Posts Tagged ‘app’

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The power of the community

May 14th, 2010

I talked to Mint.com about their Android App before it was released a couple of weeks ago.  Even though they developed for the iPhone first, they had a lot of positive things to say about Android:  Development is easier, less restrictive, and more community-supported.

After actually launching their app, they have already issued version 1.2 thanks to all the user feedback they got.  In case you missed my review on Betanews, Mint is a personal budgeting app that accesses all your online banking records, investments, and lines of credit and gives you a live snapshot of your finances and where you stand in your budget.  It doesn’t allow transactions to be made, so it’s a bit safer than some of your regular banking apps.

Version 1.2 has 1.2 in response to user feedback.  The new version of Mint for Android allows users to view their financial data in landscape mode, it now works with hardware keyboards (including Shape Writer,) it
enables widget viewing in a 4×1 area, and  offers improved categorization and cleaner refreshing.

Once you get over the initial skepticism of putting all your financial records into Mint, you find that it’s a really handy app.  I find myself using the live folder of my recent transactions very often.  It’s the first time I’ve really put live folders to good use.

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iPhone Bashing

March 15th, 2010

Tim Bray has joined the Android team at Google, so get used to him speaking for the platform.

The 55 year old co-creator of the XML standard left Sun and picked up at Google this week, and explained in his blog some of the reasons why he chose Google over a company like Apple.

In short, he thinks Android is the place to be, and had this to say about the iPhone:

“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.”

I don’t think I’m alone in giving this a big round of applause.

“Sterile” …what a good word to describe iPhone.

I too am a daily Mac user who has absolutely no interest in the iPhone. It’s simply not exciting (the goddamn iPad just serves to remind me how boring the platform is) despite the elegant hardware and snappy interface. It’s so uniform and uninspiring and STERILE. Nobody goes “Wow, is that an iPhone?” anymore. Nobody. Because once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, and they’ve been the same for three years now.

My peer group is increasingly being overtaken by Android devices, and any time someone pulls out their phone, there’s a conversation between them about different facets of the platform, UIs, apps, and future developments. It’s a more inclusive environment not only to OEMs and developers, but also to users.

It’s funny that ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn said “This beat is about to get a lot more fun” now that Tim Bray is involved, because I always thought it was the most exciting area in all of mobile technology.

Maybe it just takes someone of his stature to make people believe it.

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Posted in Android, Google

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I’m not visually impaired, what’s TalkBack good for?

December 12th, 2009

When we first saw Android 1.6 (donut) long long ago, we heard about the accessibility features afforded by the text-to-speech engine made by SVOX.  By default, your donut device doesn’t have the speech libraries loaded, and you have to add them yourself.  Eclair-based devices such as the Motorola Droid, however, come with the speech function fully loaded and ready to rock.

To turn it on, go to Menu> settings > accessibility, click on the “accessibility” checkbox, and then click on the “TalkBack” checkbox.  A warning box pops up telling you that it will read things such as credit card numbers aloud and that it “may be able to collect the data you type, ” so be careful..

When you have TalkBack turned on, all it really does is verbally tell you where you are, such as the home screen, sub-menus or URLs.  It also reads pop-up messages and warnings, but that’s the limit of it.

But I started thinking the other day that maybe TalkBack could come in handy if I could highlight text and have it read aloud, sort of like what you can do on many Kindle books, and what you can do with Speech in OS X.   Since I have to edit other people’s documents for work, I’m always using speech.  I even have a macro set up to highlight all text in this one field and automatically launch the voice reader.  So yeah, I thought it would be cool to have TalkBack read my Google News or Techmeme headlines to me as I’m driving or walking the dog or something.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution that doesn’t require the installation of another application.  I try to highlight and copy text with menu-e on the Droid, which then copies my selection to the clipboard.  But then I have no access to the clipboard to read my selection.

So what the hell…I downloaded Talking RSS Reader by Google Engineer Stephanie Doyon, which integrates with Google Reader.   It doesn’t use the nice built-in Android reader voice, but the Linux text-to-speech voice which I now equate with the dumb smiley face on the OLPC “Speak” program.  I got my niece an XO-1 for Christmas last year, and she spent quite a lot of time playing with the Speak app, making it just go “fhfhahfhfhehehehehnfmsisisisioep” and such…over and over and over.

