Android Market: What We Know and What We Should Expect

So the first day of G1 phone for T-Mobile official shipping is coming to its end soon and the first owners have already started playing with their shiny new toys (well, maybe not exactly shiny but at least new and supposedly rewarding in terms of software).

And since this phone is about the software and not about the looks, I thought I’d summarize the details for what we now know and what we should expect on the Android Market, the marketplace where the applications for Android-based devices - both the T-Mobile G1 and whatever new devices launched in the future - will be distributed by the developers for free or for a fee.

After a huge discussion earlier this week about possibility of Google censoring applications away from Android Market (which proved to be the result of a scheduled maintenance and upgrade of the market that involved upgrade of the applications as well), the Android Market has been officially opened today and every happy T-Mobile subscriber who is also a G1 phone owner can now access the market to get the free applications available there for now. By the way, there is a regular website where everyone can see the apps available on the marketplace with screenshots and descriptions without even owning a G1 phone simply using your browser.

To make it easier for all the new users to find the best applications, Android Market allows users to rate applications they have downloaded and this information along with anonymous usage statistics is used to rate the applications and choose the best ones to push them to new users.

Right now Android Market features over 50 applications from those developers Google’s team worked closely with to prepare for the launch date. But since the Android Market is positioned as an open marketplace, new applications submitted by other developers will arrive soon. Developers are invited to start submitting their apps as soon as next Monday, October 27. This delay is explained with the necessity to fix some final details with the marketplace.

All the developers that are willing to submit their applications to the marketplace will need to pass a one-time authentication procedure once (which involves paying a fee of $25). But once the developer is registered, there will be no need to go through the process again and all the submitted applications will appear in the Android Market immediately without any further verifications or approvals involved.

Today the Android team has also explained exactly how the Android Market will work for developers who want to sell their applications on the marketplace instead of offering them as free downloads. First of all, paid applications will not make their appearance on the Android Market until some time in the first quarter of 2009 when all the functionality is ready to make it possible.

While there was previously a perception that developers submitting their applications to the Android Market will keep 100% of the revenue generated with sales, the reality has proved to be a little different: while Google will actually not earn anything from sales happening on the Android Market, developers will receive the same 70% share as they do on Apple’s App Store for iPhone owners while the remaining 30% will go to the carriers and billing settlement fee.

So both Googl and Apple offer very similar conditions in terms of money and revenue sharing as developers will get the same 70% of what they sell. So I think the intrigue will be in where the quality control works better - the Apple style or the Google style. With Apple’s App Store every application needs to get an approval from Apple and we have seen cases where useful applications were declined because they were viewed as competing to Apple’s own functionality available on the iPhone. To the contrary, Android Market is launched based on a concept of a truly open marketplace where developers will only need to pay a small one-time fee to be admitted - so the only quality control here is the community of Android-based phone users who will review and rate the applications they use. It will no doubt be interesting to watch if human-powered control can prove to be working fine for such a large-scale project.