One area where the App Store kicks Google Play in the teeth (in addition to gaming) is hosting a healthy selection of apps carefully tailored for the iPad. That’s a fact, Jack, but feel free to sound off in the comments if I just made you cry.
On the plus side, Google is aiming to make Android apps a sexier experience for tablet owners, with a spanking new set of guidelines. Good stuff.
The Tablet App Quality Checklist follows an article published back in July, titled Getting Your App Ready for Jelly Bean and Nexus 7.
There are 10 guideline topics in total, beginning with ‘Test for Core App Quality’. That sounds fairly obvious to me.
A couple of other highlights include ‘Optimize your layouts for larger screens’ and ‘Take advantage of extra screen area available on tablets’. Again, fairly obvious, though Google goes into a ton of detail, complete with links to related guides. It's incredibly thorough reading.
Android tablets have found somewhat of a niche with affordable 7in offerings (Google Nexus 7, Amazon Kindle Fire) though they might soon have competition from the rumoured 7.85in iPad mini.
If the rumour mill is on the money, iPad mini launch invitations will be sent out tomorrow. Stay tooned.
