image Google is planning Android Market, and apparently it will be more open than the iPhone App store. Which approach do you think will be better? Will Apple apps be more reliable and less virus-prone because the company is controlling them more tightly? Is the loss of developer freedom worth it? With less bureaucracy involved with Android Market, could users come out ahead with, say, more frequent updates of e-reading apps? And much less risk in the future that Google will try to inflict a pet app and format on the masses?

Interesting issue: Will Google treat some books as apps, the way Apple is doing? Some interesting opps for publishers? Or would a straight bookstore be better? Or maybe a mix?

Related: HTC’s Android-driven Dream revealed in glorious spy photos, in Engadget—plus related Techmeme roundup.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. The real problem with books published as applications is clutter. On the current AppStore it is a real problem. If Android can avoid this mess, then fine, treat books as applications.
    As long as you don’t end up with pages and pages of books instead of applications, or if you can easily find the applications instead of hundreds of e-books when you type “e-book” it’ll be fine.
    Of course, avoiding such a mess won’t be easy… With their hands off approach, I don’t think Google will do anything to forbid such applications. They’ll just play with the “signal/noise” ratio the best that they can.

    So far, I don’t think that Apple’s strategy as a gatekeeper is such a good one. They allow all sorts of crappy and buggy applications, and on the other hand it takes a while to get their approval when you’d like to publish an update of your application. It doesn’t seem to raise much the bar for quality, instead we’ve seen applications removed from the AppStore for all sort of strange reasons.

  2. Having had numerous forced, and voluntary, hard resets on my Palms and Windows Mobile machines due to bad programming, I am very happy that Apple is vetting all applications. From a usability and security standpoint I think this is a great benefit – despite some other drawbacks. This is my phone you are talking about, not a PDA. I keep it on 24/7 and don’t use my land line any more. I can’t take the chance that something will screw it up.

    By the way, I think Android is probably a lost cause. Here we have Google trying to market something that nobody really wants. Talk about ebable, now we have OS bable. Symbian, UIQ, Windows Mobile (in several incompatible variants), OSX, Palm, various proprietary OSs on non-smartphones, and several others. Why should developers jump on a platform that has no market share and no uptake by any of the carriers. I really think that Android is a lot of wishful thinking on the part of a company that has no experience marketing consumer products.

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