Big Android Market expansion
android-developers.blogspot.com
android-developers.blogspot.com
The market is one of the weakest aspects of Android IMO, hopefully they'll add more features soon.
* Make the top listings more interesting by sorting them differently (eg. by a ratio of time, comments and ratings instead of the total number of downloads). There should be more change and not the same apps in the top positions for years.
* Combat spam publishers (those with hundreds of sound boards and similar apps, which pollute the new listings by pushing interesting apps way down, which happens rather frequently). One idea could be a timeout between publishing/updating apps, for example only one app per 12 or 24 hours. Could be adjusted depending on the rating of the apps.
* Make a market website where developers can link to their apps (a la AppStore)
* This app website should have an push-to-phone button. If clicked Google pushes the app's package name to the user's device, which opens a popup for installing it. That would _greatly_ simplify installing apps - QR codes simply don't provide enough usability.
* And as dpcan said, the ability to describe an app with more than 325 characters.
I get the feeling as if the Android market is just not a high priority project of Google.
Lastly, the ability to comment on our own apps from the dev console would be great so I could respond to buyer comments since we are not allowed to buy our own apps.
The rest would be nice improvements too.
Likewise, I can't feel but screwed by the new Chrome Web Store not supporting Google Checkout Merchant accounts from countries other than United States and UK. Thanks a lot for the competitive edge guys.
I'm scrambling to implement a payment processor as soon as I can, but the lack of simple one-click purchase will surely impact sales.
The Merchant forum is bloated with requests for expanding the service to other countries since the day they rolled it out. A mildly comforting assurance that the expansion is in the works is all they managed to reply for three years now.
Seriously dropping the ball (compared to Apple) from a developer perspective.
I'm scared because I know how many talented developers are about to compete with me.
At the moment, I'm the only app of my kind, but in the iPhone app store, there are PAGES of apps that would be considered similar.
I wonder if this means our ad-supported apps will finally make some money.... hmm.
good luck
very good news for android users though.
I am rooting for you, but I hope your understand that if there are pages upon pages of similar apps in the app store, your effort has already been marginalized. Good exposure it good, but it must hit a home run, or you are going to be called out.
Right now, the thought of adding countries is more exciting than not. It's like I'm about to get a second at-bat.
My fear of competition is that I get a competitor who can update features even faster than I can.
Why can I not scroll on that bloody page, do we really need javascript just to scroll down a page? Nice one google.
Anybody know why this took Google so long?
1. Better app discoverability
2. In app purchases
3. More carrier billing
4. Coupons and discounts
I can't even describe what's in an update with this much space.
It's like they want people to create an alternative marketplace or something.
Maybe the motivation came from realizing that if they don't do this fast enough, Amazon could eat the revenue from Android in a lot of countries.