On Aug 10, 11:50 am, John Coryat <cor...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Even if you can get traffic for being new, its only momentary. > > But it's a start > > There was a huge negative side effect of that "just in" category. Developers > would make an update every week for no other reason than to appear at the > top of that list. As a result, users tended to ignore the fact that an > update was available. This user attitude is now a problem for legitimate > updates. Hopefully, by eliminating the advantage of posting an update solely > for the purpose of gaming the "just in" category, people will start to > actually download the update when it becomes available and finally get over > this attitude problem. > > I'm very glad to see that category gone. If it ever does come back, I hope > it really is for new apps only. That would make a lot more sense to the > users and keep developers away from playing that silly game. >
And cause developers to play a sillier game. Instead of the developer of "Hot Korean pole dancers wallpaper" issuing an update to get on the list, they will republish it as new app - "Hot Korean pole dancing wallpaper". This will not only pollute the "New apps" category, it will add huge numbers of redundant apps to the normal market. It is a fact of life that the "just In" category gave new apps the kickstart which allowed them to gather a few ratings and a bit of profile. It is fine to say that there should be more targetted advertising outside of the market, in places where people who might need your app will find it. Where would you do that for a LWP which shows pretty patterns (as many of them do)? If the Market was working properly, and connecting prospective purchasers with sellers (the purpose of a market), then we wouldn't be discussing how to overcome its obvious limitations. It is interesting to compare Apple's and Google's approaches. Apple (and Amazon) enforce minimum quality standards on apps. Google does not. Because of this, the Android Market gets flooded with a lot of crap. Well, Android now has more (free) apps than Apple, and has certainly achieved critical mass. But this quantity has been at the expense of average quality. So, if 100,000 apps are released a year, how to you structure a market so that users find good new apps, and good app developers make money? The most obvious thing to do is reduce the number of new apps by not allowing crap to be uploaded. Just disallowing apps that manifestly break copyright law would be a good start. No, you cannot show film loops from movies, use cartoon, game or other characters created by other people, use sporting team logos, or use other peoples music or sounds without permission. Android apps should not be little more than web links. Enforce these rules, and in the LWP category would probably get half as many new apps, doubling opportunities for legitimate independent developers. Of the rest, 50% are knock-offs of existing apps, 40% of ther rest are just garbage. Enforce those rules, and the "Just In" category will work for everybody, devs and users, even if it includes updates. The cost of having somebody spend 5 minutes checking this basic stuff for all new apps would be less than $10 ph; levy a fee of $10 for every new app uploaded. Google are also fooling themselves if they think that the comments and ratings system accurately informs purchasers. In my category of wallpapers, I get a large number of 1 star ratings from users who claim it did not install, when in fact they just don't know where to find LWPs, despite me providing instructions. (Surprising, because I am well down the list, and I can't imagine that mine is the first LWP they have unsuccessfully tried to run ..). More commonly, they bitch about some feature being missing when it isn't, or just miss the point. My suggestion: Google uses anonymous reviewers, analogous to peer review. They would need about 1,000 volunteers. Each of these is asked to review on average one new app a day, and each app is reviewed by 3 volunteers completely independently. Nobody knows who the reviewers are. So that's 250 per volunteer per year, 250,000 reviews, each new app is reviewed 3 times, that's 83,000 new apps a year. These reviews are available as a seperate tab in the Market. I doubt that Google would have much trouble finding 1,000 volunteers, purely for the interest and on-line glory (albeit under a psuedonym). If any of the panel reveal their identity, or misbehave in any way, their reviews are expunged from the database. Having three reviewers each acting completely anonymously would allow systemic differences in scoring, or fraud, or competence to be detected automatically. Setting all this up shouild be quite easy; a new tab on the market for "Our user panel said:", a bit of database programming to send each app to 3 active reviewers in that market category, and a bit of open source/cloudsourcing blah buzz to motivate reviewers. As a review system it could run entirely in parallel with what is done now or what Google may do in the future; if it doesn't work, just kill it off. Its a pretty modest investment in development to test out a potentially much better ratings system. Ohh, and BTW, some talk here about the significance of the app name. I can report that on the day I changed the name of my free LWP to a name which I thought was slightly better (and did nothing else), downloads went from 200/day to 600/day and stayed there. Something this trivial shouldn't make this much difference. Peter Webb > -John Coryat -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
