The problem is that it's a naieve system that only works when all developers are considered equal.
Once you get into dealing with brand names the system falls apart and it also isn't helped by the fact that as Market lists apps ranked by popularity by default thus helping popular apps stay popular and other less popular apps have a small window in which they're shown to the user. To try and alieviate this AndAppStore switched to a popularity chart which covers the last 7 days only, at least that way apps have to maintain popularity as opposed to just clocking up the numbers. Al. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mariano Kamp To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2009 12:49 PM Subject: [android-discuss] Re: G1 failing miserably.. I think you can only write better apps and hope that they overtake the bad apps. That's how the rating system is supposed to work, no? Maybe at some point in time the Android Market will take the more recent history of comments/ratings into account with a higher rating and will help to dethrone the (buggy) incumbents. Yeah, this is dreamy, but everything else will fail anyway. On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Al Sutton <[email protected]> wrote: My concern is that the the Camera is a "built-in" app, Weather channel app is *the* number #1 app in terms of popularity in Market, and snake is the number #5 game by popularity, and all three throw up errors like this which will make the *average user* feel that Android is flaky by association. I am a developer, I can understand how things like this can happen, but this is not a developer-only product we're talking about. This is something that is aiming to be as popular as possible and used by everyone from kids to pensioners. So maybe the discussion should be; What do we do? Do we name and shame apps to try and get them improved? Do we look at improving the OS to deal with situations like this in a better manner that doesn't require users to be shown error messages they may not understand?, or do we carry on with the current system where we expect users to educate themselves to deal with problems like this? To me the last one isn't part of the path to success. Al. --- * Written an Android App? - List it at http://andappstore.com/ * ====== Funky Android Limited is registered in England & Wales with the company number 6741909. The registered head office is Kemp House, 152-160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, UK. The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not necessarily those of Funky Android Limited, it's associates, or it's subsidiaries. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mariano Kamp Sent: 12 April 2009 11:38 To: [email protected] Subject: [android-discuss] Re: G1 failing miserably.. This guy is a developer, and an Android developer on top of that, himself. So he is not trying to understand what the dialogs mean. He knows. So he seems to be publicly shaming apps for not being up to the expected standards (long running operations on the UI thread, forced closes) – and by association, the platform. On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Pd <[email protected]> wrote: Al, My curiosity got the better of me so I've just downloaded the Weather Channel app to see if I could re-create the problem Eric saw. Sadly I did. With the weather channel app I saw the force close dialog when the app was accessing the Internet for a weather update. I think the problem may be that the Activity is waiting for data from the call for new weather data. I guess the way around it would be to put all networking calls in a service and poll for data when required by the UI Activity. This way the UI doesn't have to hang around for a reply and the service can update the UI when data is ready. Sort of fire and forget. For user friendliness I would put a "Loading data, please wait!" type message in the tab which gets replaced with data when retrieved by the service. Then again I could be miles off the mark ;-) Pd. Al Sutton wrote: > http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2009/04/11/android-hall-of-shame/ > > Not a happy user, any ideas on what would cause this and how to fix it? > > Al. > > --- > > * Written an Android App? - List it at http://andappstore.com/ * > > ====== > Funky Android Limited is registered in England & Wales with the > company number 6741909. The registered head office is Kemp House, > 152-160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, UK. > > The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not > necessarily those of Funky Android Limited, it's associates, or it's > subsidiaries. > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
