I appreciate the insight, Al. A couple of points:
1. Of the changes that have been made to Android Market recently, they have introduced some major problems which could easily have been avoided by either a) consulting trusted 3rd party devs, or b) better testing. By making sub-standard changes they are giving competitors a chance to be the first to implement their ideas properly. 2. With regard to fixing known problems: a huge improvement would be to at least quickly acknowledge to devs when a problem has surfaced. Instead, we get bizarre situations where there are hundreds of posts on the Android Market forum before anyone from Google says anything. For example: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=3156d805935479c7&hl=en The Known Issues<http://www.google.com/support/androidmarket/developer/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs>page is an improvement but seems to be sporadically updated. It's also alarming that issues such as the serious one mentioned here seem to be ignored. Also see: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=1e575cf9e437736c&hl=en I'd like to see a channel of communication opened between a select few trusted devs (Treking, I nominate you :) ) and someone on the Android Market team so that some ideas could be run by them. Might go something like: "Instead of showing comments in reverse chronological order, we are going to show the ones with the most thumbs-up even though this might mean 2 year old comments (which are no longer relevant to the latest release) appear in the top three. Is that OK?" (there are so many problems with this, it's hard to know where to start) "We are going to make a major change to the Android Market on Friday and then not provide any support on the weekend..." (always seems to break something) "What about changing the refund period from 24 hours to 15 mins?" (Taiwanese users no longer have paid apps) (users don't like it) (devs in general, don't like it either) "We are thinking of adding an "Installs" graph on each app page..." (doesn't give any useful information to anyone) It's incredibly disheartening to see so many good suggestions on the Android Market forums, only to see a much lower standard of progress made on the real thing. It's as if they are not being read at all. Would be great to see a proper Android Market Issues page like: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list As things are, most issues and features get lost in the fog. At the very least there should be a separate forum for devs and users. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-discuss/-/GGd-U3FFQUMJ. 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.
