New Merchandising and Billing Features on Android Market

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. —Dirk Dougherty]

Following on last week’s announcement of the Android 3.0 Preview SDK, I’d like to share some more good news with you about three important new features on Android Market.

Android Market on the Web

Starting today, we have extended Android Market client from mobile devices to every desktop. Anyone can now easily find and share applications from their favorite browser. Once users select an application they want, it will automatically be downloaded to their Android-powered devices over-the-air.

Android Market on the Web dramatically expands the discoverability of applications through a rich browsing experience, suggestion-guided searching, deep linking, social sharing, and other merchandising features.

We are releasing the initial version of Android Market on the Web in English and will be extending it to other languages in the weeks ahead.

If you have applications published on Android Market, we encourage you to visit the site and review how they are presented. If you need additional information about what assets you should provide, please visit Android Market Help Center.

You can access Android Market on the Web at:

http://market.android.com/

Buyer’s Currency

Android Market lets you sell applications to users in 32 buyer countries around the world. Today we’re introducing Buyer’s Currency to give you more control over how you price your products across those countries. This feature lets you price your applications differently in each market and improves the purchase experience for buyers by showing prices in their home currencies.

We’ll be rolling out Buyer’s Currency in stages, starting with developers in the U.S. and reaching developers in other countries shortly after. We anticipate it will take approximately four months for us to complete this process.

We encourage you to watch for the appearance of new Buyer’s Currency options in the Android Market publishing console and set prices as soon as possible.

In-app Billing

After months of hard work by the Android Market team, I am extremely pleased to announce the arrival of In-app Billing on Android Market. This new service gives developers more ways to monetize their applications through new billing models including try-and-buy, virtual goods, upgrades, and more.

The In-app Billing service manages billing transactions between apps and users, providing a consistent purchasing experience with familiar forms of payment across all apps. At the same time, it gives you full control over how your digital goods are purchased and tracked. You can let Android Market manage and track the purchases for you or you can integrate with your own back-end service to verify and track purchases in the way that's best for your app.

We’ll be launching In-app Billing in stages. Beginning today, we are providing detailed documentation and a sample application to help you get familiar with the service. Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out updates to the Android Market client that will enable you to test against the In-app Billing service. Before the end of this quarter, the service will be live for users, to enable you to start monetizing your applications with this new capability. For complete information about the rollout, see the release information in the In-app Billing documentation.

Helping developers merchandise and monetize their products is a top priority for the Android Market team. We will continue to work hard to to make it the best marketplace for your to distribute your products. For now, we hope you’ll check out these new features to help you better deliver your products through Android Market.

Android 2.2 and developers goodies.

Today at Google I/O we announced that Android 2.2 is right around the corner. This is our seventh platform release since we launched Android 1.0 in September 2008. We wanted to highlight five areas in particular:

Performance & speed: The new Dalvik JIT compiler in Android 2.2 delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1 according to various benchmarks.

New enterprise capabilities: We’ve added Exchange capabilities such as account auto-discovery and calendar sync. Device policy management APIs allow developers to write applications that can control security features of the device such as the remote wipe, minimum password, lockscreen timeout etc.

Faster, more powerful browser: We have brought the V8 JavaScript engine to the Android browser as part of 2.2. This has resulted in a 2-3X improvement in JavaScript performance vs. 2.1.

Rich set of new APIs and services: New data backup APIs enable apps to participate in data backup and restore, allowing an application's last data to be restored when installed on a new or a reset device. Apps can utilize Android Cloud to Device Messaging to enable mobile alert, send to phone, and two-way push sync functionality. Developers can now declare whether their app should be installed on internal memory or an SD card. They can also let the system automatically determine the install location. On the native side, a new API now gives access to Skia bitmaps.

Additions to Android Market: Android Market provides Android Application Error Reports, a new bug reporting feature, giving developers access to crash and freeze reports from users. Developers will be able to access these reports via their account on the Android Market publisher website.

For a complete list of everything we’ve included in Android 2.2, please see the platform highlights.

Developers can now download the Android 2.2 SDK and Android NDK, Revision 4 from the Android developer site.

Tools update

We are releasing new version of the Android SDK Tools, Revision 6, Eclipse plug-in ADT 0.9.7 and Android NDK, Revision 4.

