RSSHow the updated Market in Android 1.6 will change everything
By Tim Conneally | Published September 4, 2009, 11:18 AM
Google's App store for the Android mobile operating system is called the Android Market; for nearly a year, it's looked like a beta build. All of the critical elements are in place, but generally with a lack of presentability and polish. It uses a white-on-black color scheme (not good for reflective mobile phone screens); its application profiles lack screenshots, and it features user reviews a little too prominently to be beneficial to sales; the featured apps are little more than the application's logo on the top of the first page; and overall, its navigability is mediocre.
Developers who have recently made their sales figures public blame the Market's unfinished appearance on the overall sluggishness of sales when compared to the multi-million selling iTunes App Store. While I maintain that the two mobile app markets should not be compared (if only for the fact that the iTunes app store evolved out of the six-year old iTunes MP3 shop ecosystem, and all of its progenies have been designed to be mobile app stores from the ground up), Android Market definitely needed to be re-thought.
Yesterday, Google Mobile Platform Program Manager Eric Chu posted a video in the Android Developer's official blog which showed that the Market has been redesigned, and most of the design shortcomings appear to be fixed.
The new features include an easier-to-read black, white, and "Android Green" color scheme, the ability for developers to post app screenshots in the description of their products, and a redesigned classification system which lets the user browse apps in a method more like the iTunes App Store.
Currently, when a user clicks on the Android Market, he is taken to a list where he must choose to start browsing Applications, Games, Search, or "My Downloads." The only apps present are the featured ones that cross the top of the screen in a scrollable marquee. In the new Market, the first page keeps the marquee, but has replaced the list of browsing options with the day's featured apps. The filters for Applications, Games, and My downloads has moved to the top of the screen. It's a much more app-centric use of screen real estate. The apps or games can then be filtered by the top paid and top free in their category; currently, it can only be sorted by the most popular of all time and the most recently added. For repeat users of the Android Market (read: every user) the most popular tag is wholly useless because the same apps have been listed there since the Market opened.
With a more appealing design, more ways to show off apps to users, and improved filtering, the new Market gives developers better tools to sell their wares.
The new Android Market will be packaged with Android 1.6 (a.k.a., "Donut"), which currently has no clear date of availability. Though there have been rumors that Donut will not be supported on the currently available Android devices (G1, myTouch3G), curious users can still experience some of the features that will come with the update. The Cyanogen mod on rooted G1s, for example, is built on the Cupcake 1.5r3 build, but includes parts of the Donut tree that are currently available, such as the homescreen settings widget, the "app fuel gauge" and the power widget, and support for PPTP/L2TP VPNs and WPA Enterprise support.
As cyanogen himself said on Twitter yesterday, "Remember.. 1.6 is a minor upgrade. Some really good stuff, but this isn't going to steal your wife or wash your car. Eclair maybe :)"
For users it may be a minor upgrade, but with the improvements to the Market, this will be an absolutely major release for the Android ecosystem.
Microsoft will kick Apple and Google's arses within 5-10 yrs with Windows Mobile and ultimately unified desktop & mobile Windows (like they did unify the home & biz markets with WinXP). Apple & Google have no CLUE what it takes to make developers happy long term (devs dictate prices and have total overall control and awesomest dev tools saving them time and reusing common libs/functionality).
So yeah, Apple came up with a nice market place for apps (& music) while Microsoft took the path of "let the software win attention on its own merit" when it came to Windows software. But I'm sure MS took a few notes on how to better market a complete-package-A-to-Z on newer ultra mobile devices (phones & media players) and will, as always, beat Apple and Google with brute force of sprinkled $'s all over the place... Just like the Xbox is subsidized, just like the iPhone is subsidized by AT&T, then future MS-made devices will be subsidized both by the OS manufacturer (MS) and the carrier, knowing full well an average person will buy X amount of songs/programs off the market place to increase overall profitablity in that segment. Software will run both on desktop and mobile device, hence -- a better deal.