"fhfhaeieieuwysofifio!"

This is the guy I picture reading my RSS feeds in Talking RSS Reader. Or more accurately, I picture him reading every single bit of text in every article in my feed in order.  When you use this app, half of the time it’s going to be saying things like “image link, image link, image link,  image link, image link”  and other such useless info that I don’t want to hear. It’s the worst in blogs because it reads all the usernames, link names, comments, and stuff.   Talking RSS reader is free and alright, but it’s better for reading the full text of articles in sequential order rather than just reading headlines.  I want something that will just speak all the headlines to me in a clear voice, and have speech recognition so I can say something like “read that one!” and it will stop its listing and drill down into the article I chose.  That kind of app would be awesome for commuters, and I guess I have to continue my search.

Talking RSS reader crashed on me quite a few times when I was playing with it, but it didn’t ever throw up an error message.  The app just silently closed, which I guess is kind of less annoying, but still bad.  I won’t uninstall this yet, as I intend to use it in the car, but it’s really not quite what I had in mind.

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Posted in Android, Apps

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Android/Google backlash? Calm down.

September 26th, 2009

I’m coming from a casual/moderate open source user’s perspective with a question:

Are all serious FOSS advocates high strung ninnies?

In my career as a journalist, I’ve encountered more haywire open source reactionaries than I’d like to deal with, and I’ve really begun to regard the whole group as a bunch of paranoid freaks.

There’s this ideology that turns into a stouthearted set of beliefs that gets in the way of logical discourse. I liken it to political radicals who call everyone who isn’t throwing molotov cocktails at the police a “fascist sympathizer.”

What am I talking about here? If you’re an Android fan, you know Cyanogen. It’s a modded Android ROM which has basically been feeding the public all of Google’s software updates before Google has had a chance to officially release them to the public. Google has finally issued a cease and desist warning to Cyanogen’s developer –also going by the moniker Cyanogen– that he has to cut it out because he’s distributing stuff not included in the open source licensing. As Google said yesterday in its blog, “Unauthorized distribution of this software harms us just like it would any other business, even if it’s done with the best of intentions.”

Suddenly the open source reactionaries cry foul and mobilize a boycott of Android. To quote Phandroid’s article yesterday: “Google is basically moving the modding community from doing their work in the light to doing their work in the dark. Forget about getting ROMs on XDA-DEVS… Android builds are about to become torrents and warez.”

*sigh*

Can we please be civilized? I mean, you shouldn’t be surprised, Android has never been purely open source. Since it was first released last October, it has been a kind of hybrid licensing structure. There is the public development branch under the Apache 2.0 license and then stuff which is considered Google’s intellectual property which must be licensed out… I don’t know how minute the stuff that must be licensed is, and judging by the confusion of the community, the two may be too closely interwoven for many to discern where one ends and the other begins.

One commenter wrote: “The phones that are running Cyanogen’s ROMs ALREADY HAD THE GOOGLE APPS.”

However true this may have been in the past, in this case it is abundantly clear what the problem is. Cyanogen included the updated Android Market in his mod, which is fundamentally different from the app already on everybody’s phones, clearly crossing the line. In other words, the C&D is about Cyanogen distributing a closed-source app and not modding the Android platform.

What the community is getting upset over is that just because Google releases a free Android app, it does not mean it’s Free and Open Source. I’ve seen this throughout the message board commentary over the last few days. People assume that because YouTube, Gmail, Google Sync are not FOSS, that Android is now completely ruined.

The modding community is pissed because they now think this means they have access to basically none of Google’s awesome services, and HTC Sense and Motorola’s MOTOBLUR are illegal, and now they’re all abandoning the platform as tainted by corporate greed.

Now, I don’t know the ins and outs of the licensing structure, but it’s obvious that this reaction was way out of hand. I suggest we all sit down, pull the black bandannas off our faces and turn the talk about boycotts and protests into talk about what can and cannot be done with Android.

We don’t need Cyanogen to be a martyr for an insurrection.

