Android Market changes

Now that Amazon has opened up their own App Store, Google has *FINALLY* added statistics to their own developer tools. The statistics only go back to Dec 21, 2010 but it's better than nothing. Now I can see the Android versions that my user base is composed of, the most popular devices, and countries that the users  are from and how my percentages compare to the Android Market averages.

Android Market News

Today, Google announced changes to the Android Market to provide a web interface to the marketplace and Over The Air installation to Android devices. After looking at the new web interface to the marketplace I'm pleased with it's appearance and responsiveness however I can't log into the Market to test OTA application installation. Hopefully Google will get that fixed later today and I'll get a chance to test it. Still no changes to the Developer Console though.

Some of the announced API changes for Honeycomb look interesting, however since there are no Honeycomb devices there's little point to getting to worked up and re-writing any apps just yet. Fragments look very interesting though.

Makes me wish that Android development followed a more BSD-style development model with Stable and Current branches.

TWIT Version 0.8 Released

Just released version 0.8 of the TWIT app to the Android Marketplace. The same version is also awaiting approval on Amazon's AppStore. This version has fixes for the issues that were causing the chat and calendar views to reload (logging you out of chat) when the devices orientation was changed. 

I'm still trying to locate the bug causing the stream to stop after 10-15 minutes on froyo. I have some reports that it's only on froyo but I need more information. It would be ideal if there were online documentation of MediaPlayer's error codes. If anybody knows what causes MediaPlayer to OnError(1,-11) please let me know.

Amazon Android Market

Amazon has announced that they are creating their own Android application marketplace and have opened it to developers. I immediately went and created an account and submitted the TWiT app for review. The reports capabilities already look impressive, but then again, compared to the non-existent reports on the Google Market anything would be impressive.

Like all app developers I get regular emails from alternative App stores wanting to carry more applications. I think the biggest of these has been 10-15K applications so I haven't even bothered looking at them. But this is Amazon. The only negative comments so far are that Amazon wants a $99/year subscription to have an developer account and that they require three screenshots. Now, for me, the screenshot requirement is just a minor annoyance but I can think of some Android applications that don't even have 3 different screens that the user would see. The annual subscription though will definitely restrict the number of developers that will use Amazon's marketplace since so many Android applications are free and have no income whatsoever.

We shall see what we shall see.

Android Devices

There's been a noticeable lack of development in the past few months with regards to the TWiT for Android and this has been due to a lack of testing hardware at my disposal. The Odroid-T that I was using for testing gave up the ghost. I have been waiting for my desired Android device to become available, the Motorola Milestone 2 (GSM version of the Droid 2). While it hasn't become available in Canada yet it has been released in Europe. This afternoon I placed an order with eXpansys UK for a sim-free (unlocked) Milestone 2. Hopefully it will be here by the end of next week!