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My educational math app A+ ITestYou is doing very well on the Google Android Market. Users signup and play daily. My next step is to publish the app to other markets and get more audience! For the next few weeks I will play with the Amazon and the Nook markets. Here you can find my notes.

Google Android Market

All Android developer tools, the device programming model, platform capabilities, phone emulators, Eclipse plugins are simply a pleasure to work with. You get step-by-step debugging and all the emulators including Galaxy Tab. Android Developers is very easy to use and an application can be published in minutes. No approval required.

Be careful when uploading the app for the first time. The form is very long and there are traps awaiting! You are safe before you press the "publish" button. After that you can't change the price or delete your apk files. Your app package name also becomes permanently assigned to this app, probably forever. I hope the Google team will figure out how to simplify the registration and clearly mark the write-once fields and the change-whenever-you-want fields.

Once uploaded, managing the app is very easy. You can have multiple APK files uploaded. Use the activate/deactivate buttons to choose between them. I especially like how it shows the exceptions that happened while the app runs on customer's phone. Since we are in Java, it shows a complete stack trace of the exception! Simple in retrospect, but oh god it is useful. Proudly, I only have a single exception trace in the logs...

Another thing helped a lot - community help. Android platform had bugs and the documentation is not clear at times. But I was able to find help on the forums for every single issue I had. The http://www.stackoverflow.com was the best source.

App updates are still a mystery to me. We have three phones in the family, each is about 4 month old. Two are of the exact same model. All three have identical Android OS version and settings. Only one phone updates automatically, other two do not (yes, I have "Update Automatically" box is checked). the updates are visible on the phone in about 15-20 minutes after new APK is uploaded and activated, but automatic update is not triggered immediately after these updates are available. I still have to learn out how this all really works. More updates to code.

Amazon Market

Amazon Developer Portal requires application approval. It takes about 48 hours for a turn around. There is no message center where you can see your back and forth with the approver, only the most recent message is shown. But they send everything to you by email as well. APK update workflow is odd as well. When you edit the fields you may need to have re-approval, but you never know what change will trigger it. Why not warn the user that change blah and blah will require new approval?

During the review, I have received couple of very interesting objections from the approval team.

Objection 1:

There was a specific questionnaire about ads, which I answered fully. The screenshots showed a selected portion of the screen, not the entire phone. Looks like it is not enough.

Objection 2:

True. I was in the process of registering both Free and Pro versions of the app in the Android Store. Pro app was not up yet, so it looked to a reviewer like the same app is being delivered over the Android Market for Free.

Think for a moment what this means. Shouldn't I be able to charge whatever I want? Or not? Are we moving towards the DVD pricing model, where every movie starts out at $23.99 the first weeks it comes out and moves to $4.99 day by day? Same start price, regardless of how good the movie is. Sad... Or may be not... Lets start new Luxury Android Apps Market where we charge 10x of what other folks charge, except our shit will works 10x better!

One thing is not yet clear to me is how to test the Amazon market apps. There is no Amazon device yet, right? how do I get an app from Amazon app store to my phone? I still have to figure this out. My registration still pending. More updates to come.

Nook Market

Nook Developer folks were quick to turn around with the approval in just 12 hours. But there are issues.

Nook has its own device - Nook Color. The device emulator is not in the standard Android SDK (I was using SDK r12). Nook site has the instructions and getting the emulator was trivial. It plugs into the Android SDK manager quite nicely. So far so good.

But the emulator did not run very well, even after being updated to revision1. It crushed and did not support debugging. Threads were visible in Eclipse, but none of the breakpoints would fire. And the worst thing, my app crashed in the emulator all the time. In about 20 minutes I discovered that my app has nothing to do with it. While started in the emulator, the Nook browser crashes when it hits certain type of HTML pages, especially with JavaScript. And my app uses WebView in many places so it crashes too.

I logged a bug with the Nook support team. They have reproduced. Will see what happens next. More updates to come.

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DISCLAIMER: I am a full-time employee of Google Inc. at the time of writing. The opinions presented reflect my personal position and experience and are in no way associated with my work at Google Inc.