There's no pleasing some people, is there? It's not enough that we're snapping up Android phones left, right and centre; Google says we should be spending more on apps too.
Android platform manager Eric Chu says he isn't happy with the Android Market's commercial performance – in other words, how many premium paid apps the Android public is snapping up.
Chu was speaking at a San Francisco conference earlier in the week, Forbes reports, where he outlined Google's roadmap for its mobile OS going forward. And with Android set to kick on as a whole swathe of new tablets hit the market over the next few months, it's time to start cashing in.
Making it easier to discover and pay for apps is central to that strategy, and Chu spoke of plans to debut in-app payments as on the iPhone this quarter, along with developing the idea of direct billing straight to your account for contract users.
Google also says it wants developers to make better use of the Android address book – “the best social graph” – for more targeted and socially relevant in-app features, and revealed the company was increasingly getting behind HTML5 for app development.
The result, Google hopes, is richer, more flexible and personally relevant apps – ones that people will happily pay money for.
Google's Android platform manager Eric Chu has expressed disappointment with sales of paid-for Android apps at a conference in San Francisco this week.
Despite the prolific nature of the Android platform – set to grow even further as a plethora of Android tablets hit the market in 2011 – the company admits that users aren't buying enough premium apps.
Forbes quotes Chu as saying he is "not happy" with the performance of the app market in terms of sales, before going on to outline a roadmap of general Android App Market updates for 2011.
Roadmap
The first is something that has been a long time coming: in-app payments. Playing some serious catch-up with Apple's iOS, Google will finally launch an in-app payment process for Android in Q1.
Making it easy for users to find good apps is a serious problem for all the app platforms and Google says it hopes to make strides in this arena throughout the year, although it did not elaborate much on how aside from tweaking the ranking algorithm.
App developers are also being encouraged to make use of the Android address book in order to make sharing apps easier for users, particularly as it pulls in contacts from multiple sources including users' Gmail and Facebook accounts.
Ensuring that developers can make money from their efforts is essential to the success of the Android app platform; if there's no money in it, developers will move to other platforms and the market's quality will fall.
So Android owners, do yourself a favour: go and buy an Android app today.
... or search for PandaHome or Better keyboard - don't show me the 10,000 themes and add-ons first grrr
