Android Market Applications: 13 Is a Weird Number but Hopefully Temporary

Last week we reported that T-Mobile had a nice surprise for the T-Mobile subscribers who preordered the G1 phone before it starts shipping officially this week by delivering the phones earlier than the customers hoped. It is understandable that many such customers anticipated the delivery in excitement.

But now the blogosphere is abuzz something that looks like yet another surprise for early G1 owners – this time the surprise is from Google and a bad one at that. Android Community reports that out of 50+ application only 13 are left in the Android Market for those subscribers with the phones already delivered to download.

There were immediately a few theories as to why Google could remove the applications, including the quality check to make sure every single application works fine on Android not to disappoint initial customers. There was also a suggestion that this was done to make sure the broadband consumed on the launch date can be controlled on the new 3G network of T-Mobile. My own immediate guess was that while all the current applications are free for users to download, there may be some paid-for competitors getting ready to launch and Google wanted to introduce to the marketplace simultaneously with those that are free to build some healthy competition.

But it looks like everything is rather innocent and it was nothing but a scheduled maintenance of the Android Market itself and those applications that were not upgraded to fit the new version were removed to be upgraded and they will appear back in the marketplace soon again.

And this theory seems to be the most realistic as Google has worked closely with creators of such applications getting ready for a successful launch date – and simply removing them from the marketplace for no apparent reason could be far from a wise move, especially with some applications used heavily by Google for initial promotion of Android and G1 phone (like ShopSavvy, the application that allows the user to scan the barcode of a product and the application will find all the information about this product including better deals in shops).

But as it usually happens in the technology blogosphere we can not resist talking about something that smells like a sensation like it is true already.

Photo by skippy13 used under Creative Commons.