Is Google ignoring the Android Market?
|When I first switched to Android from Windows Mobile, I was amazed by how seamless the transition was. I didn’t hate WinMo exactly. It was more of a love/hate relationship. In fact, I mostly enjoyed flashing it and constantly tweaking settings and updating its various radios and ROMs (mainly thanks to the proprietor of this site, whom some of you may have heard of). But when I finally decided to bail on WinMo, my Nexus One could do everything out of the box that I had to hack my old Fuze to be able to do (and half-assedly at that). And the difference between the Android version of apps versus Windows Mobile ones was staggering. For one thing, legitimate Windows Mobile apps were ridiculously expensive when their iPhone and Android counterparts were either free or a negligible fee. I’ve installed close to 50 apps on my Nexus One and they have all been free. Every last one. And they work. My Fuze was in a constant state of FUBAR. Apps tended to hang far more often than actually work. It was an enormous struggle just to make calls because my GV Dialer would crap out on me 7 times out of 10 (which probably had more to do with my rode-hard Fuze than the app itself). In retrospect I can’t believe how long I put up with all of it. But now that I’ve had my Nexus One for a few months and the Google-phoria has tapered a bit, my perspective is a little more even-keeled. So, I’m only now able to see a few flaws in the land of Google as well. My biggest gripe is with the Android Market, specifically quality control. You seriously have to wade through an enormous amount of crap to find anything worth installing, if you’re just browsing. Windows Mobile didn’t suffer this fate so much because, well, Marketplace barely had a selection to begin with (since nobody was designing apps for the dying-on-the-vine WinMo 6.5). This is the one area Apple and iPhone tend to come out on top. The app store on iPhone, despite its burdensome censorship issues, makes it far easier to find relevant and useful apps. And DVD John (the programmer who decrypted commercial DVD’s) takes the Android Market failings a little deeper on his blog, claiming that Google is falling down on the job both in terms of paying its developers properly and filtering the spam apps. Kyle VanHemert overt at Gizmodo summed it up succinctly enough, “…as the Android Market continues its explosive growth, Google will have to make some changes to ensure that its quality apps don’t get lost amidst the junk.” But if this is Android’s biggest problem, then Google is still sitting pretty.
just so you know the proprietor of blownfuze is a writer on this site too Doug Simmons. So pretty much all of us heard of him.
@steve yes, i am aware. i thought that would be implicit in my (meant to be sarcastic) reference to him. guess it didn’t translate that way.
no, it did translate thatway…
i just suck at english. It is my third language lol and when i skimmed over the article it did not translate that way. sorry.
translated just fine here, nice read.
The marketplace is filled with fecal matter and it’s only getting worse. Add to that that it’s intended to go to the bottom demonimator. They want free apps. So when a good app comes along for $1 it’s shunned. The end result is that devs will lose interest relative to WP7 which will have trials and encourange good apps at a fair price and promote apps based on criteria other than just time of upload and number of downloads.
The very thing people applaud about the Android platform is the abundance of free apps. Though it is proving to be a huge selling point now it won’t in the future. Top developers will ask why use valuable resources (time, skill, effort) in building an app for no feasible return.
@ DavidK
Hopefully the cream rises to the top. Even with tons of free apps bogging down the market, it’s easy enough for most of us (although not so much for non-power users) to go to a forum and ask or search and see what most people are using. I’m not even on android yet and I’ve got a list going just from poking around xda.
Not a big issue for a power-user, but yeah I agree it needs tightening up for the casual user.
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