December 13th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: AndroidOS | No Comments »
Google has announced it will be releasing a new version of Android Market within the next two week. The team didn’t only improve the UI, but also the terms and conditions for Android 1.6 and up.
The UI updates include a carousel on top for promoted apps as well as a new category layout that should improve app discovery. Google also added special categories for Widgets and Live Wallpapers. Google will move the apps to the right category by itself. Google will be adding additional categories over the next few weeks as well.
The individual app pages will also include suggestions for related content. It is also no longer necessary to browse different tabs to get all app info as Google will combine all information on one page.
Finally, Google has limited app refund time to ONLY 15 minutes! We know from rumours that EA has been putting Google under pressure for the huge time window on app refunds. We are not sure they are fully responsible for it, but we and many other developers should be very happy with this change.
Furthermore it will be possible to target devices based on their screen resolution and the maximum filesize will be lifted to 50MB. With some iPhone apps spanning over 500MB, Google still has a long way to go, but this limitation could also be in place to avoid consumers run into huge data costs as Android is still not optimized for side loading like iOS is.
