I really, really, really love Android. I have a nerdgasim every time I touch my Evo. My friends are going to refuse to spend time with me soon because all I can do is caress my Evo and babble about how wonderful it is. I am as much of an Android fan boy as one can get. That said, there is one thing that absolutely sucks about Android... the market place.
I like that Android's open market place. I have absolutely no problem with the free-for-all. My problem is the inability to sort through the free-for-all. There are a number of things that really suck about the Market.
Developers need the ability to explain why they need access to certain things. The poor Last.FM developer made a freaking awesome app and had their rating mauled because it asked for GPS access. There was a legit reason. They wanted to be able to tell you where nearby concerts were. Their rating was destroyed until they panicked added an explanation in the sparse few words the market lets you use to describe your app explaining why it wanted the access. Why not give developers a line or two for each alert they trigger to describe WHY they need access to whatever?
Spammers... holy crap. I can't recall what it was I was searching for, but I couldn't find a damn thing because one company spammed thirty thousand waving flag apps from every single freaking country in the world. Nothing like loading up page after page after page of spam from one developer. No dude... I really don't want waving flags or hot Asian girl pictures111!!!11!! I would KILL to be able to moderate an app as spam and filter the search by stars and downloads. No need to ban anything, just let people rate it into oblivion and filter out the spam. A nice Slashdot rating system would be killer. Hell, just give me the ability to remove a developer from my search results so when a search is filled with a hundred HOT ASIAN GIRLZ!!! apps I can just remove that developer from people I want to see. There desperately needs to be some sort of search control. Is there an app that lets you search the market place in a manner that is useful? It is shameful that Google, the god of search, has given us such a completely criminally horrible search function for the market place.
So, barring Google taking pity on my pleas to make the market not suck, does anyone have some app based solutions? An app that lets you search by stars and download count would solve a solid 80% of my complaints. I would just only search for apps with more than 3 stars and more than a few hundred downloads and that would kill most of the spam. There are a few websites doing app reviews, but they really are not keeping up with the torrent.
It is just so frustrating that such an awesome OS is marred by such a horrible market place. It is even more maddening that the Google, the freaking god of search and slayer of spam has such a horrible unsearchable spam filled market.
I like that Android's open market place. I have absolutely no problem with the free-for-all. My problem is the inability to sort through the free-for-all. There are a number of things that really suck about the Market.
Developers need the ability to explain why they need access to certain things. The poor Last.FM developer made a freaking awesome app and had their rating mauled because it asked for GPS access. There was a legit reason. They wanted to be able to tell you where nearby concerts were. Their rating was destroyed until they panicked added an explanation in the sparse few words the market lets you use to describe your app explaining why it wanted the access. Why not give developers a line or two for each alert they trigger to describe WHY they need access to whatever?
Spammers... holy crap. I can't recall what it was I was searching for, but I couldn't find a damn thing because one company spammed thirty thousand waving flag apps from every single freaking country in the world. Nothing like loading up page after page after page of spam from one developer. No dude... I really don't want waving flags or hot Asian girl pictures111!!!11!! I would KILL to be able to moderate an app as spam and filter the search by stars and downloads. No need to ban anything, just let people rate it into oblivion and filter out the spam. A nice Slashdot rating system would be killer. Hell, just give me the ability to remove a developer from my search results so when a search is filled with a hundred HOT ASIAN GIRLZ!!! apps I can just remove that developer from people I want to see. There desperately needs to be some sort of search control. Is there an app that lets you search the market place in a manner that is useful? It is shameful that Google, the god of search, has given us such a completely criminally horrible search function for the market place.
So, barring Google taking pity on my pleas to make the market not suck, does anyone have some app based solutions? An app that lets you search by stars and download count would solve a solid 80% of my complaints. I would just only search for apps with more than 3 stars and more than a few hundred downloads and that would kill most of the spam. There are a few websites doing app reviews, but they really are not keeping up with the torrent.
It is just so frustrating that such an awesome OS is marred by such a horrible market place. It is even more maddening that the Google, the freaking god of search and slayer of spam has such a horrible unsearchable spam filled market.
There have definitely been many threads on this subject in the past.
