Archive for category Android Market

Android Database Application

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Android Market, Database, Getting Started, My Commercial Apps, SQLite, phones on March 18th, 2010

iconI have just completed and published a database application for Android. It allows databases to be created on the phone or PC (using free 3rd party SQLite tools) and viewed in a list or card format. More information can be found at AndroidDatabase.info.

Developing the application was a lot more difficult than I initially thought because if you use the default framework and database mechanisms provided by the SDK then you run into performance problems with medium size databases.

Alternative Business Models

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android Market on March 17th, 2010

androidmarketOn my MobilePhoneDevelopment blog I talk today about the downward pressure on app average selling price and alternative business models. As a mobile developer creating Android apps for myself and others, this is an area of interest and concern especially considering the Android Market’s limitations.

The Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement says…

“You may not use customer information obtained from the Market to sell or distribute Products outside of the Market”

At first sight, this sentence seems to prevent you making money other than via selling your application on the market. It doesn’t seem possible to sell plug-ins for a free app and, depending on the interpretation of ‘Product’, online services associated with the app. It even seems that ‘brand’ apps that are free and promote something outside the application are illegal.

However, if you read the sentence literally, it says ‘customer information obtained from the Market‘ not ‘customer information obtained from the Application‘. I believe this subtle difference means that you can’t (understandably) take customer information from your Checkout sales information and use this to sell something else.

However, I believe you can entice customers within your (free or paid) application to purchase add-ons, subscriptions or other products and services… as long as it’s not the application itself…

“All fees received by Developers for Products distributed via the Market must be processed by the Market’s Payment Processor.”

How to do Asynchronous Tasks

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Android Market on March 15th, 2010

About exactly a year ago I wrote a post on ‘How to do Asynchronous http’. More recently, I have been creating many asynchronous tasks to do sqlite database queries so re-visited how to do asynchronous tasks. A year on and there are many examples of how to do Android asynchronous tasks on the Internet.

Unfortunately, many of the examples are incorrect because they access a GUI (Activity) member variable from within a worker thread. While this will work most of the time, there will come a day when a user will cause the same variable to be accessed at the same time from the GUI thread. Two threads accessing the same memory at the same time will cause an exception. This won’t be immediately reproducible because it’s a timing thing and consequently problems such as this may be frustrating for the user and the developer.

Since I wrote my original post, Android 1.5 has been released that provides a great wrapper for asynchronous tasks. There’s a great introduction on the Android blog. Now that the majority of phones use 1.5 or later, there’s no excuse not to use this proven pattern in applications.

Android Flavors

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android Market on May 28th, 2009

newyorktimesThere’s an article at the NYTimes on the three flavors of Android. The first type of phone doesn’t run any Google applications and hence won’t include the Android Market. Google has no way of knowing how many such phones are in development. The majority of phones Google knows about (12 to 14 phones this year) will be of the second type “to include on the phone Google applications” but no mention is made whether this includes the Android Market or whether this is optional. The third type of phone ( 5 to 6 this year) must include an uncensored Android Market.

I believe the success of Android partly depends on users having access to the Android Market. If handset OEMs or carriers choose to run their own application stores then there’s going to be consumer and developer confusion and disappointment.

Compatibility Challenges

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Android Market on April 29th, 2009

This morning I posted on mobilephonedevelopment regarding Google’s new article on backward compatibility. I have just read that some developers are viewing 1.5 as a catastophe because they don’t have enough time to download the new firmware and update their application before end users start downloading on their new phones.

One of the problems lies with the Android Market…

“…developers aren’t able to simply create a new, 1.5-friendly update and leave the existing version in place for those without Cupcake”

Whether intentional or not, this seems to force developers to maintain backwards compatibility. It could be argued that we could put up a new application with the title ‘My App for 1.5′ but, as we all know, end users aren’t really going to make any sense of this. Also, the newer application would lose all its ratings and comments.

As for my freeware applications, they are fairly simple and, reading the docs, there shouldn’t be any problems. If there are, I’ll just take them off the market while I fix them. I can see the problem though where people are selling applications. Also, if developers such as myself remove an application while they fix it, how many of them will bother? It might actually cause a reduction in freeware on the Market and/or an increase in the number of applications that don’t seem to work.