Android is listening but still has a way to go

Thank you Google for listening when we told you what we hated about Android.

The whole platform wasn't initially looking very democratic. Firstly the Market place was loaded with applications from a private selection of developers. After a period of no information, suddenly the market was open to everyone. Well everyone who could get access to a physical device.

If you live in the US and you're prepared to sign up to a two year contract with T-Mobile, then you could test your application on a physical device (as you should) and you could view the Market Place. Everyone else could only develop with the emulator and hope for the best when releasing it to the Market Place. Even worse, most developers could not see what other applications were already out there. Maybe that application already existed, maybe with the same name!

Ignoring this potential for conflict, once the app is out in the Market Place, developers can see the rating and the number of comments. What they can't see is the content of the comments (although from what I'm told the content is mostly of a youtube level anyway).

On top of all this, developers have also had to contend with a very buggy interface that sometimes showed incorrect download counts and reset everything when uploading an update.

Thankfully, Google are listening. This past weekend Google started offering unlocked devices for $399 to developers worldwide. I've even noticed the Market Place statistics are a lot more stable. What is really missing now is being able to view the Market Place on the web outside of a T-Mobile device. Hopefully this, along with the ability to charge for apps will be their next move in early Jan 2009.