By The (actual) Android Market is now officially opened to developers from far and near lands to submit their Android Applications for publication! Yup, its another landmark day for Google, Android, the OHA and of course T-Mobile who should see an incredibly influx of new applications available on their G1.
And for G1 owners that of course means lots and lots of fun, exciting and useful things will start popping up in that little robot shopping bag. Clear out the rest of your week and make way for whole lot of application downloading and testing.
For those that aren’t able to clear off their entire schedule, we understand. The best alternative is to stay glued to phandroid.com and join the discussion at AndroidForums.com and you’ll have a front row seat as it all unfolds.
And developers… if you missed the link above, let me make that easy for you. Submit your applications for publication here: http://market.android.com/publish
Making developers pay to publish free only software (until first quarter) is a jack-in-the-ass.
Developers can submit their application for download on the Android Forums market at http://androidforums.com/market
It allows for categorization, screenshots, summary, download links, upload of APK and all that jazz. We’d love for developers who DON’T want to ante up that $25 to submit their apps to us. And for those that DO ante up the $25… STILL submit your apps to AF!
There is overhead that goes along with maintaining the market and transferring all that data… especially considering many of the applications are or will monetized with some form of advertising, I think $25 is a small price to pay. It probably doesn’t even cover the costs that it takes to host/manage the files/apps. In addition, it helps to filter out a lot of trouble makers who might otherwise try to submit nonsense, non-working apps, viruses, spam, etc…
I believe (if I read it correctly before) that the $25 is also a one time fee for unlimited applications… If it was 100% free then there would probably be a higher chance of some bored college student putting a malicious application on the android market. $25 isn’t that much considering how many people will be able to easily download your application.
i think you are all missing the point. it isnt about the money, but the security in verifying the identity of the publisher through (e.g. credit card network). Forcing developers to essentially sign in with credentials in this manner ties the app to a social security number, financial history, etc… making it MUCH less likely malicious code appears.
Yeah I think Jonathan has the right idea, similar to when gmail started letting people register on their own, it asked for your mobile phone number and sent you a text message to confirm the account. Personally I think they should have stuck with this method, almost everyone that would need email has a cell phone, and it would reduce automated signups and what not. Especially if the captcha was sent via MMS ;)