Sadly, this is exactly the issue that having no approval process on the market is going to generate... bad publicity for Android at large. BlinkTag, you may be the best developer in the world.. your app may be fantastic, but this one really bad design flaw is causing your app, and possibly future apps, to be looked at badly by not only users that would use your app, but other users who see your app flooding the market list. The others here have said this is bad.. and it is. Your app itself may be very good, but the flaw in the design of including the data for each app instead of simply pulling it down over the net and using only a single app is enough of a seriouis flaw that other developers will also commit that may add fuel to the fire for apple fanboys and those that feel android is too loose and not going to succeed. This is exactly what fanboy sites and other media outlets that are comparing android to apple will love to find and cast doubt on Android as a platform for.
I don't mean to say your app alone would do this, like I said your app is probably fantastic. It's the openness of this platform, the ability to spam an app with just a minute change 120 times that will cast doubt in the success of the market. If I have to scroll thru 120 apps all the same before I get to some other apps I might like, I've already stopped. I feel really bad for any apps that may show up below yours, they will never be seen again without a specific search for them. This is unfortunate for them, and more so shows why there needs to be a better way to categorize and/or find apps on the market. There needs to be some way to drill down further to avoid situations like this if this market is going to remain completely open as it is now. This has been possibly my biggest fear for Android. Being that it is Java, and there are hundreds of thousands of new java engineers who see Android as their ticket to millions yet have little knowledge of the language, the platform, or Android and it's more restricted apis... it's going to be this sort of playground for anyone who wants to pay $25 and put up any app they want. On this forum alone there are daily "where do I learn Java.. I am new to java and Android.." and while I welcome new developers.. I fear that the majority of them spend a few hours reading a couple things, slap something together and put it up on the market hoping to make money, or at least some sort of recognition. I am surprised we don't have 50,000 apps already on the market, but I am sure we'll reach it soon enough, mostly apps that do almost nothing or do something similar to other apps. It also makes it more difficult again because of the lack of ways to really find good apps, when a flood of new apps arrive, other apps move further down in the list of apps to scroll thru and unless you know it by name, you're SOL in finding potentially good apps. For the developers that hope to make a living on this.. they are SOL becuase of the inability for most users to spend more than a few seconds scrolling before we get tired of doing so. The same reason why users leave web pages after a few seconds. We're an impatient bunch and scrolling thru 100's of apps is not our idea of fun to hopefully find that one good app. I hope the android team can make a better Market app, so that we can search by ratings, authors, more drill down on specific types of apps/games, etc. It would be great to find 4 and 5 star apps that have been downloaded 50,000 or more times for example. Show me a list of those. Give us an advanced query page that we can specify min/max downloads, min/max price, min/max stars, etc. That would be fantastic for all parties involved. Great apps with 4/5 stars and lots of downloads could easily be listed. Heck, make it so that in the Market we can program a "favorites" list of queries, so we can every week just select a query favorite, and see what new apps show up that have either shot up the list of ratings, or what have you. This has GOT to be easy to do. It's just data that you filter on and a few extra screens. I can't see why this is so difficult. Anyway, sorry, I am still learning Android, and mind you, I've been working within Java for 10 years and have a good understanding of Android (most of it anyway) and I am far from releasing any app because I want it to be solid, handle all the situations, etc before I just put it up in hopes of making money. There are definitely apps like that out there, but with the advent of $1 apps, comes the rush to put 50 different apps out each month, hoping that each will make a little money and combined make a ton. I wish more of the younger group of android developers that think of iFart on iPhone making millions would understand that that is such a rare scenario even on iPhone, and that a lot of thought in design and implementation along with heavy testing should be done for a period of time before releasing anything at all. On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:33 PM, JP <joachim.pfeif...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Jan 26, 12:29 pm, Frank Weiss <fewe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Scenario: In the San Francisco Bay area, there are about four or more > > transit agencies of interest. > > Exactly. Check out TransiCast to see how to do this right. Location > based queries for stops, routes and departures for BART, SFMTA, > Caltrain (and a bunch more elsewhere) in a single app. The > corresponding apk has around 200K file size. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<android-developers%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
