Developers view: Empty Android shopping bag

We have been very frank in the past about the challenges we have been experiencing with the iTunes App Store, the approval process and we have reported about the great progress Apple Inc. made. In the beginning there was no love lost between Apple and iPhone VoIP apps: We had to wait for weeks to get our FriendCaller VoIP processed and more than one time they were rejected with rather obscure reasons. That changed. iTunes approval is now very fast, and updates to our FriendCaller apps are approved within days even the fact of iPad drastically increasing the approval workload.

Now it is time for developers like us to call on Google Inc. to made improvements to the Android Market. The good news first: There is no approval process, you upload the app and it goes Online in a matter of minutes. The bad news: there is almost nothing else either, the web version of the Android Market provides the feel that it was created on one weekend and then abandoned. It has

• No Web preview, very limited app screen shot space and descriptions
• No complete web store to speak of, a few example for each categories only
• No proper app statistics, demographics etc for developers
• No web review of user comments and ratings or browsing through stores
• Ok, this is my favorite and I believe it is really funny: you can not even search the Android Market web version, believe it or not, yes you can not!

It gets a little better when one visits the market through an Android phone, but only a little. What puzzles us is the question that why the store has been neglected for so long? Google is famous for creating superior products, like think of Analytics, AdWord, Gmail, Google docs, Orkut, etc. Then how come Android Developers are to suffer from the fragmentation of OS version and the lack for common hardware standards like screen resolutions.

Our FriendCaller VoIP Android version is available on the store and still is in BETA. So it is an early effort, but it is very apparent that the Android market place is a way too behind the Apple iTunes store, and it is only able to deliver a small fraction of what iTunes has to offer.

A message to Google: there is some catch up to do on Android Market. As far as developers are concerned, we don’t see much interest developing there, and only see empty shopping bags.

Shabaz

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