Google Hiring Android Devs To Close the 'Apps Gap'

jfruhlinger writes "Google is reportedly hiring Android developers specifically to boost the number of apps available for the platform. Obviously there's money to be made, but the search giant is no doubt also driven by the gap between Android and iOS apps in both quantity and quality."

Comments

Figured I'd get this out of the way...

[TheChief]

Mr. President, we must not allow a app gap!

please don't

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that we would then get awful Android applications.
My provider (Bell Canada) as an application for Android, to manage your account. It is awful. Obviously ported from the iPhone, with the ugly buttons/tabs wasting space at the bottom and the "back" button at the top left. They forgot that Android had a "menu" and a "back" button. I bet there would be even more of these if there was a tool to translate objective-C to Java. Anyway, Java is a way more popular language than Objective-C, so I don't think the lack of developers is an issue.

Obviously?

[Tharsman]

Obviously there's money to be made

As a developer, I would like to be shown what makes it so obvious. Every developer I have asked says similar, if you cant get an application that's heavily used you wont be making much money in the Android platform, and then you will very likely make most that money through advertisement.

I honestly want to see actual analysis that show that developing for Android is really an obvious money making path. I am very aware that there is no certain success in any platform. Seeing comparisons of cross-platform titles and showing the Android equivalent making more money would be the best example. Maybe the web is full of Apple Fanboi propaganda, but I just cant find any success stories in the Android Market that rival the iOS equivalents.

Re:Obviously?

[B1ackDragon]

Clearly angry birds is making money on both platforms.

I think this interview may be interesting, given the reference to Angry Birds in particular:

Peter Vesterbacka, Maker of Angry Birds Talks about the Birds, Apple, Android, Nokia, and Palm/HP

9. Why did you decide to make the Android version free and is that going to change any time soon?
“Free is the way to go with Android. Nobody has been successful selling content on Android. We will offer a way to remove the ads by paying for the app, but we don’t expect that to be a huge revenue stream.”

Note: that article is something like two months old now, things may have changed since then for them.

Re:Obviously?

[LWATCDR]

Hard to say. I have an android phone and an iPod touch. I hate to pay for apps on those devices but then I hate to pay on any device. Thing is I will pay if the app is good enough.
On the iPod Touch I think I paid for three or for apps. On my Android phone I paid for four apps.
Three are games from EA that where on sale for .99 cents. One was a podcast catcher. that was like $4. I only paid for the ipod catcher because it was the only one that I liked and did what I wanted it to do.
Some programs like Angery Birds I would pay for just to get ride of the stupid ads.Others I don't use enough to pay for.
I think it is more of a cultural thing. People on the iPhone/iPod are used to paying for stuff in iTunes. The rest of us want free because well free is free.
What I want to know is what apps are missing?
Not counting games I do not really see any big gaps in the app store for Android.
Facebook check
Twitter check
Pandora check
TuneIn Radio check
Last.FM check
email check
Gmail check
All sorts of compass and GPS apps check.
Evernote Check
Drop Box check.

So what does iPhone have that Android doesn't? Now some of the special apps like the one for OnStar and such are missing but that would take the providers allowing the app.
Maybe Google is going to offer to write them for big companies.

filter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they make they audit the existing apps and get rid of the crap.

Re:Perhaps an Objective C - Java tool?

[MBGMorden]

I don't think such a tool would be worth the effort, particularly when even good versions of such translation tools almost always need to be heavily audited to ensure functionality, and most of the time the automated code is far less efficient than the original. I suppose you could take a "it's better than nothing" view of the situation, but realistically I don't think that flooding the Android market with a bunch of poor quality translated apps is going to be their goal when tackling the problem of low quality apps.

That said, I've never noticed a problem with it personally. As an Android and iPod Touch user I've never found a gap in what I could do on one vs the other.

The ONLY thing that I find better on the iPod isn't really an app on that side: the music player. The default music player on my Android phone is clunky and hard to use. It works much, much better on the iPod. On the other hand, the podcast functionality of that built in music player pales in comparison to what I can do with DoggCatcher on my Android phone.

