6. The Market

There's more than one!

When your hear Android is open it means much more than just the OS source. The Market is too. Within 5 minutes of uploading your app it's usually available. Closed ones mean you have to deal with all sorts of crap, and even if nanny does decide to let your app grace its stores presence, it can withdraw it at any point in the future for any reason - including the fact it is about to release a competing one of its own! Ugh - nasty. It's like 1984 with a huge screen showing a black turtle necked big brother glaring down at rows and rows of slave coders, and Android is the girl who runs in and throws a hammer up, freeing everyone.

It's useful to understand exactly how the Android Market works, as this will benefit you when it comes to planning distribution channels for your app. First off, you can stick your apps anywhere and any Android device that can access them (e.g. a website, email attachment, bluetooth etc) can install them. Straight away that's blown away the closed guys. Next it's important to realize that the term "Android Market", strictly speaking, refers to the system which the app available on "comes with Google" devices can talk to - which to date has been all handsets.

We know core Android is open source and free, but the extras which Google bundles up to the handset manufacturers, like Email, Google Maps and as mentioned the Android Market, are not. Think of the situation if, say, Windows were free - Microsoft would still sell Office separately. This means device manufacturers who use Android but don't "come with Google" don't have access to the Android Market, so usually end up building their own parallel app store - I'm looking at you, Archos. It's also possible for the carriers to lock down access to appstores too. For the developer, this is a great opportunity. Say you've released an app to the Android Market. You can now decide if, and how, you want to release it on any of these alternate ones, perhaps using a different charging model or customising it further.

The charging mechanism you use will limit your distribution method. You wouldn't stick a paid app on an unrestricted download site, although you might if it was service based where the user paid when the service was activated via a remote server. Also, this is a rapidly advancing field. Currently, to buy from the Android store users must have a Google Checkout account. T-Mobile, however, have just announced plans to support integrated billing, where the users purchases appear on their monthly phone bill. Many Android developers are welcoming this news as they feel that the lack of such a service has been holding back takeup of their apps. In the future there also may well be a web or desktop app which lets users buy apps directly, then have them appear on their handsets. Unofficial ones do currently exist, but all that's just rumour right now...