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.

Thing 6: Link to File on Android Homescreen

This seems like it MUST have already been done, but after an awful lot of looking I ain't found it, so perhaps not. I want a shortcut that goes straight to a single file (in this case, the image of my knitting pattern) on my Android homescreeen. With all the crazy widgets I can put on my homescreen, how is it not possible to add a simple shortcut??

So far, the best solution I've found is something called Smart Shortcuts, which lets you create a shortcut to a list of items with a certain tag (in this case, a list of length one). It seems kloodgey and stupid, and it involves one extra click, but it works.

It is sort of baffling that this doesn't already exist, so please, universe, point out to me the way to do this that I've been missing.