Cart Before Horse, Please!

[bradgoodman]

Android is the #1 shipping smartphone platform, a completely open system, with free, publicly available tools. You can do it under Windows or Linux (the later, being also free) - on cheap, commodity PCs you can buy from any vendor.

So maybe we should ask the question of exactly why it is lagging in the app department. Apple never ran out and hired a billion people to write apps - yet they have more.

Is it the language? (C-Like vs. Java)? The "sleekness" and appeal of the OS itself? The mere fact that it's been on the market longer?

I, for one, am an open-source fanatic. I work as a Linux/kernel development engineer, and think Apple is evil.

I also own an iPhone, and write iPhone apps in my spare time. Why? Personally for me, the phone and the OS are beautiful and elegant. I love the platform, and the outcome of my work - and it's easy too to make money with one appstore to have to sell it on (even if the Apple bastards take 30%).

I find Android slow, clunky, and Java-based SDK's (like Eclipse and the Blackberry dev environment) to be the same - where XCode is smoothe and elegant - even if I did have to go buy a Mac in order to develop for it!

So that's the reason why I develop for iPhone. My point though is the following: Answer the question for a majority of iPhone developers, and you'll discover the remedy to the problem - don't just think that hiring a hundred - or a thousand Android app developers will fix the gap!

I don't buy it!

[Qwavel]

With app stores having hundreds of thousands of apps, and with Google already having tons of loyal and enthusiastic developers, it seems unlikely that they would now decide to start hiring developers to write miscellaneous apps for their app store.

They know that the best way to get good apps into their store is to attract developers with a great platform, good sales figures, good dev tools, a good app store, etc. They are well aware of their weaknesses, including some aspects of their app store and platform fragmentation, and they are working on these issues.

These new app developers that they are hiring are probably going to work on some of the Google specific apps that needs (lots of) work. For example, their finance app still only supports U.S. exchanges (how do you think the rest of the world feels about that), and their Listen app has all sorts of problems and hasn't been updated in a long time. These Google apps have suffered as resources have been shifted to the core platform; now Google needs app developers to bring their own apps up to speed.

The market is at fault

[MindCrusher]

Maybe they would have more apps if the App Market place would work all over the word. Paid apps don't work in some European countries because there is no unified payment system like with Apple's App store. Although the Android user base might be larger than that of iOS Apple still has more paying customers. Google needs to see that the Market needs a serious boost in functionality. If revenue will increase developers will come.

Re:Because I'm unaware, I'll ask...

[bberens]

I have yet to find an app for Android that converts my Android phone to an iPhone 4, which is really the only app anyone could ever want. :P

Mod parent up

[TimothyDavis]

I really haven't had much use for the Android marketplace, but I did decide I wanted to check out what Angry Birds was all about. Going into the marketplace and searching for "Angry Birds" returned an absolute mess of results. As a user, I shouldn't have to weed through all of the crap to find a well-known application, especially since Google is first and foremost a search engine company.

Re:Mod parent up

[gknoy]

The irony of writing a search app for the Android market is staggering.

Re:App Inventor

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not prohibited from selling App Inventor apps in the App store. You can't make them ad supported, and you can't put any secure DRM on them, but you can sell them. It's simple.

Create a developer account.
Create a keystore

download your packaged Appl inventor app
Unpackage it
edit the manifest to fix some bugs
rebuild the package
sign it
zipalign it
upload it

Just because google doesn't have a one click way to add these apps to the market yet, doesn't mean they are preventing you.

http://simply-android.com/discussion/531/publishing-an-app-inventor-app-on-the-android-market./#Item_22

Well glad you made the topic, because,...

[AbRASiON]

Indeed there are some gaps.
Very very long story short, I've recently gone back to my iphone 4 from an Android device. Although the apps were not my primary reason for doing so, I will say I did have some difficulty finding some apps which suited my needs.

