The Android Market

Yeah, I completely agree with this post. I recently published my first application to the Android Market (last month) and was pretty shocked with how little the Developer Console tells me. I had expected a lot more analytical data.<p>Hopefully, as they continue to improve the OS, they will improve the Marketplace as well.<p>(Side: I am still waiting to even hear another thing about the Desktop version that was demoed at the Google IO this year.)

To anyone who thinks: that a very small team creating an entire, enormously complex operating system, with unending goals for platforms improvements, that has already been successfully iterating at an extreme pace, is up against enormous competition from Apple and Microsoft, and is playing the long game for the future of mobile and computing as a whole... is really ignoring these extremely common complaints and resting on its laurels...<p>...uh, really? There are many very concrete reasons to believe they know about the vast majority of these issues and have respective solutions addressing them somewhere in their product roadmap. (ie, major UI revision in Gingerbread, along with optimization for tablets.) That, and they've been overwhelmingly successful so far, as Android phones now consistently outsell the iPhone each quarter.

Thinking about this a little, I can kind of understand why Amazon would consider entering this business. Even if Apple would allow it, probably no other company would invest significant resources into trying to unseat the Apple AppStore. You have to have some kind of leverage to beat a competitor like that.<p>The situation is different with Android. Building a better app marketplace than the Android market is not exactly a very high bar to leap.

You could fill pages with things that can be improved on Android Market (most of which are available on the App Store). Most shortcoming are well documented - things that I would like to see personally:<p>- ability to publish what changed in an update<p>- track number of users who upgraded vs new users<p>- ability to search for apps and see reviews on <a href="http://www.android.com/market/" rel="nofollow">http://www.android.com/market/</a> (that website is practically useless)

Ugh, so tired of reading these posts. Has everyone so quickly forgotten Google IO? They know there are problems with the Market, they plan on having them fixed for the release of Gingerbread, which according to rumors (which indicate the SDK will be out next week) could be very soon.