Apple's
App Store, with its millions of downloads, is clearly a hit with consumers. But with developers?
Not so much. Like a dashing hero to a scorned mistress, Google's Andy Rubin is pledging a different, more loving and respectful relationship with those who would fill his company's Android Market with selections -- and his pockets with royalties. He indicates that the Market will enable free downloadable trials, something that Apple is stubbornly refusing to add, and that those downloads would not be subject to any arbitrary bandwidth caps. Meanwhile, T-Mobile at least will be levying a $2/month fee on developers of free apps expected to use more than the (
somewhat arbitrary) amount of 15MB of data per user per month, though how they'll be keeping track of that data outside of their own content stack is unclear -- our guess is that they can't.
posted Oct 2nd 2008 1:53PM
can this potentially turn out to be a bad thing? i dont really understand it too well?
yes it very much is a bad thing...
it means less developers would want to make programs for Android because now the developers would have to pay to get their programs hosted to be distributed
Bad T mobile, no cookie.
This is basically a greedy cash grab which risks hindering a completely virgin market. How dumb do you have to be to not get the concept of free to create growth during spin up. Ideally this will get slapped down pretty fast. I bet this ends costing google he money instead since it's simple not possible to shut off the grabby cel/telco reflex.
Handango does trials really well - its one thing that's really missing from Apple's App Store. I would probably buy more if I knew I could test something first. So I hope Android Market does well with its trials and stimulates Apple to do likewise.
t-mobile what are you thinking...
damn! come on tmobile! hopefully they listen to their customers like they did with the data cap.