

Big Android Market expansion - mcantelon
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-countries-more-sellers-more-buyers.html

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martythemaniak
Great news, but long, long overdue (for example, it's been well over a year
since Android launched in Canada).

The market is one of the weakest aspects of Android IMO, hopefully they'll add
more features soon.

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metachris
And the market could be improved so easily:

* Make the top listings more interesting by sorting them differently (eg. by a ratio of time, comments and ratings instead of the total number of downloads). There should be more change and not the same apps in the top positions for years.

* Combat spam publishers (those with hundreds of sound boards and similar apps, which pollute the new listings by pushing interesting apps way down, which happens rather frequently). One idea could be a timeout between publishing/updating apps, for example only one app per 12 or 24 hours. Could be adjusted depending on the rating of the apps.

* Make a market website where developers can link to their apps (a la AppStore)

* This app website should have an push-to-phone button. If clicked Google pushes the app's package name to the user's device, which opens a popup for installing it. That would _greatly_ simplify installing apps - QR codes simply don't provide enough usability.

* And as dpcan said, the ability to describe an app with more than 325 characters.

I get the feeling as if the Android market is just not a high priority project
of Google.

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dpcan
They could very easily combat comment spam too. The DroidPhoneFiles comment is
almost always the #1 comment on my free apps. I'd say it's updated
automatically almost every couple hours.

Lastly, the ability to comment on our own apps from the dev console would be
great so I could respond to buyer comments since we are not allowed to buy our
own apps.

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some1else
Google is waay too slow on these issues.

Likewise, I can't feel but screwed by the new Chrome Web Store not supporting
Google Checkout Merchant accounts from countries other than United States and
UK. Thanks a lot for the competitive edge guys.

I'm scrambling to implement a payment processor as soon as I can, but the lack
of simple one-click purchase will surely impact sales.

The Merchant forum is bloated with requests for expanding the service to other
countries since the day they rolled it out. A mildly comforting assurance that
the expansion is in the works is all they managed to reply for three years
now.

Seriously dropping the ball (compared to Apple) from a developer perspective.

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spiffworks
The Market is expanding to 18 other countries in the next 2 weeks, which means
this is probably the last chance for interested researchers to nail down
before and after piracy figures. Results will be really interesting.

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dpcan
I'm happy because my apps are about to get an insane amount of exposure.

I'm scared because I know how many talented developers are about to compete
with me.

At the moment, I'm the only app of my kind, but in the iPhone app store, there
are PAGES of apps that would be considered similar.

I wonder if this means our ad-supported apps will finally make some money....
hmm.

~~~
blantonl
_I'm happy because my apps are about to get an insane amount of exposure._

I am rooting for you, but I hope your understand that if there are pages upon
pages of similar apps in the app store, your effort has already been
marginalized. Good exposure it good, but it must hit a home run, or you are
going to be called out.

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dpcan
Luckily I already feel like I've hit a home run. I'm fortunate enough to have
a top 20 game in one category and over half a million downloads, lots of good
feedback, and great ratings.

Right now, the thought of adding countries is more exciting than not. It's
like I'm about to get a second at-bat.

My fear of competition is that I get a competitor who can update features even
faster than I can.

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rodh257
Australians can now sell apps! My motivation for creating them just went up a
bit.

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megablast
Nice one, I will look into this now.

Why can I not scroll on that bloody page, do we really need javascript just to
scroll down a page? Nice one google.

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slug
mouse wheel doesn't work (using noscript), but pg up/down does, go figure.

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uggedal
Off topic, but the Android Developer Blog's use of frames to always show
navigation is really horrible. I've to use my mouse or TAB before scrolling
with J/arrow-down. Haven't they heard about 'position: fixed'?

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bgaluszka
From developer's perspective it's such a disadvantage when developers from
other countries can sell apps in your country but you can't.

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carlrice
Now companies can stop opening an American "office" just to sell apps on
Android and other like hacks such as Paypal in app unlocking.

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tomjen3
Finally, takeing this long is frankly embarrassing.

Anybody know why this took Google so long?

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dminor
Developers have been asking for this for a long time. Hopefully soon we will
also see

1\. Better app discoverability

2\. In app purchases

3\. More carrier billing

4\. Coupons and discounts

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dpcan
5\. Ability to describe an app with more than 325 characters.

I can't even describe what's in an update with this much space.

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bad_user
Bah, why not open the market to developers from all countries? WTF can be that
difficult at Google's scale?

It's like they want people to create an alternative marketplace or something.

~~~
patd
I'm wondering if this news is related to the fact that Amazon launched their
own marketplace recently.

Maybe the motivation came from realizing that if they don't do this fast
enough, Amazon could eat the revenue from Android in a lot of countries.

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barrydahlberg
Well that deals with my comment over here...
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734264>.

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india
Indians still can't sell. :(

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Rabidgremlin
This ought to help with Android's worldwide adoption...

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anedisi
it sux to live in croatia :(

