A little piece of history for you: You probably think that mobile apps appeared soon after iPhone’s launch back in 2007? Actually… Tesco created its first mobile app back in… 2002! Tesco Pocket Shopper was a complete guide to selecting and ordering your Tesco online groceries which you could use offline, then go online to upload your order. Here’s what it looked like: You remember the Compaq iPaq? – that was our target ‘pocket pc’ back in 2001 when development started. Articl

If you would like to join Tesco.com R&D in testing content and applications we’ll be sending to ‘Channel Zero’-enabled Freeview boxes, then please apply below. You may also optionally apply to receive one of 20 Technika Freeview HD set-top boxes that the Tesco Electricals team have kindly given me to hand out as part of the experiment and which you can keep for free afterwards. I’ll offer them out BUT I want each box pointing to a different transmitter so experimenters receiv

It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and my copy of Tweetdeck is on the screen displaying my favourite filtered Twitter feeds. As you can imagine I have a column filtering “tesco iphone app” and I have to admit I’m enjoying the very many positive comments coming from ‘the real world’. The team at Ribot are enjoying it too. Given that they designed and built the Tesco Groceries for iPhone app, their enjoyment at watching this very real feedback is even greater than mine (click he

I don’t get any products, favourites or delivery slots when I use my iPhone or Nokia app – what’s wrong? If you get this problem, it means is that your grocery account is set to an ‘accessiblity’ profile. In order to make your account work with the app it needs to be displayed in ‘standard’ profile. Changing your profile is easy but you do need to go to our web site and make a change to one of the settings. Follow these instructions: Login to your grocery account at http://ww

AND… those of you not filling my email and blog comments with barcode scanner questions, it’s Android. Curse my transparency – hold onto your hat as you read this message from B0lty: Why haven’t you included a barcode scanner? More like why haven’t you included a Tesco Android app? I find it flabbergasting that so many leading UK businesses seem to ignore or lag behind in developing for the Android OS. It’s like they’re oblivious to Android. You’d be a very short-sighted co

Thanks to all of you who have downloaded our Tesco Groceries for iPhone application. The app is achieving a continuous top 10 position in iTunes for ‘most downloaded free app’ (it’s at No. 5 right now) and is No.1 in the ‘Lifestyle” category in the time period since it launched last Thursday. Of course downloads aren’t everything – we’ll be monitoring usage to see what customers use / avoid / love / hate about the application and tune it up appropriately. Feedback pretty good

We’ve just launched our mobile applications portal web site. The site has essential information about all our applications and it will grow to become your complete guide to our mobile apps, with all kinds of support facilities too. http://www.tesco.com/apps #apps #mobile #tesco

A great question has come from @sitereport on Twitter: Can multiple iPhone users add items to the same order? Technically, as long as the users are logged in to the same account, then yes you can add to the same order (or change quantities or remove the item). Indeed, this can be a mix of anyone on the iPhone app, the Nokia app, and the web site – each keeps the others up to date. I say ‘technically’ because if someone checks out an order, the basket is emptied ready for the

Computer Weekly, one of my favourite reads, has as exceeded even their own excellent forecasting abilities. In their article Tesco Finder app reaches 1m downloads published yesterday, they reinterpreted my blog entry of Friday which spoke of the number of Tesco Finder requests reaching one million, rather than app downloads reaching one million. Given that Tesco Groceries for iPhone is about to launch, I thought I’d compile the actual total count of downloads of all the other

Last week our grocery home shopping competitor Ocado won the BT Retail Week Technology Award for their iPhone and Android Ocado on the Go apps. The two applications are excellent examples of applying technology appropriately for the customer’s benefit – making the process of grocery shopping easier and more convenient. I’m sure our forthcoming grocery apps will be worthy competition. Indeed if we can even do half as well as Ocado’s claim that 5% of orders are made through the