Hi, tero.k...@nokia.com wrote: > But we also need the process and mechanisms to ensure that the > community apps are of good quality. The apps are one of the calling > cards of the community. Also some process to ensure that the people > building on the community OBS do not hog the system or try to do > otherwise bad things in there.
In general, I disagree with the sentiment that we *must* have processes for quality of community apps. The law of averages says we'll have some shit & ome stars, and a big mass of average applications, this is to be expected. What is important is to ensure that there are as many apps as possible, so that you get more stars. And that means a very low barrier to publishing your application. The cream will rise to the top. The Android store has some very basic checks, and applications there are of wildly varying quality. The Apple store has a certification process which appears more like the doorman policy of a cool night-club than a quality checklist - you can come in if your clothes don't colour-clash with the owners. Both these stores share a characteristic: the cream rises to the top. What's absolutely necessary for this is a voting mechanism to rate applications, a way to sort apps by popularity and/or rating, a nice categorisation system that lets you look for function, a good search interface to find apps that fulfill a specific function, and a review mechanism that lets users see what other users think of the app. When I see "Doesn't work", "broken for me" or comments like that on Android apps, it doesn't bother me - I just don't install them. I don't think less of Google for it. To my mind Extras-testing was a blunder for Maemo, because it raised the barrier for app distribution for Maemo developers, and made getting an app into Extras (and keeping it there after updates) into a troublesome chore. I'd like to see MeeGo learn from that experience & make it as easy as possible for developers to get their software into MeeGo users' hands. >>> Because we may still need some distinction between app store >>> downloads, I'm still inclined to name these "Add ons" or >>> "Extras". > Maybe think of the name from the end-user perspective? Those people > will see different stores and then this community place. How to make it > obvious to a user that this place caters community built open > applications. I.e. it is not a store, but you can get useful things from > there. "Community apps" ? Why do we need a distinction? Can't we just have an app store where lots of applications are free? If the goal is to communicate the communitiness/freedom of the applications, perhaps there's another way to do that, but having a separate distribution channel just seems to me to make it less likely that people will go there. Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: dne...@maemo.org Jabber: bo...@jabber.org _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list MeeGo-dev@meego.com http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
