Google Awards Android Dev Prizes, Introduces App Store

An anonymous reader writes "A group of Canadian engineering students was one of 10 teams to win a $275,000 prize from internet search giant Google Inc. Their program, Ecorio, gives users the ability to reduce their environmental footprint with tools that provide transit options for trips, invest in carbon reduction projects, and share their tips with other users. Other winners included a taxi location app, a price comparison app, and a settings manager than changes your settings based on your location." Google has also started talking about their plans for Android Market, which is similar to the App store used for the iPhone. Ars Technica's coverage points out a blog post by Google's Eric Chu which notes that early handsets running Android will have a beta version of Android Market enabled.

Comments

Google says to Apple "Gimmee Some-o-dat!"

[speakerbomb]

Oh yeah, Google will be quick on that one. There is no way The Goog is going to watch Apple's App Store make a million dollars a day and rake in a cool BILLION dollars in revenue next year and not respond.

As a marketing consultant, I can appreciate how easy the App Store relieves people of their burdensome credit. Just fire up the App Store on the iPhone, select one of the thousands of apps, and press the BUY button. Voila, your pre-authorized credit card is charged with a sale. And you get emailed an invoice from Apple a few days later. I've done it myself, with purchases of up to $20 in fact. Steve must know how media starved and spend-easy us iPhone users are ;)

APT Repos, Not "App Stores"

[Doc Ruby]

Android software would be much more available if it were served to machines from Debian (or Ubuntu) style APT repositories, rather than Apple style "App Stores". Not just because free software is basically more popular and available than $pay software. But also because anyone can set up an APT repo, and anyone can point their machine at it. The machines ship with a list of tested/approved repos, but the machine's admins can easily add/delete from that list. They can even make their own local repo, or one shared among a user group or developer group, or a website of fanboys.

These repos make SW deployment trivial, even with complex interdependencies (though with some exceptions when the repos and packages are managed badly). Simple, reliable SW management is perhaps Debian-style OS'es best feature, and even more important on something like a mobile "phone", that's supposed to be super-simple for even the lightest weight users to master without thinking too hard.

Since Android is supposed to be a major OSS platform, I hope it quickly gets a F/OSS repo system that all its users can easily use if they want. Because that would kill the "all-proprietary only" SW model that phones now support.

Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar?

[TheRaven64]

I have to agree with the grandparent. If the Linux devs hadn't thrown a hissy fit when OSS went proprietary and just done what every other *NIX did - forked the last open release and kept it in their kernel - then Linux would have a stable and easy to use sound API. It always amazes me that FreeBSD has had in-kernel support for multiple userspace applications playing sound at once with software or hardware mixing as appropriate for almost a decade, with a simple interface (open /dev/dsp, set a couple of ioctls for sample rate and format, write data - about four lines of code in total with no libraries beyond libc needed) and yet people keep telling me 'FreeBSD is just for servers, Linux is better on the desktop' when Linux needs horrible hacks like userspace sound daemons (which add a load of latency, and only work if everyone agrees to use the same one) to get the same functionality.