According to a survey conducted by research company GfK, 59 percent of iPhone users are loyal to Apple and plan to stay with the company for their next phone. The survey was conducted online between October and November on a sample size of 2,653 users in Brazil, Germany, Spain, Britain, United States and China. The survey says only 25 percent of total smartphone users are planning to stay loyal to their respective phones. Apple’s brand loyalty was the highest followed by Research in Motion (Blackberry) – 35 percent, Google (Android) – 28 percent, Nokia- 24per cent and Microsoft – 21 percent.

“Loyalty with a handset is a lot more complicated these days in that people buy into experiences at the high-end level,” Ryan Garner, the lead analyst on the survey, told Reuters. “If a phone doesn’t do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty” he further added.

The survey also found that around 37 percent mobile users in all the markets except china plan to advance into a smartphone. The smartphone sales are on the high and shown good business in the last quarter of 2010. Analysts believe that with more and more users opting for upgrades to smartphone, the sales figures will continue to move upwards in the near future. In such a scenario, brand loyalty will be a huge deciding factor in the market.

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If you think this rumor holds some value and might turn into real news later. Then, one thing I just don’t understand is, why an iPhone OS 4 beta has a Google suggestions enabled into Safari for iPhone which is been tested by iPhone Developers ? Yep, Apple has taken Google search a little more closer to iPhone in iPhone OS 4 and hints nothing for Bing.

Well, all I think is, Bing might get place as an optional search engine but not a default one. It will be up to user which one to use. If you still think, that iPhone’s default Google search will get replaced by Bing, please do let us know, why?

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Let’s try to predict some of the features for iPhone OS 4 and we can come back to check once we have the final words from Apple.

Multitasking: Of course, this is the most expected feature this time. Well, it was rumored last year that iPhone may get Multitasking with the release of iPhone OS 3.0 but when they previewed it, they showed off Push Notification and positioned it as an alternative to Multitasking. Though, this Push Notification services were first demonstrated with the release of iPhone OS 2.0 however got delayed by a year and finally released in iPhone OS 3.0. Today, when all the iPhone competitors have multitasking as their major feature it becomes all the more essential for iPhone to have multitasking. Let’s hope Apple finally gives us multitasking with OS 4.0 and just not come up with another weak alternative.

Better Notifications: iPhone OS 3.0 pushes you the notification right away, whether its an IM you received or to join a multi-player game online. But this notification system is really at its initial stage of development. These notifications come to the user’s iPhone even when the App is not running in background (as iPhone doesn’t allow yet). So, the parts of the notification system includes badges count, sound & window popup alert. If you’re working on any App on your iPhone and you received an Alert Window notification, you can respond to right there. If at all you quit that notification window you need to go to that app and run it & if you forget to do so then you miss it completely. Given the situation it would be extremely helpful for users if Apple improves this notification system, so that the users can view all the unanswered notifications on a separate screen or something similar. Well, let’s see what iPhone OS 4 has to give us on this.

Better Mail App: The current Mail App need each accounts to be configured separately. All accounts have their inbox separate from other accounts. So, the whole navigation flow to check your inbox is to tap, tap & tap to go from one inbox to other. It’s been expected that there will be a common inbox for all the mails account.

Better Syncing: Apple may introduce a whole new way for syncing Mails, Contacts, Calendar and Multimedia content. Today, iPhone does sync perfectly but there are some itches when it comes to third party syncing options. Like, Google Sync.

Some tweaks with Home Screen: If at all Apple gets multitasking to iPhone via iPhone OS 4.0, and then we should see some little tweaks with the Home Screen. There can be a better way to switch between Apps. It’s also expected that iPhone may have more number of Home Screens (if at all they plan to keep same Home Screen pattern), which currently can only hold around 180 apps on 11 screens.

Apart from this, there can be many minor tweaks for iPhone in 4.0 releases. Let’s wait for 8th April and see what iPhone OS 4.0 has to offer.

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Today’s iPhone’s 3.x.x software is a fully preemptive multitasking operating system but it artificially restricts apps (other than specific ones bundled with the system by Apple) from running in the background. Apple has always cribbed on poor battery life as the reason to not enable this feature. With the iPhone barely running for 6 hours under heavy use, according to Apple, running apps in the background would bring the battery life down even more.

Since Apple first introduced the ability to run third party applications on the Apple iPhone 2.0 controversies have been brewing with the multi-tasking issue, often reported as a technical flaw. The phone can run SMS, email, iPod, voice recorder and certain other bundled applications in background while another application is being used, but in case of a third party app, it is designed such that the app is shut down when the user tries to go to the home screen or accept an incoming call .

Jailbreaking your iphone was a common way to launch and run multiple apps at the same time, however by jail breaking the iPhone Security Model is compromised. This also opens doors to malware and piracy, which were handled previously by the default security system. With this multi tasking feature being a part of iPhone OS 4.0, it would no longer be required to jailbreak your iPhone for multi tasking.

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Ever since Apple has released the new iPhone OS, I have been looking around for a fix to the problem I have seen with UIImageViews. Frantically “Google”ing for a fix, searching Apple iPhone Documentation again and again just to see if I have missed anything in the Release Notes and Change Logs of the iPhone SDK for UIImageView have not yielded any result. My self imposed deadlines to update all my apps for iPhone OS 3.0 have been breached and a resolution was not in sight.

The bug in UIImageView was its memory usage. As long as an image on screen is left alone after being created, nothing happens. But if you have any sinister designs on your mind, of moving/resizing the image on screen memory usage starts increasing. And there is no way you could do anything to bring the memory usage down, even releasing the image view object does not work.

And the most important finding in this issue is that “there are no memory leaks”. All the memory allocated is always being used!! That is what I had to believe, but performance of my applications on iPhone was rapidly falling down with the amount of time spent on it. Clearly indicating to me that there was something odd with the new iPhone OS.

A detailed bug report that I sent to Apple received a reply stating

This is due to a bug in the graphics system that mis-reports how it is allocating memory to ObjectAlloc, which causes it to display memory usage as continuously increasing.
If you attach the Memory Monitor instrument to your sample application, you will find that the Real Memory usage stays constant through out the application’s execution, indicating that while ObjectAlloc believes memory usage is increasing, it really is not.

For a couple of days, I was devastated at receiving that reply. So, no way out for me from this situation? Are all my app users going to give me bad ratings for no fault of mine?

Fortunately, I received another e-mail from Apple Support acknowledging that

this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering

Obviously someone else has already reported the issue, but the above response is only a “consolation prize” for me and nothing in the equation between me and my application purchasers changed. They are still going to complain that my apps are resource hogging and give them bad ratings.

This issue seems to be fixed in iPhone OS 3.1 and beyond, but the damage is already done!! Will all iPhone/iPodTouch users update their devices promptly?

Hope your applications are not plagued with these problems, and/or you have found an alternative to overcome this problem.

Happy programming!!

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If you too are experiencing the same problem, here is the solution to continue iPhone development with iPhone SDK 3.0 for your iPhone running iPhone OS 3.0.1.

1. Log-in to your MAC with an Admin account and launch the Terminal application (You will find it in /Applications/Utilities)
2. Copy and Paste the following line into the Terminal window
ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0\ \(7A341\) /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0.1

Note: If you have not installed iPhone SDK 3.0 in the default location “/Developer”, replace the “/Developer” directory in the above line as appropriate.

You can download the iPhone 3.0.1 Advisory guidelines document from iPhone Dev Portal

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