As concern grows regarding the negative impact poorly written applications can have on mobile networks, Huawei is offering a cloud-based way for developers to evaluate a particular app's network friendliness.
Called MBB Insider Online--the MBB stands for mobile broadband--this new cloud-based mobile platform from Huawei was developed by mLAB, the Chinese vendor's wireless network innovation lab.
The platform offers evaluation tools that accurately determine the impact an app will have have in terms of traffic consumption, signaling, device power and delivered user experience when installed on a smart device connected to a live mobile network. In addition, MBB Insider Online provides app optimization recommendations to improve delivered user experience and optimize utilization of network resources.
App design can have significant impacts on mobile networks. For example, earlier this year network vendor Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) reported that a November 2012 update to Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) iOS and Android apps increased overall signaling traffic and airtime consumption on mobile networks by 5-10 percent.
Along with the rollout of MBB Insider Online, Huawei also introduced a related developer community, which the vendor said "is designed for developers to learn more about the mobile network technologies that ultimately underpin the performance and effectiveness of the mobile services they are providing."
Among other things, the community provides a series of open Application Programming interfaces (APIs) for network control and management capabilities such as quality of service management and network status information.
In other app news, Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo said it will next month launch a developer support website to provide smartphone application developers with APIs for conversation-oriented applications. The company will release the conversation API, in addition to previously available voice-recognition and question-answering APIs for the voice-agent smartphone application Shabette-Concier.
"The new website is intended to deepen relationships with outside developers and thereby strengthen DoCoMo services for smartphones and other mobile devices," the operator said.
For more:
- see this Huawei release
- see this DoCoMo release
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