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Posted in Android, Lifestyle

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SequencePad 1.0: MIDI for Android

September 17th, 2009

We still have a long way to go until Android has a significant number of music creation apps for creative types to choose from. It’s only a matter of time, sure…but things right now are a bit scant, so when a new music app comes along, I don’t hesitate to pick it up and give it a run through.

SequencePad (Skyarts), a 4-track general MIDI sequencer is available for ¥250 in the Android Market right now. If you work with MIDI, it makes a decent song sketchpad and supposedly exports sequences as .mid files which, as you know, can be edited in any number of desktop music suite, I personally use Logic Studio and FruityLoops.

However, I cannot guarantee that this app actually does export .mid files, because the simple fact is:

IT’S THE CRASHIEST APP I’VE EVER USED, and I never got far enough to find out if I could save as .mid.

Now I don’t think I’m unjustified in calling this app “crashy as fuck”, but SequencePad doesn’t just force close a lot (I can understand it to a point, it happens…that is something I’m used to), but this app would just turn my screen black and go completely unresponsive for 3-5 minutes. I had to fully reboot my phone three times in the course of reviewing it, and the worst part about it is that this fatal crash occurs when you want to exit the app. You’re not provided with a quit or close button, so you can either try to hit “back” or “home” and the result is the same: total unresponsiveness.

That’s not to say the app isn’t worth picking up, though. I mean, you really don’t have much of a choice if you’re an Android-using musician. You get every app at this point, support the developers, submit useful bug reports, and hope for updates.

On to what SequencePad can actually do.

The main sequence screen

The main sequence screen

There are a couple of very dumb things about the sequencing screen.  Each vertical line is a note in the scale and each horizontal line is one beat.  The red dots are notes that I’ve placed.   Down the right hand side, you see the numbers 1-4, and in the lower right hand corner, an arrow pointing down?  That’s SequencePad’s way of fitting in 8 beats.  On the first screen, you’ve got your first half, and then you click the down arrow to switch to the second half of the phrase on the second screen.

That’s not the dumb part.

The dumb part is that you can’t put a note on the ONE beat at the very top!!!  you have to start either on the upbeat or on the TWO.  See how the screen actually has space for five beats?  yeah…it doesn’t make any fucking sense.  You actually have to start playing the track to figure out where the downbeat is.  And there’s no metronome function to simply and clearly show you where to start.

If you like general MIDI and its familiar palette of 128 sounds and sixteen assignable drumkit slots, you’re fully covered.

Ah, Bird Tweet. The most useless MIDI sound ever.

Ah, Bird Tweet. The most useless MIDI sound ever.

There are four tracks of general MIDI instruments which can be either “tones” or “rhythm.”  The red number one in the picture above means i’m on track 1, and the purple button with the tools to the right of it lets me switch between sounds.  To switch tracks, you just push the number button in the middle and choose your track.

The compositional aspect of this app is intuitive and should feel familiar to experienced musicians. You can listen to a track individually, or with the rest of them at the same time, and you can alter the tempo with the metronome button.  The only thing I haven’t figured out (besides how to export .mid files) is how to sustain a note.  As far as I can tell, this app only allows one note at a time per four tracks.  That is, you can’t plonk down four tracks worth of sustained piano notes complete with overlaps.  If you can, I still haven’t figured out how.

This might be because the instructions are in pure Zero Wing Engrish.

“Edit Phrase Screen:  When it touches the measure eye part, the demiquaver can be added.  When it touches an existing note, it is possible to erase it.  However, harmony cannot be used.”

Okay, I sort of get what it’s saying, and let me respond by posing this question:

How perpetual notes? User cannot creation tone which have timbre and echoing over formerly stricken sound, and resulting phrase have redolence of Sierra On-Line vintage King’s Quest MIDI beeps.  Please to instruct.

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Google Fast Flip: I gripe about Web Apps

September 15th, 2009

Note: I originally wrote this here, but I got assigned the same topic at Betanews, so in my haste, I submitted this same blog post (although edited and re-tooled to omit four letter words and tone down a bit of the personal spin) to Betanews this morning. I hope you don’t feel cheated. I’ll do another one tonight.

Call me crazy, but aren’t Web apps just a kind of reversion back to the “Mobile Web” that was so furiously chastised when the full Web browsing experience came to smartphones?

