Android market from a developer's point of view: What needs to be improved?

The Android market is one of the most criticized parts of the Android system. For some people it might even be a great show-stopper in competition with the iPhone. I personally prefer Android over the iPhone because of it’s openness and flexibility. Like quite a number of people using android I guess. The ones benefiting most from an open platform are the developers. They have much more freedom building and releasing their apps and can hook them into the system where they like and can let them run “when” they like (multi tasking). Hence the user has a more flexible phone and is able to install exactly the apps he/she likes to be running. Hence more people will by open (Android powered) phones. For the users it is also important to have a nice app market with screenshots a clean structure and a transparent ranking, because they don’t want to browse through thousands of apps to find something useful. These topics have been discussed often and it seems like Google is also hearing it. (Check Google’s market update blog post)

As important as a nice market front end is a good developer back end. Needless to say that developers are the drivers of modern mobile platform and especially of open ones.

Everyone that releases an app really cares about its success. Success may be monetary or in terms of user satisfaction, downloads etc. As to Android one must admit that the opportunities for monitoring the success and reacting to feedback are very limited.

I had the following frustrating experiences:

I released an app an marked it as “beta”. Instead of writing directly to me most people just gave a bad rating, sometimes with sometimes without a comment. And here the problems begin… Would there not be sites like androlib.com I would not even be aware of complaints, I would just have to sit and wait and see how my overall rating falls because there is no possibility to read the comments other than on my own country’ s market (and that only via the market front end). Luckily androlib offers the opportunity to check other countries markets. That way I tried to avoid the disaster of getting down rated within hours and quickly bugfixed my app. The next problem is, I can not interact with the user I have to sit and watch but can not have a conversation an tell them why something is like it is (e.g. because it is a beta release).

First point – User feedback

Why can’t a developer see all ratings from all countries in the developer console? And why is there no system that lets me interact with the users? A twitter or Google Wave functionality directly embedded into the marked would be nice. Even given the fact I read a complaint and fix the problem the user might already have uninstalled the app and so does not correct his/her rating. A quicker conversion might have kept him/her.

Second point – The developer “console”

The pic already demonstrates one problem: The stuff you see are the only analytics metrics you get from the dev console.

Android Developer Console

OK I am just paying 25 bugs to get into the dev programm but why do I get such a poorly equipped “console” that into the bargain looks pretty messed up on mobile chrome (why is there no mobile version?) ! The developer back end is simple and kinda easy to use but as a software developer I think I can handle a bit more functionality, like charts of app installs, retention, app ranking, similar apps and so on. This might not be a too hard thing to include! In terms of analytics there is to mention flurry but what if my app is not used online and I don’t want to bother the user with seemingly pointless permission pop-ups.

Third point – Versioning

Ok, so I pushed my beta app out, got some over thousand installs, some feedback and now want to publish a final version. What to do now? My app marked as beta still has some low rankings mostly because of bugs and lacking functionality that I already corrected or implemented. So my final app which is assumingly improved towards the beta version has a bad start if I publish it instead of the old beta version but maybe a better start than let it try to climb through the market rankings again. Also I obviously want my old loyal users to get a taste of the better final app. The point I am making here is that the ratings are often not appropriate for the current version. One might say if there is a certain amount of ratings some bad ratings are pretty irrelevant for the overall rating but for a small tool trying to overcome a critical mass (networking effects) this can be fatal for its success. I think the rating per version approach would be more useful here (kinda like iTune’s).

Forth point – Search and find

I know this topic has been discussed a lot so I keep it short but I want to stress some things. The most annoying thing both as a user and as a developer is that apps can only be found if an exact query term is being put in. How often did I have to search again and again for an app I already heard of but not remembered the correct name or spelling! I bet that happened to a lot of us. It is even more frustrating for a developer to imagine how many times people could have found and tested your app but didn’t because the searchers big fingers were not yet used to type on a software keyboard. Also a related problem is the too short length of app description text (325 chars max) allowed on the Android market. I admit a short description has it’s pros but additional tags or release notes sections would not hurt.

I read an interesting article at androidguys.com that touches app ranking in the android market which is sometimes very confusing and intransparent:

You’ve made an app that you like and put it on the market. It goes on a tear and starts climbing the charts. You find that you have 10,000 downloads, a 4 star rating, and that your app is ranked number 20 in its category. Sounds great.

Then you check the 15th ranked app, it has 5,000 downloads and a 3 star rating.

Read full article here

Fifth point – Back up your apps configuration

The Android phones are nicely synced with the Google services (Mail, Calendar, Finance, etc.) why is there no “myAndroidApps” service which lets you bring those apps installed previously to a new/resetted Android device?

What do you think? I would be pleased to hear your opinion.

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