@Justin: That's a very good point Justin. I doubt that Apple will be able to kill off the truly established social sites, however, for two reasons: 1. The Apple social gaming platform seems as if it is going to be fairly limited (leaderboards and chat?). The established social sites offer significantly more than that. Stuff like Achievements, cross-network promotions, facebook integration and virtual goods all have a lot to offer the application developers that Apple do not seem likely to bring to the table anytime soon. 2. The social sites that have already achieved critical mass (e.g., OpenFeint with its 19 million+ registered users) are not going to disappear overnight. Obviously, the Apple platform may well become the default system to use for new applications, but what would make the established developers move to it, if they can be offered better services with a 3rd party system?
I read your comments on the previous thread which went over this subject, so I guess you are pretty much on the DIY side of the on-line scoring fence. As you may guess, I am somewhat on the other side - I'd rather not have to build this, if I can get a deal that saves me work and server expenses. Sadly - as you note - none of these services seem yet to be quite mature for Android. @Rob: You are indeed correct. It sort of gets lost in the information overload of their site, but they do indeed have some plug-in social functionality. It does not appear to be as fully-featured as the dedicated services, but the SDK being an open beta is certainly a huge plus. I shall have to make some time to look at this. OpenFeint hasn't revealed anything about their SDK for Android yet, so... we'll see. From what I've been told, though, Scoreloop also already has the whole downloadable content/in-app purchase system in place - though since their system is apparently in closed Beta, it is hard to say how well that works. And I agree with you - given the complete lack of protection afforded to for-pay apps (and the fact that a large proportion of developers can't even sell apps, even if they wanted to), virtual goods/DLC seems like a viable way to go. I do tend to wonder how virtual goods/DLC interplay with clause 4.5 of the Android Market agreement. Regards, Michael A. -- 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 To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