I understand that our modern Web Apps are being rendered by a “desktop browser” engine, and not some junky WAP browser circa 2002, but I can’t help but feel that an application designed specifically for a mobile phone’s browser is the same goddamn thing as a Web site stripped down to Mobile Web size.

Google debuted the Fast Flip lab last night and it has thus far been received with moderate acclaim. The improved ad coverage and revenue sharing with publishers has been widely cited as a step forward. But what is Fast Flip and why would I give a single shit about it?

Well, it’s another news aggregator. It takes the top 30 headlining stories and arranges them as if you were reading a magazine with one story per page. You should care because a major aspect of this lab is the mobile component that allows Android and iPhone users to leaf through articles with a swipe of the finger. But really, that’s just about all there is to it.

Fast Flip Web App front page

Fast Flip Web App front page


The main page frankly looks like ass, and the text is too small by default; so when I go to look at “Sci/Tech” headlines, I keep accidentally hitting “Entertainment” and having to look at TMZ or something equally inane for a second.

There’s also a search field which lets you look for subjects of interest to you by keyword. One cool thing is that the search field has a built-in X button, so you can erase former searches or typos with a single button smash. That will come in pretty handy when trying to type in someone’s name and it autocompletes it as something else. My buddy from high school yesterday was trying to type in Swiss tennis player “Roger Federer” and it kept auto-correcting it to “Roger Desertes.”

I don’t know when “desertes” became something people really need to type either…but I blame them for Federer’s loss at the U.S. Open.

Once you’re in your chosen category, it’s pretty cool. You swipe your finger from right to left to flip to the next page overview. If the article looks interesting to you, you tap on it and an abstract pops up which asks if you want to view the full article, zoom in, or close the abstract.

abstract popup

abstract popup

You’re also given the option to “like” a story, adds a smiley face to the upper right hand corner and logs it into a profile for stories it will suggest later, sort of like when you give certain songs the thumbs up in Pandora and then you hear them 900 times a day. If you’re logged into your Gmail/Google account, you can also hit “email” and it’ll send a screenshot of the article to whatever email address you input.

Taking a hearty cue from Twitter, Fast Flip also has a trending topics category based on most commonly searched terms. Last night, there were some kinda fucked up ones in there, so I’m pulling it up right now and seeing what the trends are in Googleland.

Just as I expected…people are searching for Health Insurance, Bankruptcy, jobs, 9/11, cancer, abortion, Yankees, and Sarah Palin.

It’s all the depressing stuff the news is good for.

But the point here, albeit a rather blunt one, is that Web apps like Fast Flip, no matter how good, lack the hard key action of dedicated applications. All your controls are situated within the browser window, and if I hit “menu,” which is typically the master control switch for Android apps, I just get the browser’s controls, nothing specifically tailored to Google Fast Flip, or any Web App, for that matter.

Web Apps still feel like a hollow shell to me.

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Uh oh…how do I organize these widgets?

September 9th, 2009

The problem of widget disorganization in Android has been approaching for some time. Now that many of the most popular apps come with widgets, I’m really beginning to feel the clutter on my homescreen. With today’s release of the official Pandora app and yesterday’s release of the official Facebook app, I now have two more medium/large widgets to deal with, and some reorganization to consider.

Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska

Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska


I’ve reached the point where things have gotten ugly. With traditional icon-based apps, I can at least do a cohesive theme where everything is the same size and color and it matches the background. With non-themed widgets, though…I’m kind of at the mercy of the app’s designer.

Fortunately, I can add up to 7 more homescreens with Open Home, but anyone who’s dealt with a pack-rat will tell you that giving a hoarder more space doesn’t solve any problems, it just makes them harder to tackle.

I wouldn’t call myself a “widget hoarder,” but let’s see. In my “Add to Home Screen > Widgets” folder, I currently have: Analog Clock, Calendar, Facebook, Music, Open Home Big Analog Clock, Open Home Music, Open Home Setting Widget, Open Home Weather, Pandora, Picture Frame, Search, Tiny Clock Widget 2, Twidget Lite, Voice Text, Voicemail+ Large/Small, Weather Large/Small/Tiny, Weather Channel WxWidget Large/Small.

