The Android Market doesn't give huge amounts of information to application publishers - in fact, all it really gives us is the number of downloads of our apps, and the number of active installs. As of this week, my HK Weather Alert app has reached over 3000 downloads and 1000 installs, which I think is pretty decent. I really do wonder why people are bothering to uninstall it, to be honest, since it's pretty small and harmless, but that's up to them. Just to update on where it's up to, I've put out three releases recently, each with one change, and I've got a couple more things I'm interested in:
- New icons
- A few users complained that the old icons, which were on a transparent background, were invisible on the HTC Hero when the icon itself was black. I've updated all the icons now to have a black background (and white foreground where appropriate) which should have dealt with that problem.
- Broken alerting
- Just to explain, the app reads from a part of the Observatory website which is easy for software to read from, but not designed for that - it's an RSS feed with relatively unstructured content. That means that when they change their site, it's quite possible for them to break my app. I had to update a few weeks ago to deal with that, and I've tried to make things a bit more robust in the meantime so simple changes might not break my app as easily.
- Optional persistent notifications
- I had an email from Vincent Wong last week, asking me to make the notifications persistent, so they wouldn't go away when you click the "clear notifications" button - it's something I had been thinking about, but he prompted me to actually do it. The option is in there now, and it seems to be working well.
- More network robustness
- At the moment, if there's a network problem when the app tries to check for alerts, it'll decide that since it can't check, there can't be any alerts, and it clears any existing notifications. If it then succeeds in checking the next time, it'll flash the notifications up again (and vibrate/make a sound, if you've set those options) even though the alerts haven't changed. We all know that mobile data networks aren't 100% reliable, and that the Observatory website has a habit of falling over when things get busy, so I need to make my app deal with this better.
- Alert filters
- A lot of people really only care about a few alerts - typhoons and rainstorms, mainly - so I'm planning to add an optional alert filter which will allow you to choose which alerts you want to be notified about, and ignore the others. Coming soon!
The other thing I'm going to add - I'm going to add it here as well. Unfortunately, the Android Market is still only distributing free apps in Hong Kong, but I'm sure that plenty of my users would happily donate a few dollars to thank me for my software - right? Since Google won't let me sell the app - or more likely, have a free and 'donate' version, PayPal is the next best thing:
Any donations are very welcome, and will help me stay interested in making sure the app keeps working in the future, not to mention any other new features. Thank you for your support!
Before I start - 'the Market' is the Android Market, the official-but-not-exclusive app store for Android. Unlike the Apple iPhone App Store, the best known the the current crop of app stores, the Android Market is pretty open - anyone can sign up, anyone (within geographic limitations) can sign up to sell apps, and once you're signed up, you can push a new or updated app in a dew seconds, with no approval or delay. That's a good thing in many ways - for example, I've pushed multiple bugfix releases of my main app in a single day when I had to - but it also means that there's a lack of control, not so much for quality as for outright abuse. Google do have the right, and ability, to block individual apps or developers from the market, and there are a few cases where I really think they should be a bit more active at preventing abuse.
There is one serial abuser who stands out above all the rest, and a couple of others who are obviously breaking the spirit, if not the letter of the Market terms and conditions. There are also a few borderline cases, where there is definitely some abuse going on, but not necessarily enough to be worth taking action on.
Khalid Sheikh aka Perfect Acumen, now running under the name Sapphire Apps is by far the worst offender. He was famously booted from the iTunes app store after their supposed approval process allowed him to publish 943 apps, about 1.25% of the total published apps. Presumably, he's had to change his name in the Market twice because his previous accounts have been closed, but given that it only costs $25 to open a Market account as a published, and the apparent lack of oversight which has allowed him to return, he'll just keep coming back.
He's a spammer because of the volume of apps, the fact that most of them are priced entirely inappropriately at $5 or so, and most importantly because of the content of the apps. As research for this post, I've just bought 'Sexy Ladies Angelina 2008', which is an entirely typical app, and it's disgusting - not because it's treating a beautiful woman as an object to be sold, although it does that too, but because it's US$4.99 for an application consisting entirely of 15 pictures of Ms. Jolie, complete with next and previous buttons. That's it. That's all there is, for $4.99.