Primarily and most importantly for myself, I'm a tightass - infact a lot of nerds are. So I want a free app which will cover my needs. Oddly enough the iphone has several free RDP applications which work quite well, I use one of these at least 2 or 3 times a week and absoloutely need it.
On Android I can not for the life of me find an RDP application which supports multiple entries and lets me save them. The restrictions to the free versions are all too tight.
I don't mind ads on my phone, I don't care if there's a box as I open the app or even if I'm forced to see a static ad image for 1 or 2 seconds before the app opens, I just want a free and good RDP app. No such luck.

Also, the media playback tools are frankly, ugly rubbish. It's such a giant shame as I have a 4.3" Android phone and I prefer it to the iphone 4 picture (yep, size matters) - the resolution is still good enough on the 4.3" screen (double the iphone 3GS pixel densite) it's just the media tools pale in comparison to apple.
I suppose I should've done some research, infact yes I should have but I blindly went in and had this crazy idea that without these idiot apple restrictions, I'd have this amazingly powerful device to play media back with.
I want to be able to copy an divx / avi file (example an episode of top gear) on to the device and just plain play the thing. You know what else? I'd like to be able to play it over my SMB network if I'm at home, I have wireless, why can't I do that?
The file structure for media is ugly and gross, the device itself needs to follow a standard.
Movies should be placed in X location and _!ALL!_ Android applications should check that location (only) as default for media, period. - you should be able to add more folders in the Android OS - not per application. A nice standard so that when you try a new media player, they all know where your 'library' is and can display the data clearly and simply.
There is something similar to this in the system but it's hamfisted and messy. Many applications just ask you to navigate and browse the phone. I love that I can do that, I am still a nerd but I'm an aging nerd, I would like it simple and logical.
Furthermore the codec support, admitedly not googles fault, I know but god damnit I had to convert stupid files on the iphone with itunes and sync via a cable (gross!) but with Android it's not much better. I want to just play back my media, the device needs more codec support (apparently the Galaxy S has licensed quite a few codecs and is better - but we need consistency across the damned platform)
I could elaborate further on the media stuff and be quite specific but I'd be here for ages, I'm sure the point is clear- this is currently..'clumsy' and needs to be cleaned up, simplified and improved. This beautiful little thing has so much potential and falls short.

Podcast solutions:
If you used itunes, besides the horrible sync with PC aspect of it and the nasty UI of itunes, it does 'just work' and the podcast playback tool is leaps and bounds superior.
The consistency in the UI for a start is helpful. The rewind 30 second button? genius, the fact I get to see the podcast description and the podcast 'banner' or graphic? great. (I tried several on the android, like RDP solutions, nothing quite fit my needs right)
I do love my Android device but oddly enough it's more the concept of what it could be and the hardware I love most more than anything.
My iphone 4 has superior battery life, more reliable (at least in regards to market application upgrade and installs) it has a better UI for media playback it just falls short in the fact the screen is stupid small, it's locked down and apples ridiculous design choice of one button holds it back (4 or 5 dedicated butt

Android PDAs have no Market access in U.S.

[tepples]

Google would prefer it if devs shifted the focus from iOS to Android

Then why does Google continue to require 3G support on devices sold in the United States before a device is allowed to use the Android Market application? For all the restrictions of Apple's App Store, at least iPod touch and iPad are allowed in, unlike Archos products which are limited to AppsLib instead of Android Market..

Better searching is more important

[Daetrin]

From what i understand, the Apple App Store does a pretty good job of promoting the good apps and making it easy to find what you're looking for. The Android App Store on the other hand is a total mess. The promotion system is so-so, the categories are rather broad, and the actual search system is very primitive. If you don't know the exact name of the app you're looking for to use as a search term it can be very hit or miss.

So perhaps what Google needs is better organization and searching for the App Store, rather than new and better apps. Perhaps they could hire some kind of company that specializes in search engines to improve their app store for them?