Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Play, a rebranded Android Market which consolidates all of Google’s media offerings, including apps, music, movies and e-books, into one portal. But it appears that Google’s ambitions to create its own iTunes-like experience won’t stop there. In the Help Center for the new Google Play, empty pages titled “Audio Books” as well as “Magazines and journals” have appeared, hinting at Google’s plans into its future content offerings.
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Google often confuses me. The company, with its thousands of genius employees, often makes the most brain-dead decisions. Just earlier today Google rolled out their latest twist on the Android Market — but it’s not called Android Market anymore. Instead of simply redesigning the e-store, Google also re-branded the whole thing to Google Play.
The reasoning is sound: the company wanted to better describe their offerings since it’s not just apps. The Play name is multifaceted, evoking thoughts of playing a game or pressing play on a media file. Cool. But most markets also sell more than one sort of good. The old name worked just as well.
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Google’s Android Market has undergone some tremendous changes over the last year or so. What started as just a standalone app store has quickly grown to encompass e-books, music, videos, and now Google feels like the “Android Market” moniker is getting to be too restrictive, too constraining for what they’re really trying to deliver to their users.
That’s why Google is officially putting the Android Market name to rest. Starting today, all of Google’s digital media services have been rebranded to fly under a brand new banner: Google Play. That’s right gadget buffs, despite some delectable new rumors, Google Play isn’t a new tablet from the folks at Mountain View, but rather a unified brand that seeks to tie the company’s digital media services together. → Read More
A little more than a week ago, the Clik smartphone app launched, resulting plenty of press coverage and more than 100,000 downloads on iOS (at least according to Clik). But there was one area where the launch fizzled — in the Android Market, where the Clik app is apparently invisible to searches.
“Over the weekend, as we get all this hype, nobody could find our app,” says CEO Ted Livingston.
Even today, if you search for “clik” in the Market, the app doesn’t show up in the first five pages of results. (It may be hidden even more deeply than that, but that’s as far as I went.) It’s not clear what’s going wrong, but I’m guessing that the Android Market assumes you made a typo and searches for “click” instead — hence search results that are topped by “1-click cleaner.” → Read More
Android malware has been an issue over the past year. Granted, most of the numbers we see out of security software companies are inflated — including malicious apps from third-party sources and ignoring small download figures — but that’s not to say that we can just brush that dirt off our shoulders.
Google knows this, and has for a while. Despite the fact that downloads of malicious apps are down 40 percent between the first and second half of 2011, seeing that 14,000, 30,000, or even 260,000 devices have been affected by this or that malicious app requires action. That said, Google is adding a new security layer to the Android Market: codenamed Bouncer. → Read More
Getting featured in the Android Market is starting to have a meaningful impact for mobile app developers. According to the recent news from fitness app maker RunKeeper, the company saw a 637% increase in downloads since November after just a few days of being a featured app in the Android Market “Health & Fitness” section.
But is RunKeeper seeing the boost because of the New Year’s resolution-making crowd? Or is being featured in the Android Market really bumping up download numbers in the extreme for anyone who makes it there? → Read More
Google’s been celebrating their recent Android Market milestone with a string of discounted (and awesome) apps, but really — what’s a celebration without an infographic? Thankfully, Google has come through on that front with a slew of stats about the Android Market and the people who use it. → Read More
Research firm research2guidance this morning published a (free) report, offering key findings from an analysis of mobile applications store Android Market.
According to the firm, the number of active mobile apps in Android Market stood at 319,161 at the end of last month, compared to 459,589 apps that are available in Apple’s App store (the company claims there are 500,000 apps, actually).
Android developers appear to have more appetite for distributing multiple apps than iOS developers, however. → Read More
There’s no doubt Android Market will at some point offer more applications for download and/or purchase than Apple’s App Store, as the latter’s growth has been slowing down of late, while the Android application store’s growth rate has been accelerating.
In a recent report, app store analytics company Distimo forecasted that Android would surpass the App Store in size before the end of July 2011.
Another research firm, Germany-based research2guidance, corroborates Distimo’s findings; the firm forecasts Android to blow past Apple’s App Store by August 2011. → Read More
Google was originally set to debut in-app payments support for Android in the fourth quarter of 2010, and recently said that the launch would be delayed until the end of this quarter. Be that as it may, the company is set to launch another much-anticipated (at least by many app developers or publishers) Web-based in-app transactions product in May 2011. (see updates below)
Jambool, the company behind a virtual monetization platform dubbed ‘Social Gold’ that was acquired by Google last August, this morning started sending the following email to users:
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Today at their Mountain View headquarters, Google held an event to show off Honeycomb, the latest version of the Android operating system. After some demos of the OS itself, Android engineering director Chris Yerga took the stage to show off a big new feature: the Android Market Webstore. Yep, the Market just hit the web. Finally. And it’s already live. Find it here.