If it was just that one app, I'd call him an idiot, but not an abusive spammer and scammer. There are hundreds of them, literally, all targeting different 'Sexy Ladies', all presumably exactly the same program with a different name and different photos. He got kicked out of the iTunes store, officially, because there's no way he has permission from the owners of the photos to sell copies of them, but frankly, he should have been kicked out - and he should be kicked out of the Android Market, permanently - for being a spammer, and scammer, and a bastard.
Oh... must remember to refund the app. Don't want to give the bugger any of my hard-earned!
IndiaNIC are probably the closest to Khalid, although close is a relative term. They've also resurfaced recently under a new name, presumably because they were no longer welcome using their original account, and they are now known as "Apps Publisher". Their scam is simpler than Khalid's - they publish ebooks on the Market, one app per book, and charge a small fee for each one. Not much of a scam there, except for the fact that the vast majority, possibly all, of the books they're selling are out-of-copyright public domain books. In other words, they're selling free books for a dollar a time, and flooding the market with well over 100 of them. More annoyingly, a lot of them are religious books, which deserve more respect than they are given.
Keytel Co. Ltd. aka Shin Hiraide aka Negroni - let's face it, publishing under multiple names, particularly at the same time, is a pretty clear sign of a spammer. Well over 200 apps, as usual all identical with different media, as usual almost certainly not paying any royalties or licensing fees on the media in question. In this case, their single app displays photos when you finish a call, which seems pretty pointless to me anyway, and the only difference is which photos it displays. A twist here is that the apps are all(?) free, which makes it hard to work out what they think they're going to achieve, really.
M STAR LLC are an interesting case. They have a number of 'calculator' apps, each domain-specific, like a Probability Calculator, a Concrete Calculator, a Piston Speed Calculator and so on. They could probably be combined into one app, some are free, some are not and, well, they're not really all that spammy. What makes them spammy is the fact that once or twice a week, at least, they push out updates to all (or nearly all) of their apps. Since updates show up alongside new apps, that has the effect of getting their apps into users' views a couple of times a week. I really really doubt that their Probability Calculator was so buggy that they needed to release 10s of updates for it...
MGeek, UK Android Apps and Browser are three developers who are effectively doing the same thing - releasing simple wrappers around third-party websites (often the 'mobile editions') as individual apps. In many/most cases, they are also using the name and/or logo of the site they're wrapping without permission, giving a false impression that these are official apps from sports teams, websites, news outlets and so on.
These are not the only offenders, but they are the most obvious ones I've seen. The Android Market has many problems, some of which may be solved or at least eased with the upcoming 1.6 release - but it seems like spam will be around for at least a while, and will doubtless expand if/when the Market grows and there is really serious money to be made. While the openness of the Market is a major bonus, as I said above, a bit more enforcement would certainly not go amiss. We don't know how many genuinely pornographic, malicious or otherwise obviously 'evil' apps are blocked or banned, but I'd say it's not quite enough - yet.
All comments are taken from the HK Weather Alert page at Cyrket, the closest thing there is to a proper web interface to the Android Market. Since the Market doesn't allow developers to respond to comments, and there simply isn't enough room in the software description, I've decided to reply here:
- Support hk local. Can u also make a program for hk news rss?
Lam (2009-06-26 13:42:40)
- Thanks Lam. I'm not planning on doing a News app, no, sorry. I wanted the weather alerter myself, which is why I wrote it, but there are already plenty of other RSS readers out there. I use and recommend Newsrob.
- Support local apps, but it's not work!
Raymond (2009-06-26 11:16:05)
- Sorry to hear that Raymond. It works for me, and for other people, but if you could email me I'd like to try to fix it for you.
- Support local apps. Hope next version can be loaded automatically with system startup.
cHuEn (2009-06-25 11:45:19)
- It was a good idea, and thanks to you I added support for starting with system boot a few versions back
- Support hk software
James (2009-06-19 01:09:46)
- Yes! Not much more to say...
- how to use it? i installed, opened & set it to refresh every 15 min., but nothing happens
Alan (2009-06-17 08:11:49)
- It's sunny and warm right now, but not too hot - so there are no warnings issued. If you've got the app running in the background and the Observatory do issue a warning, you should get an alert popping up in your notification bar to let you know.
- support app for HK local. keep it up!!!
Alkit (2009-06-15 17:17:27)
- Thank you, I will!
I'm happy to answer questions or comments about my apps - either leave a comment on the Market (with lots of stars!) or email me, and I'll try to help, or at least answer...