You Don’t Need to be a Hero to Have a Voice in the Android Market

As Apple continues to “evaluate” Google Voice for the App Store its the Android users who determines what stays in the Android Market.

This Big Brother approach was the final straw for Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and others to leave the iPhone for the freedom of Android as he even has his HTC Hero Halloween costume already prepared.

The Android Market is not without its faults as finding applications is cumbersome along with needing a better spam comment control but most concerning is applications that just go missing randomly which is most concerning for high profile applications such as Layers & ShopSavvy.

A developer commented after a long trail of missing application concerns on the Google Groups for Android that, “While this is hurting android as a whole, its especially hurting developers hoping to make a living.”

I believe vast improvements will be made to the Android Market in the near future in preparation for the new Android phones coming out and the soon to be publicly released Donut update.

These improvements should come as there are now approximately 6,000 Android applications with more and more applications being unique to Android rather than simply copying over what was popular first on the iPhone.

Android engineer and winner from the first Android Developer Challenge in 2008 Jeff Sharkey tweeted a humorous dig at the App Store today “Google Voice? There’s an app for that… on other phones”.

AndroidGuys wrote an excellent post today explaining that Google evaluates an application ONLY if the users flag it enough for review which is approximately 1% of all the apps submitted.

Perhaps if Apple used a similar model it would not take so long to “evaluate” Google Voice to provide its caged in users.