Android SDK Tools, Revision 6, Eclipse plug-in 0.9.7

These new versions include support for library projects that will help you share code and resources across several Android projects.

Android NDK, Revision 4

Workflow improvements
The new NDK brings a host of workflow improvement, from compilation, to debugging. Starting with 2.2, the NDK enables debugging native code on production devices.

ARMv7 instruction set support
This release enables the generation of machine code for the ARMv7-A instruction set. Benefits include higher performance, as well as full use of the hardware FPU for devices that support it.

ARM Advanced SIMD (a.k.a. NEON) instruction support
The NEON instruction set extension can be used to perform scalar computations on integers and floating points. However, it is an optional CPU feature and will not be supported by all Android ARMv7-A based devices. The NDK includes a tiny library named "cpufeatures" that can be used by native code to test at runtime the features supported by the device's target CPU.

For more information, please see the releases notes for the SDK Tools, ADT, and NDK.

As I said at the beginning, Android 2.2 will be here soon, and some devices will get the update in the coming weeks. I invite application developers to download the new SDK and tools and test your applications today.

Check out the video below to learn more about Android 2.2.

Knowing is half the battle

As a developer, I often wonder which Android platforms my applications should support,especially as the number of Android-powered devices grows. Should my application only focus on the latest version of the platform or should it support older ones as well?

To help with this kind of decision, I am excited to announce the new
device dashboard. It provides information about deployed Android-powered devices that is helpful to developers as they build and update their apps. The dashboard provides the relative distribution of Android platform versions on devices running Android Market.

Android Platform Percentage of Devices 1.1 0.3% 1.5 27.7% 1.6 54.2% 2.0 2.9% 2.0.1 14.8%

The above graph shows the relative number of Android devices that have accessed Android Market during the first 14 days of December 2009.

From a developer's perspective, there are a number of interesting points on this graph:

• At this point, there's little incentive to make sure a new application is
  backward compatible with Android 1.0 and Android 1.1.
• Close to 30% of the devices are running Android 1.5. To take advantage of this significant install base, you may consider support for Android 1.5.
• Starting with Android 1.6, devices can have different screen densities & sizes. There are several devices out there that fall in this category, so make sure to adapt your application to support different screen sizes and take advantage of devices with small, low density (e.g QVGA) and normal, high density (e.g. WVGA) screens. Note that Android Market will not list your application on small screen devices unless its manifest explicitly indicates support for "small" screen sizes. Make sure you properly configure the emulator and test your application on different screen sizes before uploading to Market.
• A new SDK for Android 2.0.1 was released two weeks ago. All Android 2.0 devices will be updated to 2.0.1 before the end of the year, so if your application uses features specific to Android 2.0, you are encouraged to update it to take advantage of the latest Android 2.0.1 API instead.

In summary, Android 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0.1 are the 3 versions of the platform that are deployed in volume. Our goal is to provide you with the tools and information to make it easy for you to target specific versions of the platform or all the versions that are deployed in volume.

We plan to update the dashboard regularly to reflect deployment of new Android platforms. We also plan to expand the dashboard to include other information like devices per screen size and so on.

Some News from Android Market

I'm pleased to let you know about several updates to Android Market. First, we will soon introduce new features in Android Market for Android 1.6 that will improve the overall experience for users. As part of this change, developers will be able to provide screenshots, promotional icons and descriptions that will better show off applications and games.

We have also added four new sub-categories for applications: sports, health, themes, and comics. Developers can now choose these sub-categories for both new and existing applications via the publisher website. Finally, we have added seller support for developers in Italy. Italian developers can go to the publisher website to upload applications and target any of the countries where paid applications are currently available to users.

To take advantage of the upcoming Android Market refresh, we encourage you to visit the Android Market publisher website and upload additional marketing assets. Check out the video below for some of the highlights.

Android Market update: priced applications for US users

Last Friday, we enabled developers to upload priced apps and saw a flurry of activity in the days that followed. Today, it is my pleasure to let you know that we have begun the phased rollout of priced applications to T-Mobile G1 users in the US. Once the service is enabled on their devices, T-Mobile G1 users will be able to see the priced apps immediately without the need to reboot. For more details on this update to Android Market, please see last week's blogpost.