Do I really need SIX different weather widgets and three clocks? Not really, but you sometimes need to compare to get the best looking widgets that also provide the best results, plus it’s really only three in multiple sizes. The WxWidget actually isn’t my cup of tea, though it’s a super popular and handy app with more in-depth updates and alerts, but the Weather Widget by Lock2 is 100% better looking and gets the job done (I believe it’s designed after HTC Sense’s weather widget). It’s free too, but I highly advise floating a donation their way if you’ve got some change to spare.

Before I can even begin to think about organizing anything, I have to have a deep philosophical “chicken or egg” discussion with myself: Do services gain homescreen position because I use them more, or do I use them more because they’re on my homescreen? My homescreen is usually a bit of both. I use the weather widget a lot mostly because it’s there, not because I always care about the weather. Shazam is an app icon I feel like I always need on my homescreen, but I don’t use it nearly as much as, say, the Google Search bar, which I have relegated to a secondary screen. But really, I’ve started to feel like I don’t need app shortcuts any more with the way things are going. Everything I use pretty much resides in the “side drawer.”

It’s times like this that I wish there was a Widget “snap to” program, or a position randomizer, where I could just hit a button and have the widgets fit to a grid on my screen and I could decide if I liked it or not.

New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite

New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite

Because I prefer an uncluttered layout, I’ve switched to a five-screen layout where each screen serves a different purpose. The main screen has weather and calendar, the “music screen” has the Mp3 player and Pandora, the “feed screen” has Twitter and Facebook, the “utility screen” which right now only has the settings widget, and the “Google screen” only has the search widget right now, but anticipates the arrival of new homescreen toys from Google.

It’ll get the job done for now, but more widgets=more processes which ultimately means slowness. It’s running acceptably now, but we’ll see how things get bogged down in the real world. This is something we need to think about as Android users, since the elegant use of widgets is helping to make Android both stand out above icon-based smartphone interfaces, and run more efficiently for the user.

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Let’s just fingerpaint already.

September 5th, 2009

Paint programs.  They’re as old as graphical computers themselves, and one of my all-time loves.  As a formerly aspiring artist (ages 1-18,)  I spent much of my youth perfecting my paint program techniques through various interfaces:  joysticks, mice, trackballs, tablets, whatever I could get my hands on, really. Yet as I write this, I only now realize that I’ve never used a light pen. Damn, you know, I’d really like to.

Anyway, I’ve drawn on computers for a long long time in an amateur/enthusiast’s capacity, and I’ve left tracks all over this silly Internet thing. Some really vile tracks, quite intentionally vile, might I add.

See, for some reason I went through a phase where I’d draw grotesque and bizarre scenes in MS Paint on my friends’ computers, and make those pictures their wallpaper. Giant green phalluses…exploding toilets….people being run over by steamrollers…basically stupid shit to get a laugh.

Well, I turned into a junkie for those laughs. At one point, I was making daily ventures to nearby Best Buy and Circuit City shops specifically to draw fucked up pictures on display computers and make them the background for all the shoppers to see and laugh at. I’m weird, I know…but I loved breaking up the staid chain store setups with phantasmagoric and ridiculous imagery. I kept those at a Saturday morning cartoon level of sex and violence, never including anything morally offensive. Ridiculous and inappropriate? Yes…Child-scarring? No.

Like most things, it got boring. So I decided I just wanted to do serious art stuff and lost interest in getting anonymous laughter from shoppers and retail store employees.

That was a long time ago…and now that I’ve clung pretty tightly to my Wacom tablet or good old fashioned physical media like paint/ink/canvas/cardboard/paper, I have completely let the opportunity to draw on a touchscreen phone fall by the wayside. So today, I got Picasso by French developers Tiki Move, a €1.99 “fingerpainting” app in the Android Market and gave it a good, thorough testing while waiting in the airport this evening.

First impression: Fun, but not magical. The app launches directly to a blank canvas and for some reason your default brush color is magenta. I have no idea why…this is probably one of those things the devs didn’t even notice, but most paint programs (and I’m speaking from vast experience here) default to a black. Shit, even the paint program I had on my IBM 286 with only CGA depth didn’t default to magenta, and its colors were only CMYK.

