Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Thing 15: Better Android App Management

I use the Android Market and the Amazon App Store and various other random sources to get my Android apps, like most people. But it has a problem: there's absolutely no equivalency between the two for updating--whatever you download through Market will only update through Market, and likewise for Amazon. This wouldn't be a problem if both stores listed updates at the same time, but they don't. There's been a Tweetcaster Pro update listed in the Market for weeks now, with no parallel update in Amazon. The problem is particularly bad for paid apps, since you have a license for that app in one marketplace but not the other.

I don't know enough about the infrastructure behind the problem--on the developer or the marketplace side--to suggest a good solution. Any solution involving a universal app-license-clearinghouse runs afoul of Google's hands-off(ish) approach to the Android world. But it needs to be cleared up, or I suspect users will tend to choose a "home" marketplace from which they only go afield for something very specific and desirable.

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