmers are willing to learn or keep up their skills developing for Windows, and you’ve got the makings of a death spiral a lot like BlackBerry.

Microsoft has no strategy in sight

Somehow, Microsoft has made their tablets a mild success. Enterprises are embracing the Surface and they’re outselling iPads, as previously mentioned. By building quality hardware (and that NFL snafu was a network problem, not the tablets themselves!), a pretty solid touch-enabled OS, and lots and lots of marketing, they’re making headway.
But that strategy won’t work for phones. Why? Because as we said in another blog post, tablets are for enterprise use, not for your average consumer. And the average consumer wants reliable phones with all the apps that they’re used to. Without the support of 3rd party developers, Microsoft just can’t deliver on those needs. The only thing they can do is double down on Windows 10 and hope consumers will make the switch, but that’s less a strategy than wishful thinking.

…maybe one last ditch effort.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s best hope is to win the enterprise market. Follow the Surface’s success by pushing a similar smartphone to users already familiar with the tablets. And sure enough, the Surface phone should be out soon. If the phone can hitch a ride on the backs of the tablets, and sneak their way into the homes of these businessmen and women, then it might have a chance. But, in our opinion, this isn’t going to move the millions and millions of Windows phones to stay competitive.
And I have a feeling my friend might not even have the option to get another Windows phone in 2 years, when her contract is up.
What do you think about the state of Windows Mobile? Sound off in the comments below!
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So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

How do I love thee? Let me count the Waze – Part Deux

February 10, 2016
 
Dan Katcher

wazeA year ago we wrote an artfully beautiful tribute to Waze on Valentine’s Day, entitled “How do I love thee? Let me count the Waze.”  Funny thing, we thought we were being deliciously clever, but check out a google search for that title and you’ll note we’re not the only one to think of it.
However, we are in fact number 1 in the Google search results for that topic (so I’m not saying you should read that #1 post, but you should probably read that #1 post).
Ok, so a year has passed. So what’s happened to Waze? Sure – they’ve updated their interface and made it smoother better bigger bolder.  I was going to do a UX breakdown of all the updates, but well candidly, that’s a little boring.
What is interesting is that Waze just released an SDK so you can integrate their real-time mapping functionality into other apps.  Check this article out. The gist is that by letting companies like Lyft, Cabify, and 99Taxis integrate with Waze, more data will be gathered, providing an ever better experience to Waze users. It’ll even make driving safer by automating route updates which was previously a manual process for Lyft drivers.
What I find so fascinating is how this transforms Waze (and hence owner Google) into an ever more important service for big businesses.  According to this excellent article on TechCrunch, Waze is operating on multiple fronts to increase their enterprise footprint. As part of their connected citizens program, Waze will provide data to their broadcast partners for traffic reporting. So, Waze’s footprint gets bigger, its data gets better, and Waze gets entrenched in all of our lives in more and more interesting ways.
It’s all about the data.  And for the consumer, it’s hearts once again, on Valentine’s Day, for Waze.
Read our original love letter to Waze here, and let us know what you think about this navigation app in the comments below.
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So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

The State of the Apple Watch in 2016

February 2, 2016
 
Ashley Rondeau

Back in March of 2015, as the Apple Watch was heating up in sales, we had a fairly positive view of the new wearable technology. We called it a pure luxury item at that time, and thought it would win that niche until prices dropped, and then it would appeal to the masses. We were (and are) keen on the Apple Watch to do well because we’re app developers, and it’s exciting to develop for a brand new platform/gadget and to figure out a whole new UX.
So, what’s the latest with Apple Watch as of early 2016? Were our predictions right? Well, sort of…
apple-watch

Apple Watch is still a luxury item.

With the least expensive model still at $349, prices haven’t budged, and its reputation as a luxury accessory has only grown as of late. In fact, it has recently dethroned Rolex to be the most “obsessed-over” luxury watch brand. The nerds have truly taken over the world.
We said we hoped to see a base model drop to $99 in three years from launch, but that seems to be an Apple pie-in-the-sky sentiment. So with the high prices, it’s no wonder we don’t see many of these watches in the wild. You’d think they’ve barely sold any. Well…

Apple’s shipping a ton of them…but…

Turns out, Apple’s shipped 51.5% of the smartwatches in all markets in 2015, according to a report by Juniper Research. In comparison, Android Wear watches accounted for just 10% of smartwatch shipments last year.
But you’re a savvy reader and know that shipping amount doesn’t always equal sold amounts (remember the Amazon Fire smartphone?), you’ll think it suspicious that Apple hasn’t released any hard sales data, instead choosing to lump the Apple Watch into the “Other Products” category in their latest earnings report. Apple says Watch sales are doing great, but won’t back them up with statistics. So what’s really going on? Can we try to estimate their sales numbers?

Estimated Apple Watch sales are all over the map.

Analysts have pegged last quarter’s Apple Watch sales at 10.5 million to 3.10 million. It’s really just guessing at this point. But what’s most interesting is that by and large, these analysts have lowered their predictions of first-year sales by 37%, from when they first made their prediction back when the Watch debuted.
screen-shot-2016-01-21-at-10-06-36-am
Most analysts have tempered their expectations of how many Apple Watches have been, and will be, sold. And this is a sign that the wearable won’t be as popular as their hopes led them to believe.

We still don’t know why we need it.

IOS_+_watchOS_iMessage_ContinuityThe crux of it is that the public still doesn’t know whether it even wants an Apple watch, let alone needs one. The reason is that the Apple Watch has yet to deliver that killer feature that so many other Apple devices have had in the past. The iMac worked right out of the box. The iPod had iTunes, which was the best music management software around at the time, and the click wheel. The iPhone had apps.
The Apple Watch has… 10,000 apps? Well, none of them are killer apps. You don’t see people shoving their Apple Watch in each others’ face to show off some messaging app. It’s cool, but it’s not mind-blowing. In fact, the closest thing to a killer feature might be its fitness and health tracking, but even that is done just as well by other wearables that cost a fraction of Apple’s device. And that’s important if the device is used for exercise and runs the risk of getting sweaty or broken with repeated use. After all, you don’t go jogging in Alexander McQueens.

Time running out?

So is the Apple Watch going to fade away like The Newton? Not if Apple has anything to say about it, because Apple Watch 2 will soon be upon us. Sure, this might drop prices of the original Apple Watch, which might increase overall sales, but we have to say that we’re a little skeptical.
We dig Apple products here at The Farm, but we have been asking ourselves what exactly is the key selling point of this device, and we’re left scratching our heads. Hopefully, the new Watches will have that killer feature we’re looking for to justify its existence. We’re putting our money on health sensors that might make the Apple Watch 2 the perfect device for people who work out and possibly for the elderly and those who need to monitor a chronic condition.
What do you think about the state of the Apple Watch? Sound off in the comment below!
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So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.