As far as paint programs go, it’s pretty bare bones, You’ve got a few brush options (Pencil/Line, size, fill/blur/hardline, emboss,) a few shape options (circle, rectangle, filled/unfilled,) Flood fill, and one effect called “vortex” which swirls the image with Coriolisness.

You can save your pictures to the SD card as .png files or export them as .jpgs via email/gmail/messaging/picasa/pixelpipe (or other similar exporter) or you can take a screen snapshot.

While playing with the app, pretty much everything bad happened straight out of the gate. I spent a long time drawing and went for a screenshot first. It crashed the app and I lost my drawing. Then I did another one and sent it out via POP3 mail. It never arrived…the same happened with Gmail. I didn’t try Picasa or Pixelpipe because I was sick of redrawing pictures, so I just saved my next file to the SD card. That was the only one that worked.

I mounted my SD card on my computer and found the images that never sent, so they were saved, but the first one that crashed can never be recovered. Too bad, because it was quite a little stunner if I do say so myself.

a test of vortex effect, saved as a PNG

a test of vortex effect, saved as a PNG

This image is pretty boring, but I was frustrated at this point from the lost images, so I just splattered it up and tapped all over it with “vortex.” It actually kind of reminds me of Eric Carle tissue paper painting, an artist who will forever remind me of my little brother Hubert. Hubert was one of those rare children who at a very young age decided he had a favorite artist before he’d decided he had a favorite television celebrity…his choice was, of course, Eric Carle.

But I’m rambling. This is an app review, after all.

Exploiting the default magenta brush.

Exploiting the default magenta brush.


The black in this picture is pencil with “blur” turned on. The hard lines are just the standard non-blurry pencil. The rule? Keep it simple, keep it big, and layer the shit out of it. You really get the feel for your limited space and limited gestural accuracy with this app. There is quite a bit of latency in drawing, and I find myself pushing a bit too hard on the screen.

whee. I love macrame and yogurt!

whee. I love macrame and yogurt!

The petals were shaped with pencil with “fill” turned on. This creates free-form op art style shapes when you move your finger around. It’s kind of a nifty feature, especially when you add the “emboss” feature, which makes the shapes look vaguely three dimensional. That feature is used all over this picture.

What do I think in the end? It’s not all that bad. Totally fun to play with and would absolutely be worth the €1.99 if the file export issues get fixed promptly. After all, you don’t want to lose your precious creations just because you had the hauteur to want to show them to people.

Oh…also, you can set your drawings as your home screen wallpaper, so my picture of a vomiting mailbox can proudly be shown off (to be added later.)

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Android Market is only worth ONE million dollars?!?

September 2nd, 2009

Sure enough, after all the fuss thrown up over the state of the Android Market, it turns out that we could track sales all along, and Jtribe released a free app in the second week of August simply “Android Market Stats” that attempts to chart the progress of Android’s ecosystem, and in doing so, lends credence to the notion that the Android Market is pathetic.

We’ve been collecting data on the Android Market for the past 8 months and publishing it on androidstats.com. We have been able to watch the Android Market grow to it’s current size of just over 7000 apps and almost 3000 publishers, recording every movement made within the market…Considering all this, along with app price and days on sale within the market, we have been able to determine the monthly revenue from the (US only) Android Market to be closer to $1M USD.

Well…that’s even less than was predicted a couple of weeks ago.

But let’s not feel sad. The good news is that we don’t have to guess any more, we can use Jtribe’s statistics, which are gathered completely independently of Google. We may not be as prosperous as the iTunes app store yet, but at least we can revel in our open data.

Jtribe’s app lets you check the week’s biggest movers, check price changes that took place the previous day, or browse the market as you normally would.

It lets you filter the apps according to which ones are for pay and which ones are free, or you can check out all of them at once. You get a clear picture of who’s hot, and how much they’re making if they’re charging. In today’s top overall rankings, there’s actually only one paid app, a game called Brain Twister by The Game Boss, which was bought 150 times today.

