The New Android Market brings many changes towards enhancing user experience, discoverability of applications and developer friendly changes. The new update will be rolling out to all the devices running Android 1.6 or higher.
With a focus on improving discoverability and merchandising of applications. They have introduced a new carousel on the home and category screens. Now users can quickly flip through the carousel to view the promoted applications and can immediately go to the download page for the application. As developers have been churning out great Widgets and Live Wallpapers related applications, two new categories have been introduced for Widgets and Live Wallpapers. Applications that include Widgets and Wallpapers will be automatically added to these new categories. More categories for popular applications and games will be added in the coming weeks. The app details page now includes Related content, which makes it easier for users to quickly find apps of similar type.
To enhance and streamline the browse-to-purchase experience, users can now access all the application related information on a single page without the need to navigate across different tabs. Application content rating is also being introduced so as to provide users with more information about applications they are interested in.
In this update Google has reduced the refund window of purchases done through Android Market from 24 hours to 15 minutes, saying that most users who request a refund do so within minutes of purchasing. Most of the users are going to be unhappy of this move as to try out a complex application, or something which requires you to setup things on your computer or needs signing-up, the new refund time limit is too less.
They are now introducing support for device targeting which was much needed from long before. Now developers will be able to target devices according to their screen size, screen density or GL texture compression format.
They are also increasing the maximum size for .apk files on Android Market to 50MB, so that now richer graphic games can also easily fit in.
Lets see what is more to come in Android Market space.
Keshav Gupta is a technology enthusiast. He is always on the verge of remaining updated with new technologies. By education he is a computer software engineer, and left his job in November 2009 to venture in his own interests. Now he blogs at Techgeekguy about Technology,Mobile, Computers, Software...
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