Co-Written By Sherwinator and Jay Booshay
The Android Market is the major conduit for Android users to download applications for their smartphones and tablets. Every day, users download hundreds of thousands of apps a day. A few months ago, Android altered the user interface of its official market. The Android Market is now reminiscent to the design and layout of Windows Phone 7, in that it implements a “tiles” based system. Users can swipe their screen left, right, up, or down to reach different categories, whether they are top free apps, top paid apps, sports, news, entertainment, or any other genre of application.
Furthermore, this tile based system is now universal across Android OS 2.3 up to 4.0 on both smart phones and tablets. Even the Honeycomb (3.0) version is the same as the phone version, albeit in a slightly different layout, bridging the huge divide between OS 2 and 3 for Android.
The new tile system has been deemed controversial at best by critics. What was intended to be a simpler, yet more elegant user interface, in actuality, could be considered to be convoluted and based on an unnecessarily complicated hierarchal structure. In any event, the search feature still exists, and is probably the easiest method a user can utilize in order to find the app or type of app that they are looking for. The Android Market is by far the largest market for Android applications available, however, as of recent, several new markets are appearing on the internet which offer users unique advantages over the official Google Android Market.
The Amazon Market is the 2nd most frequently used market on Android devices. Offering a very similar total amount of apps and games, most of the apps in the Android Market are also in Amazon. However, Amazon offers a very enticing feature – the “one free app per day” in the market. Sometimes, Amazon offers apps up to $20 for free – a great deal for some of them. The apps are hit or miss each day, but generally, if you check every day, you will find some great deals.
However, I find the Amazon Market less user friendly that the related Android Market. The app pages are more complicated to search through and don’t offer all the info at once, requiring you to navigate to a different page. The Android Market has one page per app with all the pertinent information easily accessible.
Between these 2 markets, you should have no problem finding the apps that you want.
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3 Comments
It isn’t really everything you pay a guy, but what he costs you that counts.
Many men speak to failure because of their not enough persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
Wow! Did you program yourself or a plugin type thingy? Bloody brilliant! Been wanting to get going on this for a project of mine.
I’ve been tinkering with the android sdk for awhile now, with the goal of publishing somethings. One of the first apps I made was a spirit level. I thought this would be a good way to experiment with the accelerometers. It turns out that making a spirit level for a first app was a poor choice. There are already a bazillion apps like it, both free and paid.Even though this type of app has a limited audience and the market is completely over saturated, I decided to move ahead with it anyway. I figured out how to make the app; I might as well figure out how to publish it. I re-thought the design, put some polish on it and I think I came up with something original. Outside of friends and family that I coerce into buying and rating this, I don’t expect too many people to want to buy this type of app since so many are already free. The thought process was to get something published and try to discover any pitfalls along the way.Anyway, if you want to check it out, it is called Arcane Widgets on google play. I tried to think what a medieval spirit level would look like.viallevelscreenshotcropped.jpgbowllevelscreenshotcropped.jpg