UPDATE: I misunderstood what the numbers next to each app stood for.  As Chris from Froogloid informed me (see below)  these numbers do not correspond to number of times downloaded (which I thought seemed really really low)  but instead, are numerical rankings.  I have altered my post accordingly.  Thanks Chris, keep up the great work!

As someone remarked on the Techcrunch article I linked to the other day, Android is not a gaming platform*…and the Android Market Stats app shows it clearly. Today’s most popular game, CowPotato 3D by Froogloid (the guys who made the Keyring rewards card app) was downloaded 304 times, then SuperYatzy-free edition by Tommy Pedersen was the second most downloaded with 162.

Android Market Stats app by jtribe

Android Market Stats app by jtribe

All the data in the app is also available on Androidstats.com, where you can do the same comparison of free and paid apps.

Hopefully, the guys at Jtribe will get my pingback and let us know a little bit more about their methodology.

It’s a rather dull app, unless you’re a stats fan (which I am), so having the ability to track the Android Market’s progress is very exciting to me.

*see comments

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Do not compare the Android Market to the iTunes App Store on my watch.

August 31st, 2009

Read this article and then hit “Back.” I’ll wait.

….

Welcome back. I know that is just the stupidest way to start a blog entry, but you’ll have to forgive me, I was a bit irked at that article. It is supposed to be a suggestion to Google, I guess, because it does end on a favorable note. But seriously, there was one thing that upset me about it:

Larva’s Matt Hall attributes this poor performance in part to Android’s shoddy App purchase flow. Unlike the iPhone’s integrated App Store, Android Market doesn’t have screenshots of apps, forces you into the browser at times, makes you use Google Checkout, has some unintuitive navigation issues, and a handful of other problems. These issues are widely known — you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the purchase process is as smooth as it is on the iPhone — but they’ve been around for quite a while.

What’s wrong with Google Checkout? It has improved a ton in the three years it’s existed, and comparing a fully functional multi-way transaction system with a simple dedicated merchant site is just silly. You can tie in Google Checkout with your Adsense/Adwords account, you can use it to sell shit online. iTunes is just a money hole..real tough to get right in six years.

Furthermore, the Android Market does not really exist anywhere that’s visible on a non-phone platform. Yeah, there’s the site, but that’s not at all what the market really looks like. The iPhone app store has iTunes, which extends the App Store’s sphere of influence into the desktop OS realm.

Also…I don’t know if you’ve ever spent a great deal of time shopping for apps directly on an iPhone, but if you pick up your iPhone or iPod right now and look at an app’s dedicated site…just pick one at random, it doesn’t matter.

Okay, what’s missing from the first page that is FRONT AND CENTER in the Android Market?

User reviews.

And you wonder why this developer sold more in the iTunes App Store? People are sold by the description and the screenshots. They have to click over to another page to read user reviews. The Android Market, meanwhile has user reviews right up front…however nescient they may be. Developers have to deal with the idiot masses right out of the gate, people who wouldn’t know open source from a third degree burn.

Actual front page review of Larva Labs’ Retro Defence: “Good, but not worth $5.00″

Look around elsewhere. Notice that customer reviews are almost always put at the bottom or on other pages? No wonder you’re not selling as much as you could.

And as for “unintuitive navigation features” that this guy is talking about, I have no idea. I’ve never found myself wildly floundering for direction in the Android Market. Games and Productivity apps are separate. You can see them by popularity or by date uploaded…click on the one you want to look at and then click “buy” then hit “ok.” It’s not fucking celtic runes, get over it.

I absolutely agree that the Android Market is not perfect. The first thing I’d change is the white on black color scheme*. No sites designed for consumption on a phone should do that, it makes the screen reflective and harder to read (see: Mirror app.) I also agree that screenshots are needed to entice buyers.

But criticizing it for Google Checkout is completely dumb. iTunes is not a bank, PayPal is not a bank, so they’re all about equally vulnerable. I won’t even get started about basing an assessment of the Android Market’s prosperity on the FIFTH PLACE company. You can’t base ANYTHING on that. At least if we contacted the top seller, you could set a ceiling. Come on.

You can’t tell me how long a race lasted by the fifth and twelfth place contestants. You can’t even tell me if it was good.

Black-on-White Android Market

Black-on-White Android Market


*According to CNet today, this is already in the works.

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