Yerga notes that up until know, the only way to find and install apps was via the Market on your phone. But now users can simply go to their browser. And it’s more seamless than something like the iTunes native app because when you select an app, it can be set up to download automatically to your Android device. “There’s no wires, no syncing with computers. None of that sort of nonsense. Everything is connected,” Yerga says. → Read More
While T-mobile have supported carrier billing on the Android Market since those far-off days of ’09, they have — up until this point — been the only US carrier to do so.
BUT NO LONGER! As announced on the Android Developer’s Blog today, Google have been busy rolling out the feature (alongside that recent Market update) to a number of AT&T customers over the last few days. → Read More
If you’ve been holding off downloading Hot Buns for Beginners* from the Android Market, for fear that it may not be about baking, then Google have some great news for you: the Android Market will soon include a content rating system.
In an email sent out to developers today, Google outlined the new policy (you can find it here), which involves a self-rating system where the developer places their app into any of four categories, specifically: “All”, “Pre-teen”, “Teen”, and “Mature”. → Read More
As Apple CEO Steve Jobs like to point out, the Android Market is great for users who want to find porn. While that may not be exactly true, other Android-based stores are trying to make it true. And perhaps perception was getting too close to reality, as today, Google has announced that in the next few weeks, they’ll be showing content ratings for all apps listed in the Market.
While Android has previously had a content rating policy, prior to this, these ratings were not surfaced to users. Nor does it seem like they were strictly enforced. As a result, it was difficult to distinguish an app with mature content from those that were meant for kids. Now, all apps in the Market will be required to show one of four content rating levels: All, Pre-teen, Teen, & Mature, Google’s Eric Chu writes today. → Read More
Android are updating their Market this Friday, and have scheduled a 6-hour outage for developers (not consumers, though).
Questions have been raised on what the update will bring (especially with Gingerbread looming around the corner), but today, Android have sent out an email to all registered developers outlining some of the new features/requirements for app listings in the Market.
Follow us through the jump for the full email, but the new requirements now include a “feature graphic” of 1024 x 500 resolution, a 512 x 512 high-res icon, two screenshots (increasing to 8 in the future), a link to a promotional YouTube video, and a “recent changes” section in the app description. → Read More
Well, well, well. An eagle-eyed reader tells us PayPal posted a short announcement yesterday on its corporate blog, only to pull it mere seconds later. As you can tell from the URL, PayPal was poised to announce support for “all three major mobile platforms” (also see retweets of the blog post).
That is: support for Apple’s App Store, Blackberry App World … and Android Market.
How do we know? Thanks to a little something called Google cache (screenshot below for posterity). → Read More
Just before the weekend, Google dropped word to developers that paid Android apps support was on its way to more countries than the 14 currently supported. In the email, the company did not specify a timeframe other than “over the next few weeks” and stopped short of saying which markets would be gaining support for paid apps.
Now app store analytics company Distimo tells us they’ve noticed paid apps targeting previously unsupported countries have started making their way to the Android Market.
So far, the startup has identified 13 ‘new’ countries: → Read More
App store analytics provider Distimo yesterday published its latest report, once again zooming in on the pricing of mobile applications across a variety of platforms.
Consistent with its previous findings, Google’s Android Market has by far the largest share of free applications available compared to other mobile app store, but the gap is also widening.
In July 2010, 60% of all applications on Android Market were free of charge, representing an increase of 3% since May 2010 when it was 57%. → Read More
You might say the company’s just a tad late to the party, but Miniclip has finally seen the light and is expanding its casual gaming empire by entering the world of mobile games.
With a self-declared user base of more than 57 million casual gamers worldwide and a library of more than 600 online games, it’s a wonder really that the London-based company hasn’t made the move sooner.
After all, Apple’s App Store for one now offers roughly 250,000 apps, many of which are of course casual games and have been available for years. → Read More
Despite earlier reports to the contrary, Android Market watcher AndroLib says there aren’t 100,000 applications available in the store – yet. There have, however, 100,000 apps been submitted to Android Market since its public debut, the site wagered this morning, up from approximately 5,000 in June 2009.
The Androlib directory covers multiple markets, including international ones, so not all apps and games are available in the United States, necessarily. Not all markets are counted, even, so AndroLib claims it may potentially undercount the number of apps, although it’s safe to say there’s somewhat of an error margin either way as with every data aggregation. → Read More
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