Android: Some Progress and App Store Analysis
Well the G1 developer phone arrived the day after my last post. Right away I spotted that the fonts for the geocoder activity were too small. I have fixed this now. I have a few apps in the pipeline (not least of which is the Simple Weather app mentioned in previous posts). No sign of them being the finished article yet. I am now struggling with InkScape in an effort to create some icons. I admit I am no artist which is quite frustrating as I want to make anything I put on the app store as polished as possible.
For those of you without a phone it’s now possible to view the app store at this site.
There was quite a lot of speculation when Android was announced that Google would build in some sort of advert delivering mechanism. To their credit this hasn’t happened (yet). It may be that Motorola, or many of the other phone manufacturers with a phone in development, fancy themselves as the next Google of the mobile phone world. Could it work? I guess it’s possible to put a subsidised phone in the hands of consumers and make them watch an advert every time they wanted to send an SMS. If we think that the new phone market is driven by a young demographic then I can’t see any one from that particular group putting up with the scorn of his/her peers when they pull out an ad-subsidised phone from their pocket. Not only that but if the providers think they are losing revenue from unlocked phones at the moment then wait until they are giving expensive ad-based smartphones away and watch their revenues drop from the frenzy of unlocking that ensues. It’s just not going to happen.
So that leave the applications themselves. Will an ad-supported application work? The model on the Apple store is ‘lite’ ad-free apps and full blown paid-for versions. This clearly works after a fashion. I guess you can’t knock folk for trying though. That’s the nature of game, get yourself into the cracks and exploit them. I just don’t think it will last.
Other news…
Lots of snow in the UK this week which has seen the hits on gTraffic jump up a ridiculous amount. I hope it was of some use to people to find out what was going on. Traffic England have a new site in beta at the moment here. They are using maps from what was Map24. They seem to by owned by Navteq now. I had a play about with their mapping control ages ago but have not looked at it in a long time. Not really fair to pass comment on the map API now as I assume the version I used has long been debugged and upgraded.
Next post I hope will be the news that I have at last put something up on the Android Market for the ridicule of the G1-owning public.
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