Android Market update: support for priced applications

I'm pleased to announce that Android Market is now accepting priced applications from US and UK developers. Developers from these countries can go to the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish to upload their application(s) along with end user pricing for the apps. Initially, priced applications will be available to end users in the US starting mid next week. We will add end user support for additional countries in the coming months.

We will also enable developers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain to offer priced applications later this quarter. By the end of Q1 2009, we will announce support for developers in additional countries. Developers can find more information about priced applications in Android Market at http://market.android.com/support/

Google Checkout will serve as the payment and billing mechanism for Android Market. Developers who do not already have a Google Checkout merchant account can easily sign up for one via the publisher website.

Also, Android Market for free applications will become available to users in Australia starting February 15th Pacific Time and in Singapore in the coming weeks. Developers can now make their applications available in these countries via the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish.

We look forward to seeing more great applications on Android Market.

Android Market: An Alternative way to market our Android Program

Today i visit android developer blog and found article about Android Market. It is a place for user to browse applications have been developed with android and for now it is free to download them. For Developer, It is a chance to publish their work. And in the future They can distribute a paid application.

User that have Android Phone can rich their phone app by download it, and maybe try it before buy one.

This place would be an increased place day by day. As developer will make it as a chance to distribute their applications whether it is a paid application or a free application. For placing an application, Developer will be charge a fee $25 for first time only. Once registered, the application can be downloaded by user without further validation or approval.

I think $25 just a personal guarantee for developer's resposibility for their application, and they will have 70% of paid application bought by user.

Anyway, I see that Android Market is a chance for both developers and users.
Congrat to Android Market.

Android Market: Now available for users

Last month I outlined some details around Android Market. Today, Android Market launched for users to download applications along with the first Android-powered phone—the T-Mobile G1.

With Android Market, users can easily download apps to their Android-powered phone. Users can also rate the apps they've downloaded and leave comments. These users' ratings along with anonymous usage statistics help determine how apps are ranked and presented within Android Market.

If you're a developer, you will be able to register and upload your applications starting next Monday, 2008-10-27, when we've wrapped up a few final details. In order to make sure that each developer is authenticated and responsible for their apps, you will need to register and pay a one time $25 application fee. Once registered, your apps can be made available to users without further validation or approval.

Starting in early Q1, developers will also be able to distribute paid apps in addition to free apps. Developers will get 70% of the revenue from each purchase; the remaining amount goes to carriers and billing settlement fees—Google does not take a percentage. We believe this revenue model creates a fair and positive experience for users, developers, and carriers.

There are already over 50 apps available in Android Market today. You can view a showcase of some of these apps—which include multimedia, location-based tools, barcode scanners, travel guides and games—at http://www.android.com/market/. Now that Android Market is live and ready for contributions, we hope to see developers adding their own compelling apps starting next week.

In the coming months, we'll continue to roll out additional tools and enhancements to Android Market. We also expect to see additional Android-powered devices rolling out by different carriers around the world. Starting today, you can get a device, test your apps on it, and get them ready for upload. On Monday, to share your app with the world, simply register, upload your application and publish it. It's really that easy. I look forward to seeing what you bring to the Market.

Update: As of Monday morning (2008-10-27), http://market.android.com/publish is now available for developers to publish their apps on Android Market.

Android Market: a user-driven content distribution system

When we talk to developers, a common topic is the challenge of getting applications in the hands of users. That's why today I'm happy to share early details of Android Market—an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google's expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.

Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term "market" rather than "store" because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.

I also wanted to share some early details to help with planning your efforts so that you can be ready as our partners release the first Android-powered handsets. Developers can expect the first handsets to be enabled with a beta version of Android Market. Some decisions are still being made, but at a minimum you can expect support for free (unpaid) applications. Soon after launch an update will be provided that supports download of paid content and more features such as versioning, multiple device profile support, analytics, etc. Below are some screenshots that illustrate some of the security features and workflow.

With the addition of a marketplace, the Android ecosystem is becoming even more robust. I am incredibly energized by the support and amazing content I've seen so far. We will share more details as they are available and I look forward to working with many of you in the coming months.