A Guide for Product and Tech teams
DeviceAtlas' core mission is to help our customers manage a very fragmented device landscape. The continued emergence of new form factors and device categories shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, the trend is accelerating with the advent of IoT and the inclusion of connectivity in an ever growing variety of devices. For better or worse, fragmentation is real and growing.
In one of our recent research reports, we looked at just how fragmented some individual markets are. Statistics for the USA alone showed very significant levels of fragmentation in the devices that people use on a day-to-day basis to access the web. There were some 243 device manufacturers, 79 different screen sizes, 24 different operating systems, and 23 different mobile browsers used in the period we looked at.
| Device characteristics | Device types in use |
|---|---|
| Device manufacturers | 243 |
| Phone models | 2,021 |
| Screen sizes | 79 |
| Operating systems | 24 |
| Mobile browsers | 23 |
To a greater or lesser degree, this diversity is seen right across global markets. The sheer variety of screen sizes, screen resolutions, mobile browsers, device manufacturers, phone models and device capabilities in use is staggering. And it presents a challenge to organizations who have a business case to stay on top of it.
Turning Fragmentation into a competitive advantage
For many DeviceAtlas customers, fragmentation is actually a good thing: by making sure their platforms and products are always device aware, they are able to create a competive advantage for themselves. Many of our customers come from a product management or technical background, with a strong focus on building functionality into their platforms that will create value for their customers and differentiate their product in what is an extremely competitive landscape.
DeviceAtlas powers many platforms that are able to provide a better offering to their customers by guaranteeing that they are able to accurately handle traffic from any device — they are always up to date and aware of the latest devices and have the technical capability to identify and understand device characteristics at high speeds. What's more, they don't need to dedicate precious (and expensive) R&D resources to the onerous task of maintaining their own device respositories.
The applications that product and technical teams power by incorporating DeviceAtlas into their environments are many and varied. The potential use cases are only limited by the imagination of product innovators but some typical examples include:
- Analysing and reporting on device usage
- Optimizing User Experience on digital channels (web, apps) based on device knowledge
- Specifically targeting devices based on their characteristics
While providing intelligence on mobile devices is something we have always done, out remit has over time extended to all connected devices, as well other traffic types such as bots and crawlers. We provide this data in web, apps and mobile network environments.
If you are responsible for a product and are considering adding a device intelligence layer to your product, we've put together the following whitepaper which will give you extensive information on potential use cases, case studies, deployment options and more. Download your copy now.