Introduction

Before having a look at Nokia’s Ovi Store and their new flagship model, N97, let’s just say that we also have HTC Magic for testing, which is an Android phone and so we could finally check out the application store called Android Market. This, just like Ovi Store, is trying to reach up to the heights of the first and best Apple App Store. Let’s see how much chance it has.

Of course we mostly consider the users’ perspective as it is very important to know in the case of an online software store who can buy apps and how. Besides these it’s also necessary to check out free applications, the traffic of the store, how user-friendly the user interface is, how fast is the installation procedure, how does it handle software updates and what tools do the developers have. Before taking the Android Market to pieces, let’s say a couple of words about what does the expression online application store mean.

An online application store is a kind of virtual market where users can choose from categories of programs, download them directly to their phone and pay for the software with a credit card, coupons, text messages or directly through their carrier, using their billing system. These last two features can usually be done automatically by the online store’s framework, after the user enables it. The online catalog, the servers in the background and the server’s software are operated by the manufacturer, content is offered by developers, the network infrastructure, necessary for reaching the customers and for the downloads, are offered by the network operator, while billing tasks are accomplished by the handset’s manufacturer and the carrier. The greatness of this solution is that developers are freed from the burdens of promoting and distributing their software, while customers can access the applications in an extremely simple way. Of course advertising is necessary in most of the cases, so we can come across editors who cooperate with multiple developers – in this case of course developers end up with somewhat less money made from the sold games, but thanks to the effective marketing it is possible to make the product much better selling than it were if sold under their own brand name.

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!