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|Hey, I'm with you 100%, man! Yeah, I totally think Microsoft will kick trapple and gorgle in the butts! Its like they did with in the MP3 player market man. Sure, Trapple got a head start with them iPods, but then they got totally owned by Microsoft's Zune.
Sure the first Zune's left something to desire, but the new ones are so totally better, man. Microsoft even put 'HD' in the name, so you just KNOW that Microsoft is just months away from world dominance.
And besides, Microsoft is a better.... hello? Hello...?! Hello?! Wait, come back..!
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|I guess someone didn't appreciate sarcasm and voted you down. They had to add HD to the Zune name since the rest of the players are being discontinued. I wouldn't be surprised if they have Turbo versions soon.
The Android Market may get better but Google hardly seems organised in a way that will hurt Apple. The same speaks for Nokia and likely, Microsoft, as far as mobile stores go. It's the integrated, easy to use application that makes all the difference, not just for the initial sale, but for updates.
If Google can put real ease of use into their product, they'll have a winner.
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|The Kiddies here don't seem to know computer history.
People seem to forget that things like Microsoft Word/Office were the Zune of the 80s and early 90s. Where does it rank today?
They also forget product markets like consoles and the XBox that was to have no chance against Sony, and now the PS3 is far behind the XBox 360 in sales and technology.
In the 80s Mac and Apple were the defacto standard bearer of the consumer GUI OS markets, and in the period of about 2 years in the early 1990s, Windows crushed their GUI dominance.
The thing most kiddies don't know is that Micorsoft Windows won in the 90s because of DEVELOPMENT TOOLS and there is one thing Microsoft STILL does better than anyone, and that is development tools, platforms, and bare compiler technology.
Windows Mobile and an 'app' store is a tricky thing, but things that a lot of kiddies again don't realize is that Windows Mobile Phones have more features than Android or the iPhone (like they can multi-task) and have had people developing specifically for this platform for over 10 years, it just never had a 'consumer' aspect to the market. (i.e. You will see your cable techs and shipping companies and doctors and tons of other industries using Windows Mobile devices with custom software everywhere, doing things Android and the iPhone were never designed to do nor are capable of doing.)
So Microsoft already has a larger developer base for Windows Mobile, they just need a good store and consumer access model so people can buy the apps in a cute one stop location, they already have the developers and the apps.
Heck even look at Vista, and the horrible press it got, a couple of years later and people that hated Vista and Microsoft are drooling over Windows7.
Apple can't hold the market with clever 'marketing', people eventually pierce the vail of the marketing, and Apple has NO technologies on the table or upcoming that are even in the realm of what Microsoft is doing.
Trick here is not to under estimate Microsoft, EVER...
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|keep dreaming. Microsoft will keep copying and failing. The game has changed, and not how Microsoft wanted it to. They are trying again with their proprietary Silverturd, but most people are smart enough to avoid that trap.
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|What was there to declare article "will change everything". Usesless. I thought it must be having some unique information like beating App store, revolutionizing android.
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|What's new basically everything Google does is unfinished and unpolished.
How did Google grow so big with so much crap?
But yet people still use their unfinished unpolished crap.
Now with Bing out perhaps it will give their search engine a run for there money.
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|Agreed. I just tried Google Apps premier, and I can't believe 1 million companies use that POS for their work product. Gmail is OK, I guess, but all the other portions are quite unfinished and I can't imagine any but the smallest business getting by on the tools provided.
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|Probably the vast majority of Google Apps users (like myself) are using Gmail for domains... Google Docs is pretty cool but I personally still prefer the real thing (Word & Excel).
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|At home i use Google Docs for everything I need. At work, i just started a project to use the Confluence Wiki and start phasing out Word and the crappy Sharepoint from all our technical documentation. a Wiki is so much better than the super expensive proprietary Microsoft Word.
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|Why is it everything Google does will "change everything?" Let's get real and leave the hyperbole at home for a change.
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|Don't you believe it? i say that it will equal the sales volume of iTunes in 2011... NOT.
Let's say now Android has a better market, or a good market... and? it still has sold 1:10000000000 devices compared to iPhones and it ain't going to go much better than that...
Betanews, please be moderate.
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