Yes, really moronic. There are a lot of really smart people at Google. And then there are things like this. It's hard to believe it's the same company.
For we developers, there are several techniques to deal with this, including dynamic HTML, browser detection, redirection.... What I do is, give out a link to my own web site. I detect the browser, and on the device, redirect to the market URL. Otherwise, they get my product landing page. So Google's web crawler does not see a broken link -- it sees what I want it to see, which is what I want anyone to see who isn't on their device. Ideally, I'd detect if they have the market installed, but feh, I doubt I can do that. Of all the things you can criticize Android for, nothing comes close to how poorly thought out the Market is. It's not a matter of a lack of resources. Most of the problems with it wouldn't have required more work -- just a basic understanding of what it needs to do. Like, serving up the descriptive content regardless of the platform. I presume this was a marketing decision -- but a dumb one. Really dumb. You want to SHOW OFF what's available on the market, even if you disallow actual download! Undermining and concealing the value of your own brand -- sheesh. Or setting a half-way reasonable limit on product description length. Or more than two screenshots. No extra work there, just needed a better decision. Admittedly, it might have taken an extra day or two to implement release/change descriptions. Of course, the other big issue is non-technical -- countries of availability. I won't even speculate. Overall, I suspect the Market has been viewed in Google as a lever with the device manufacturers and carriers, which seems to be the focus of their marketing. They appear to have had decent success there, in a difficult venue, so I can't find fault there. But in terms of Google, themselves, and their consideration of their marketing impact with end consumers, well... On Nov 16, 1:45 pm, Nathan <critter...@crittermap.com> wrote: > The link to your listing will return 404 on anything besides an > Android. Yes really. To get a link that will work, you might have to > use Android Zoom or another Market scraper. > > For entertainment, try an Adwords ad that links to your listing and > watch it not get approved because the url doesn't work. > > And just wait for Google to penalize your website for having a broken > link. :( > > Nathan -- 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
