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“Brand your app, don’t just name it.” This simple tip is among the many offered up as part of a new initiative from Google to increase the quality of apps available for Android devices. The Guide to the App Galaxy by Google is a website created for developers, keeping in mind that the most technically savvy individuals aren’t always expert marketers of their own material. The well-designed website uses animations of rockets, space, and beyond to instill knowledge Google sees as crucial to developing and promoting a successful app.
Quick links provide devs with advice on promotion, monetization, analytics, and evaluation. Case studies include Angry Birds and The Weather Channel allow you to follow the journeys of some of the Android Market’s biggest successes, but Google also gives users the opportunity to create their own path to the stars.
It’s a fun, interactive site that those not interested in developing apps should find interesting as well, if only for the creative navigation that allows you to launch a rocket into space.
Ironic, Google attempting to teach marketing.
Google must be doing something right in regard to marketing.
What I would really dread is Google attempting to teach Customer Support.
Android is successful because its really good and its open nature has allowed carriers and handset makers to go hog wild on it. The Galaxy Nexus is a great example of how far behind Google is compared to Apple in marketing.
I agree with you on the tech support side.
Don’t really agree with using The Weather Channel as a case study. Unless they profiled it as a way to completely screw up by releasing a horrible, bug filled, non-useable update and then ignore the users for a couple of months. But none of that is in the site.
I know TWC sent out another update, but I’m not risking it even after the reviews from the last.
And it proved that the rating system needs some tweaks, mainly forcing users to re-eval the star rating after updates. Improved apps rarely get their users to up-rate, and poor/disastrous changes don’t cause a downgrade by the general public.
Proving that you’re the tech type that they’re targeting, who knows nothing about marketing. Marketing isn’t about usability or bugs or support. Marketing doesn’t care how big a pile of crap the item is.
In the context that I was speaking about, marketing and releasing a far from par app update had nothing to do with one another. And if the case study was put out solely for developers to learn from, TWC is still a poor choice in that they already had nearly all the known-brand market share and plenty of cash to push out a broad multi-venue ad campaign. All in all, they could have found a better example that would have better served the purpose of developers learning how to market. And I’ll assume that my negative read of your reference to me was simply a poor wording arrangement on your part, maybe your not so good a marketing.
You know what would get the quality of apps to improve? The ability to sort apps by star rating on Market (like on AppBrain), and displaying the star ratings of the apps most recent update (like on Apple’s App Store). That way, we can push the crap apps to the bottom when we browse and search, including apps that USED TO BE GOOD before the latest update destroyed the app (i.e. TuneWiki).
agreed. this is the point I brought up in my comments concerning TWC.
A good thing Google could think about is to have a second category in the Market. One for Apps and one for HQ Apps which have to pass through an inspection like Apple does it. This way you still have free or cheaper Apps from random developers but you also have professional Apps that cost a bit more. This would be good for people using apps in a professional manner who depend on a flawless well designed app. And it bring the best of both worlds together the huge variety of apps already available on Android and the Higher Quality apps that iOS users enjoy for a higher price, then the consumer can decide for which apps he or she is willing to spend the extra money for a better experience.
Except that the Apple store has a vast amount of apps-not just games-that are poorly coded, useless, suck up memory or crash. In the time I had an iDevice I d/l’ed about 700 apps, and maybe, 100-200 worked flawlessly.