If there’s anything I’ve learned in my almost-five years of tech blogging, it’s to never believe that we’ve exhausted the capabilities of any technology prematurely. There have been so many instances where it appeared that we’d found all the uses for one particular aspect, only to find out that there’s so much more we can do with it. I’m not sure anyone particularly thinks that we’ve exhausted touchscreen functions, but it does seem that we’ve reached a comfort level with them. But thanks to some work by folks at Carnegie Mellon, we might see touchscreen, and therefore smartphone, functionality take another step forward.
Read the rest of Don’t think touchscreen innovation is over…
Earlier this week, in checking Phandroid, I noticed the following item. Apparently, Google has trashed the Just In section from the Android Market. I hadn’t noticed myself, because I hadn’t checked the Just In section for months. Apparently developers aren’t too happy about this, as it’s one way they can stand out from the larger, more prominent app developers. But in my experience the Just In section isn’t useful at all, and I can’t imagine developers get much traffic from it.
Read the rest of Do you ever check the “Just In” section of the Android Market?…
If you want to get paid for your apps, don’t give them away for free. There’s nothing remotely controversial about that statement, yet it’s the overriding theme in the most recent developer outcry regarding the Amazon App Store.
To ensure everyone’s on the same page: Amazon recently opened its own Android app store, which puts more of a focus on paid applications rather than free ones. Since the Android Market is already pre-installed on new Android handsets, Amazon has had to promote the store heavily. One way it has done this is with a free app of the day, in which they give away a normally premium app for 24 hours. That’s a great deal for them, but developers should know by now that it’s not all that hot for them.
Read the rest of Lessons learned from Shift Jelly’s Amazon App Store experience…
If there is one rule for getting people to pay for something, it’s to make the process as simple as possible. The fewer steps people have to take, and the less they have to think, the easier it is to sell them something. Android took the first steps towards ease of payments when it introduced carrier billing to the Android Market. You don’t have to enter your credit card or any other form of payment. The cost just shows up on your cell bill, which, if you’re like most people, you just pay without examining anyway. Now they’ve implemented another way to separate users from their money: in-app billing.
Read the rest of Separating you from your dollars: In-app billing in Android Market…
If you’re looking for a look for a comprehensive Android year in review, you might want to check out tomorrow evening’s MOTODEV podcast. It’s a live event hosted by Randy Ksar and Nicole McMorran of Motorola, and they’ll dive into 2010 in terms of Android. This includes developer news, new apps, announcements, and news. They’ll have a number of guests, including representatives from Adobe, PayPal, and Foursquare. The podcast runs tomorrow evening, December 16, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Time (8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern), and you can listen for free. Just go register for the MOTODEV podcast here, and then tune in tomorrow. It promises to be an informative and entertaining hour.
In order to succeed, the old adage goes, you have to be either first or best. But with so many different types of apps in the market, and since the market has been around for a while now, the opportunity to be first has, for the most part, passed. There’s still room to be the best, but some developers are trying to take shortcuts. Take this example we saw last month, wherein a developer admitted to spamming the Market with mostly useless apps.
Read the rest of Making money in the Android Market…
Over the weekend news of the Cease & Desist from Google to Steve Kondik AKA Cyanogen over his popular Android Mods raised concerns about how open Android is.
In summation Google openly allows modifications to Android as well rooting of phones with Android on them but providing non-Android Google proprietary applications such as YouTube, GMail, GTalk, etc in Android modifications publicly is not allowed due to relatively loose manufacturer & carrier agreements.
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Google has initiated what it terms as an experiment with select universities & colleges as they give away free Android phones to students in Computer Science courses.
Each school will get 20 HTC Android phones according to The Wired Campus but it did not clarify if these would be And Dev 1 G1 Dream phones or possibly Google Ion Magic phones.
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Android continues to build momentum by making life easier for developers and possibly converting a rival mobile OS Symbian backer Nokia to contemplate switching to Android phones.
Google has provided an NDK (Native Development Kit) on top of the Android SDK to allow developers to code natively in such languages as C & C++ thus allowing faster & higher performing Android applications.
Read the rest of Developers Embracing Android As the Future of Mobile – Will Nokia?…
