Funny, a lot of people say they like Android phones, but they don't have the apps the IPhone has. How many apps do people need?

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/andr...apps-50001313/

I did think it could be organised better, you get a search control and three categories, free, pay and new or something like that.

Wouldn't it be better to have more categories. How about one called main which contains ebay, bbc, you tube etc, one for newspaper apps, supermarket apps, games.

How about users award them stars for quality and you can say show games apps three stars plus etc.

It does have more categories. Apps is broken into Comics, Communication, Entertainment, Finance, Health, Lifestyle, Multimedia, News & Weather, Productivity, Reference, Shopping, Social, Sports, Themes, Tools, and Travel, then Games is broken into Arcade & Action, Brain & Puzzle, Cards & Casino, and Casual. How many more categories do you want!?


Have you even used the Android market? All apps gets awarded stars for quality already. Then the "Top Free" and the "Top Paid" inside each of the categories listed above, pull out the highest rated apps.

As for the market reaching 100,000 apps, that's marvellous until you consider that 99,500 of them are shit. Personally I'd be happy with just 500 decent apps, but each to their own. I don't know what the ratio is for the iPhone's App Store but I'd imagine a large number of the 400k apps are equally worthless. Numbers aren't a measure of anything, really.

If it's quantity you're concerned about, aren't Android apps coming out more quickly than Apple now?

Glad you pointed that out, and your figures seem pretty accurate from my browsing. When I had the iPod Touch I had similar thoughts to what I see now with Android - the lions share of apps are utter rubbish, and as more and more apps come along it gets even harder to find the few good ones.

Wonder how many of that 100k are keyboard skins etc

Or utterly useless live wallpapers ..... I occasionally install one, then realise why I didn't bother. They add absolutely nothing to the user experience, and only enhance the "ooooh, shiny!" side of Android.

Yep,
some brilliant with most total junk.

But still not grindr

So you don't like anti-mosquito apps then I always wondered how it is possible to get one's app in the spotlight, if there are hundreds of thousands of them out there. So far I only installed Kindle app and UI language pack for my Android phone. Also I had a look at development tools for Android as I thought I'd try to make some app myself, just for fun, it's java and the environment looks OK, but I can't think of anything I'd need.

Something I have always wondered is how does the android market manage all the different phones, and how do the diffrent apps work with phones all with different screen sizes and different button layouts.
I now have an iPhone and of course all apps are for the iPhone which has the same screen size and button layout since the first iPhone, I did have a window phone and lots of the apps did not work on MY phone, despite being a windows phone.

Generally speaking, incompatible phones simply can't "see" the apps in the Market - for instance, HTC Wildfire users couldn't see the Angry Birds game in the market, even though it was there, because their phone was incompatible. However, I think this relies on the developer flagging it up, so it is not perfect.

As for different screen sizes, how do Windows programs or Mac applications deal with different screen sizes? They expand, shrink or remanipulate to fit. Different button layouts are inconsequential because every Android phone, at a minimum, must have a Home, Menu, Back and Search button, so the developers can rely on these for sure.

Have a look at this Get Started Developing for Android with Eclipse. Instead of working with absolute sizes you use layouts where you describe relative positions and alignments of the controls and the app is then scaled to the screen as necessary.

Two things the Android market needs: the ability to sort search results (by name, ranking etc); and an automatic spam filter which removes URLs. Other than that it's pretty good.

Its also all the apps that just don't need to be there when they simply should be part of their web site.

How come there is no DOSBOX for Android yet?

Monkey Island 1 and 2 would be nice. Doubt it's going to happen though.

ScummVM is available for Android, so it is likely that even if MI 1 and 2 don't currently work with it, they will in the future.

Ooh I didn't know SummVM was out there already

Is there a way to get some of the old Lucasarts games currently then, or is it currently a pointless app?

What makes you think there isn't?

http://androiddosbox.appspot.com/

Good to know they have got to alpha now.

"Currently, aDOSBox needs physical keyboard on the phone. We will add virtual/onscreen keyboard in the future."

Like the computer version of ScummVM, it just utilises the data files, so if you already have purchased Monkey Island 1 or 2 it should just be a case of transferring the data files onto an SD Card. That's the extent of my understanding, having not looked at the Android version much but certainly having used the PC version.

Ah ok, cool.

In actual fact, I am not sure if there is a compatibility issue, but when I search for ScummVM on the market it doesn't show. Only the various plugins are available.

I have a Galaxy S so would have thought it would be okay.