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Microsoft has recently posted some interesting job listings that lend themselves to (unconfirmed but solid) speculation. Their acquisition of European mobile music provider Musiwave last year just deepens the mystery.
Caller ID from WhitePages is an add-on for the default Android caller ID that enables location detection. The service tells you two bits of info whenever someone (whether they're on your contact list or not) calls: the approximate city the number belongs to and whether or not it's a landline. The app seems to work pretty well for the first (it got my phone's area correct), but wasn't smart enough to know that it wasn't a landline I was calling from. Still, a pretty useful app for those weird numbers you get sometimes. Available now on the Android Marketplace.
Well, this is asinine. Since the Android Market won't support paid apps until next year, asshat developers are disguising links to paid apps as free ones. When you click on the "free" applications, it takes you to the devs' site, where you get to pay a lovely fee for it. Mobihand's Fast Food Calorie Calculator is one example of this scumsuckery. Look, it's cool to charge for apps, as long as you're upfront about it, not being sleazy and sludging up the store with dirty tricks. I know they're not blocking apps from the store, but I hope MobiHand and others are tossed on their arse and banned for life. [Phandroid]
Expect a tidal wave of more Android goodness today, the first day any developer can register and upload their own applications to the no-overlord-approval-necessary Android Market. We'll be following the action closely in our Android App Liveblog, so keep a close watch there as the applications start rolling in. [Android Developers Blog]
One of first apps I grab on a smartphone—or com, whatever—is Facebook. It's pretty excellent on the iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm (though most excellentest on the iPhone), so you'd expect it to show up pronto on Android where it would also be awesome. But apparently that's not going to happen—whether it's because of bad mojo between Google and Facebook or not—TechCrunch reports that "Facebook has dedicated exactly zero resources to creating a version of the service for Android, and has no plans to launch anything at all." That's a charitable way to put their feelings.
The folks at Medialets have put together a number-crunching comparison of the iPhone App Store and the Android Marketplace after the first 24 hours. There is nothing really Earth-shattering in the data, but it does provide some insight into the similarities between iPhone and G1 users. Basically, it illustrates that both parties are interested in the same sorts of apps, given the fact that the distributions are fairly similar. One could draw the conclusion that Android users are more into lifestyle and productivity-based functionality, but without detailed information comparing the number of these apps released by both platforms at launch, this assessment is probably a bit premature. [Medialets]
Good news for BlackBerry users and developers! Research In Motion has just announced an applications store! Bad news for BlackBerry users and developers! It's not going to be available until March 2009. This sure won't help the fact that the iPhone is outselling the Blackberry and Android is quickly becoming Apple's major rival in the public's eye instead of the new #2 seller. No matter how nice the BlackBerry Storm is, the delay is not good.
Official word from Google on the mysterious disappearance of many apps from the supposedly intervention-free Android Market yesterday:
The demo devices give an early version of the Market since it hasn't been launched yet. We needed to be sure that a few of the 3rd party apps are final for consumer use in the Android Market when the T-Mobile G1 officially launches on October 22nd. We're replacing the preview applications with final versions today. After October 22nd, developers will be managing their own applications.
This one is strange: Nobody knows exactly why, but Google has taken down most of the more than fifty applications that were supposed to be in the Android Marketplace. Although I'm getting an Apple deja vu here, nobody knows yet why this is happening, although there's plenty of speculation. Explanations range from "trying to save bandwidth" (very unlikely) to "last minute quality check" (weird). As far as I'm concerned, it may have been the little green men, but the fact is that there are only 13 apps up there right now:
Despite the "free" and "open" buzzwords bandied about during the G1 launch, app developers stand to make a good deal of money the platform — that is, when the Android Marketplace lets them. Google should work out a payment system soon, but until then Handango, who already sells apps for virtually every other mobile platform, is planning on running their own little marketplace, complete with actual monies. Though the official Android store will only launch with free apps, unlike the iPhone the G1 (or any Android phone) has no restriction on sideloading apps, so alternative sources are essentially kosher.
