The highly anticipated new version of Android labeled “Ice Cream Sandwich” is rumored to be unveiled at the upcoming Samsung event on October 11th and the ShopSavvy team could not be more excited. The last version of Android, Honeycomb, was specifically tailored to tablets and was never released for phones.  With the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, the Honeycomb interface and APIs will be brought onto phones which, according to Google’s developer blog, will allow us to write one application that works for both tablets and phones.

Over the last few months we have been slowly moving ShopSavvy onto the Honeycomb API using Google’s compatibility framework.  All of our new features such as ShopSavvy wallet, scans near you, login, and list syncing have all been built for both tablets and phones. We have also reworked all of our older features to take advantage of activities with fragments to display information in an optimal way for every screen size.  With the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, Android tablet users will finally be able to get one app to fill all of their shopping needs.

Here’s a few examples of screens on tablets compared to their phone counter parts.

Kevin was kind enough to build a weekly report I am comfortable sharing with with the world. The report currently covers:

• Wallet Purchases by Retailer
• Wallet Shipping (Paid vs Free)
• Wallet Taxes (Taxed vs Non-Taxed)
• Average Purchase Value
• Average Shipping Charge
• Average Tax Charge

Somethings to consider. Since our wallet is new and our sample size is still small the data may change drastically. Additionally, in this week’s report Barnes & Noble has more than 50% of the overall purchases, but it is important to realize that retailers like Target and Walmart were not fully functional until yesterday. If you have any suggestions please pass them along to sales@shopsavvy.com and we will consider adding them to the report. Without further ado, here is a report from the last seven days:

It isn’t the Android Market yet, but for those of you willing to help us find bugs the beta is for you. The Android beta is ready to go, and can be downloaded and side-loaded from here:

http://shopsavvy.mobi/UIPrototype.apk

The two big updates to the Android client this release are:

• We’ve reset the Welcome Sequence flow so that it’s re-shown to users again; this is to help try to bump user regs
• We’ve introduced the new Social Photos concept. You can find this by tapping into a product details page, and then tapping on the new “Activity” button in the bottom right. You’ll then be brought to the new photos carousel where you can view, and thumbs-up photos that you like. Or, you can add your own. This is the start of our new ShopSavvy Open Graph features that will become the foundation for our community framework going forward. Missing in this beta is the “Report this photo”, which will be a small icon at the top right corner of each photo that allows community enforcement of which photos are inappropriate. Those reported photos will go into a photo moderation tool that will allow us to review and take action as needed.
• We’ve done some adjustment to the location logic in this version. This should be fairly transparent, but let us know if you even notice the updates.

Please take a look and let us know what you like, don’t like, or any bugs you encounter. This is a Beta release so you WILL find bugs, but please report anything you find to me. We want to make sure all buggy scenarios are covered in the final release next week.

ShopSavvy was one of the first ten apps available on Android so we have always been popular on the platform, but this month has been amazing with over 1.2 million new users joining the ShopSavvy family. Wow.

This summer it hasn’t been unusual to add a million users in a month, but we were adding 500,000 from Android and 500,000 from iOS (not counting WP7 and Symbian). We were wondering why. I suspect it is simply a result of the success of the Android platform – I see Android devices EVERYWHERE.

Thanks Google, you rock! FYI – we have a new version of ShopSavvy on Android due later today (so update and rate). Thanks!

If you are a manufacturer and want to have your American made products highlighted in ShopSavvy send us a list of your ‘made in the USA’ UPC/EANs to madeintheusa@shopsavvy.com as soon as possible.

This week I noticed a few posts describing how much time users spend in various mobile apps. I pulled our data from Flurry (only counts iOS and Android, excludes Symbian and WP7) and was surprised by the numbers. During the average month our users spend more than 30 years scanning barcodes – thats a LOT of scanning.

September is shaping up to be a record month for ShopSavvy. Our prior record for traffic and new users was set back in May. Things were pretty slow between June and August as they always are, but we were surprised to see consumers out shopping this early. We usually don’t see a massive increase in users and downloads until October. Our biggest growth was on the Android side. Some of our newer features like ‘Scans Near You’ seem to be a big hit (coming someday to iOS) as well as the new ShopSavvy Wallet.