[LINK] Why does Firefox send non-URL text in the location bar

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Robin writes,

> People who write software should be wiser and smarter than average
> users, and should do the users a favour by not allowing or encouraging
> patterns of usage which are contrary to their interests ..


Agreed, Robin. And, surely, this would be normal professional behaviour.

However with the current worldwide growth of developer-app-marketplaces,
such professional care regarding 'rouge coding' could be a forlorn hope. 

Eg, Android Market, and soon, for example ...


Welcome to the Amazon Appstore Developer Program

 https://developer.amazon.com/welcome.html

* Powerful Marketing Features: Market your apps to tens of millions of 
customers using Amazon’s proven marketing and merchandising capabilities 

* Simple Account Management: Submit your apps using the portal’s self-
service workflow, track approval status in real-time, and generate custom 
sales reports 

* Join the developer program now, and we’ll waive the $99 program fee for 
your first year!

-- (And ..)

Amazon Appstore Developer Portal

by Jason Kincaid, Jan 5th, 2011 
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/amazon-android-app-store-2/


Today, Amazon has launched their developer-facing part of the store, 
inviting devs to submit their applications so that they’re ready when the 
app store is ready for its consumer debut later this year (Amazon isn’t 
giving a firm date on the full launch). 

The developer portal is at http://developer.amazon.com

It’s going to bring some very interesting dynamics to the way Android 
applications are purchased and distributed. 

In some senses, this is the Android equivalent of Apple’s App Store — 
even more so than Google’s official Android Market.

I spoke with Aaron Rubenson, category leader for Amazon Mobile Services, 
and Ameesh Paleja, general manager for the Engineering Division of Mobile 
Services, about the new store, and it clearly has the potential to be a 
big deal.

First, some background for those who don’t follow Android too closely. 

All Google-endorsed Android devices ship with the Android Market, along 
with a suite of other Google-made applications like Gmail. Android Market 
is a lot like Apple’s App Store with a few key differences: it doesn’t 
have an approval system, so developers can quickly submit and iterate on 
their applications. It also tends to have a lot of junky applications 
that Apple would reject — things that crash on launch on certain devices, 
or apps with that occasionally have features that don’t work as expected. 

While Google’s terms do require descriptions to be accurate, the general 
attitude is to let the market decide what works, and it surfaces the top 
rated applications (most of the time) while letting the junk sink.


Amazon is taking an approach that is more in line with Apple’s. 

Developers who wish to appear on Amazon’s store have to get approval 
(Amazon says that the process is currently taking about a week). And 
Amazon is going to have slightly more stringent guidelines: your 
application has to work properly (i.e. it can’t crash right off the bat) 
and it has to do what you say it does. It also has to be safe. 

Android Market has many of these same requirements, but the difference 
here is that Amazon checks apps before they’re deployed to its store, 
while Google does so after problematic applications are reported.

However, unlike Apple’s screening policies (which were largely a mystery 
for years and are still pretty wishy-washy), Amazon says it’s going to 
take a more liberal stance as far as what’s allowed on the store. Porn 
and illegal apps are not allowed, but your satire apps should be okay. 
And developers won’t have to make any changes to their .apk files, 
either — it sounds like you can upload the same ones to both Google’s and 
Amazon’s marketplaces (neither has any exclusivity requirements).

The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed 
to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where 
developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains 
full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a 
bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List 
Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a 
variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and 
you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry 
standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, 
or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.

The bottom line here is that Amazon will be offering discounts on some 
applications (possibly making them much cheaper than the same application 
on Android Market or elsewhere). That sounds like it could be a recipe 
for frustration for some developers, but Rubenson and Paleja say that 
they’re going to do everything they can to maximize the amount of money 
developers make, and that sometimes that involves adjusting pricing. They 
also say that Amazon has an incentive to keep developers happy — and that 
developers can remove their apps from the store with ten day’s notice. 

We’ll have to wait and see if the system works.

So why, aside from these pricing differences, would consumers want to use 
this Amazon App Store at all? There are a few answers to that question.

The first is that there are manufacturers making Android devices that 
decide not to partner with Google to offer the official suite of Google 
applications (including Android Market). Amazon is happy to offer their 
store to these manufacturers, and it will work on any Android device 
version 1.6 or up. So if, for example, Facebook releases its own flavor 
of Android down the line, they could include Amazon’s App Store.

Reason number two: Amazon says that it can offer recommendations using 
the technology that already exists on Amazon.com. This includes the 
obvious example of showing applications that are similar to each other, 
but Amazon will also be looking for correlations between physical 
products and apps — it might start recommending a popular baseball app to 
someone browsing for a baseball bat, for example. And it’s going to be 
promoting these applications as users browse Amazon.com.

Amazon says it’s premature to talk about what the store itself will look 
like, but they did share a few details about the consumer experience. 
First, payments unsurprisingly will be done using Amazon’s one-click 
payment system (which already has tens of millions of credit cards on 
file), though developers can integrate whatever transaction system they 
want into the app itself.

Customers will be able to browse through applications from their phone or 
on Amazon.com using their desktop computers, and they’ll be able 
to ‘send’ applications they buy to their mobile device. This sounds 
similar to what Google showed off at Google I/O, but with one minor 
caveat: the apps won’t actually be pushed and installed immediately, it 
sounds like you’ll have to fire up the Amazon application to do that.

So how will people actually get access to this Amazon marketplace from 
their Android device? This is going to prove a bit tricky for some users —
 Amazon will offer a walkthrough instructing users on how to do this, but 
it will require you dig into the settings menu on the device and allow 
installation from “Unknown Sources”. It’s easy to find if you know what 
you’re doing, but it sounds a bit scary. However, Amazon is also in talks 
with various partners, and we’ll likely be seeing plenty of applications 
shipping with the market pre-installed.

Now, Amazon isn’t the only company that’s making alternative Android App 
Stores — Verizon is also doing one of its own, and there will surely be 
more to follow. But Amazon is in a position to establish itself as the de 
facto non-Google App Store — and that could prove to be very important. 
As Kevin Marks wrote recently (and we discussed further), Android is 
going to increasingly fragment into flavors that aren’t as closely tied 
to Google, and we’ll start seeing more alternative versions of the 
core ‘Google Apps’. Amazon’s App Store would fit in nicely as one part of 
this alternative suite.

This will also bring pricing battles over the same applications into the 
equation (which hasn’t really been possible when app distribution is 
monopolized by a single storefront). And, yes, it could lead to some user 
confusion, though Amazon has a strong incentive to keep this as 
straightforward as it can. 

Make no mistake — this isn’t going to replace Google’s Android Market by 
any means. Google’s store will have better international support for some 
time (Amazon is US-only at launch) and it will still be shipping on 
plenty of phones by default. But given how many Android devices are going 
to be out there in the near future (they’re activating over 300,000 a 
day), there’s certainly going to be enough customers to keep more than 
one store in business. 

I asked a few times about timing for the consumer launch but couldn’t get 
anything more specific than “this year”. However, the team did say that 
the mobile storefront is being built with tablets in mind, so my guess is 
that we can expect this to launch after Android tablets running Honeycomb 
are on the market (which will probably be around April or later).

I asked the Amazon team how Google felt about the launch — there was an 
audible chuckle, and they said something about Android being on an 
amazing growth trajectory and that they were fond of its openness.

Reached for comment, Google gave this statement: "Android is an open 
platform – and entities other than Google are free to create their own 
content and marketplaces, much like the web."

I bet they’re thrilled.

--

Cheers,
Stephen