Why the Android Market is a broken model
filed in Ecosystem Android, Ecosystem iOS on Jun.30, 2010
Sometimes I feel copying some other people’s concept and offering what you termed is good for the public, does not turn out the way you want.
You will argue about it but the more you use it, the more you feel frustrated by it.
That seems to be what many people feel about the Android Marketplace.
Jon Lech Johnson is not a normal blogger. He is part of the development team for DoubleTwist, which is a music synchronizing application that aims to be the alternative to iTunes.
And it syncs to PSP,Android,Palm Pre.
In his latest post, he wrote about why he thinks that the model for Android Market needs to be improve and most of his points raised are very valid:
1) Too little curation of apps.
Apple’s App Store Reviews applications before they are listed for users to buy or download. They are checked that these applications do not run libraries that are malicious or use private apis.
To the opensource commitee , this feels like an authoritative government, but for me they are doing a lot of legwork to prevent security issues from happening.
In this article, google downplays the problem of Android Smartphone’s forming a botnet.
For me, what google is inviting could possibly be a black swan event. As a noob like me and I would say I understand the risk what owning an Android phone entails and it seems more dangerous than an iPhone.
2) Lack of quality apps
There is a big problem when you are trying to sell a phone, promote it to be open, yet the developers that you seem to attract does not produce applications that are high quality like those over at Apple’s App store.
Why is it (according to a Larva Labs study) that App Store pays out to developers 50 times more than developers Google has?
If you are developer, how would you feel if your apps can only be made paid in 13 countries only?
Am I that altruistic to spend months of my time producing a top quality app and people use it, complains about it, raves about it and I do not expect any monetary incentive?
The key thing why so many people rush to develop for the App Store is probably because they think they can produce something the market doesn’t have or better than any competitor in the market and earn something from it, be it better games or more productive apps.
Google does not give that kind of incentive. Its only those cloud apps or those companies with a web front that brings their services to the Android device.
Until the you and me developers thinks seriously about producing something like this:
![]()
or this:

then Android becomes a viable productive device.
3) The top list is littered with nonsensical applications.
In the case of this screen its littered by spam ringtones apps instead of the top multimedia apps.

4) Confusing payment system with Google Checkout
As a consumer I don’t want to worry so much about the payment at this point, I just want to consume the application.
If you make payment a complicated process and not make it as straight forward as how Apple does it, you can’t expect it to thrive world wide

5) Openness breeds piracy
So everyone is free to produce the kind of apps they want and there is little control on copyright infringement. The end result?
You get a great app like Tunee that enables you to download great music from top artist for FREE


Conclusion
Until all these have been well and sorted out, I really don’t see myself moving on to Android. I like the concept of opensource, but as a productive tool it is currently very unappealing because of these problems.
