Android App Store Market Unveiled, No Phone To Use It…Yet
With all but honest-to-goodness reviews of the first Android phone doing the rounds, it is obviously a good time for Google to reveal their software distribution service.
With a marked resemblance to the App Store, the Android Market will be the place to get your wares, the name placing emphasis on the fact that it is ‘free and open’ rather than a closed shop to sell things to users.
Last time I went to Portobello Market, I saw a stylish beret which was definitely not free so don’t expect it to stay this way forever… The App Market not the beret, obviously.
More interestingly, it will not have a vetting or approval hoop to jump through to put up programs, rather relying on Youtube-style star ratings to push up the good and bury the garbage. A good idea, and one that is already highly effective on the App Store. Less than three stars = probably not worth the extra crashes on my iPhone.
Early adopters will be treated to a beta version of the Android Market (a beta from Google? What a surprise!), allowing downloads of many already completed games, themes and programs, including the winners of the controversial Android Developer Challenge.
An example of the kinds of apps being developed is GoCart, which uses the camera on the phone to read barcodes of products, subsequently searching online shops to acquire the best price for them. Pretty cool, and should be available as soon as they release a phone that can run it! They are definitely benefitting from a release after the App Store, taking on board the criticisms to offer a genuinely useful alternative to Apple’s clinical and money driven success story.
One question, with over ten times as many Windows Mobile apps as iPhone’s miserly thousand or so, where’s their App Store, eh?
