I would say junky apps would include Themes, Background Wallpapers and Content as apps.
Themes are everywhere, for home screen replacements I don't even have installed. They aren't spam, I'm sure many of them are actually reasonably decent and shouldn't be removed from the market. But I think they should when uploaded to the market be required to put in some kind of "requires aHome to be installed". And the end user's market should have a setting for "Hide add-ons for not installed apps". And while apps like Locale, the big draw is the number of plugins it has for it, so if users didn't see that they might not understand how big that ecosystem is, so having that option be off by default would be ok with me (even though I think most users would prefer it on) The Background Wallpapers and Content as apps is where someone creates an app that does nothing more than say, show 1 funny image (as opposed to connect to a remote site and allow users to browse through a whole content set). Or the app is just a scanned version of a comic book, etc. For one thing, it would benefit the user the most if content providers adopted a sub-platform for distribution that wasn't the market (but I think billing, and getting paid is something hard to do so I don't see this happening). But it would be better if people downloaded some e-Reader type application off the market, and then bought comic books through that application. Better user experience, a user who wants 1000 comic books on his/her phone doesn't have an app drawer that is ungodly, etc. Since it's unrealistic that the above will ever happen, I don't know how much thought went into the market categories. Did they do market research to figure out what the top N categories were for applications and games? Or did some person out there just pick them out of a hat? But a good temporary solution is stuffing these dumb content apps into their own categories and allowing users to have a filter settings in the market. So that they can say "Filter out the following categories when browsing" and "Filter out results in the following categories while searching". Then you could even have a parental control there to assist with the Girly apps. Then the only remaining part of the system is what to do when the spammy app makers don't categorize or tag their apps correctly. And the solution there is to make app developers sign an agreement that states that they understand that their submitted categorizations etc. are only hints to the market, and that final meta-data is decided by some kind of voting/ranking/wiki community style. Market needs vast improvements.. soon. -E On Apr 30, 8:34 am, Shane Isbell <[email protected]> wrote: > What kinds of junky paid apps are there on the Android Market? I know > slideshows of pretty girls is one type of junky app. Are there any other > types that flood the market, distracting from the higher quality paid apps? > As developers, if there were types of apps you'd like to see stripped from > the Android Market, what kind would they be? > > Thanks, > > -- > Shane Isbell (Founder of > ZappMarket)http://twitter.com/sisbellhttp://twitter.com/zappstorehttp://zappmarket.com > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Android Discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group > athttp://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
