Up town top ranking
“The Android platform gained some real momentum during 2009 and is gathering even more pace with a slew of device announcements from the likes of HTC and Motorola, and improvements to the OS itself. The Android market itself is also becoming more sophisticated, making it easier for customers to browse and choose apps. We particularly appreciate the ability to view app rankings,” comments David Quin, marketing director at ALK Technologies.
“With the CoPilot Live 8 mobile navigation product we have worked harder than ever to develop a full-featured application that will work seamlessly on Android devices and it’s great to see that our on-board maps approach to navigation is proving so popular. One great feature of Android Market is its software update facility, which makes it easy for us to distribute new features and improvements automatically. We have just released our latest software update for Android and this is available free for existing users. It brings support for many of the latest devices, including Motorola Droid and HTC Tattoo. It also brings free detailed text-to-speech (TTS) voice directions using Android’s in-built TTS engine to pronounce full street names,” adds Quin.
Advice for suitably paranoid developers to take on board here, then, is to look for fundamental shifts in the way Android and the Android Market online software store work. Whether it is the software update facility, the application ranking function or some other augmentation that may at first sometimes appear relatively subtle, keep a sharp eye on everything that happens and question it all.

I want my MobiTV
Arguably one of the prime movers in the Android marketplace is MobiTV. The company has developed Mobile TV applications for the Android platform and its latest application provides access to live streaming and Video-On-Demand. According to Jan Olin, who is European MD for MobiTV, some of the first reviews of the Google/HTC G1 phone commented that it adopted the best features of the iPhone and Blackberry devices, but that it wasn’t necessarily as innovative as it could be.
“While it is true that the first Android phone didn’t really bring any unique new features to the party that weren’t already provided by other platforms, they missed the point about what makes the concept – and the phone – so interesting. What is so exciting about the Android platform it that it is open source, and the impact that will have on its apps store and how that will raise consumer expectations of what a mobile phone is capable of,” contends Olin.

The truth is that Android is gaining real momentum at the moment, there are up to a dozen smartphones using the OS, software developers have created up to 12,000 new applications, and recent reports indicate that consumers are downloading over 20 million applications a month. That figure might be small compared with the estimated 100 million downloads a month for the iPhone, but it’s not bad when you consider that the number of Blackberry downloads is around 300,000 a month.
“From a technical MobiTV perspective, Android is just one more of the 350 different devices and platforms we support. Our latest application, the NBA League Pass, for iPhone and Android, offers consumers access to over 40 live games each week via either Wi-Fi or 3G connection, providing access to live streaming and VOD to the same coverage available over cable TV and broadband,” says Olin. So if NBA games on TV and intuitive navigation tools make for great money-making Android applications, we can safely assume that this rule of motion holds true across most of the global developer landscape. But what other ingredients do you need to bring to the recipe? Actually, it’s more obvious than you might think and is best summed up in two words – compatibility and interoperability.

Compatibility counts
The previously mentioned CoPilot Live v8 from ALK Technology has proved extremely popular with Android customers. Since its launch on Android Market in June 2009, it has risen to become the top paid application on Android Market in the UK. The UK and Europe apps currently hold the number one and number two positions of all paid travel apps respectively. So how did they do it? Did the nifty text-to-speech voice directions swing it? Well, yes, in part, that didn’t hurt. But the full compatibility with the latest Donut and Eclair versions of Android probably helped even more. This brings full on-board turn-by-turn navigation to the latest handsets including Motorola Droid and HTC Tattoo – and that, after all, is what the customers will want.

So who else to turn to for commercial advice on Android application profitability? Stopping short of calling a psychoanalyst and explaining the collective (albeit positive) paranoia that we are advocating here, we’ll opt for Patrick Mork – VP of marketing at GetJar, the world’s largest cross-platform application store. Hopefully Mork can put some substance behind our hopes and fears for Android with some sanguine advice.