The Android Market is finally getting a face-lift with the upcoming Android 1.6 (Donut) update. Along with the new look comes some much requested features. We think the update is long overdue, but we are overjoyed that Google is finally allocating more resources to improve the Market experience.
Highlights of the new Market include:
- At the homescreen, users can choose among Apps, Games, and Downloads.
- Inside a category, users can explore titles that are Top paid, Top free, and Just in.
- For each title, users can now see screenshots submitted by developers in addition to reviews from other users.
Thanks to the latest experimental CyanogenMod I had a chance to play around with the new Market. I snapped a bunch of screen shots and made the gallery below. The simplified look is nice, but outside of the screenshots there are not many new features to report. About the only thing I could find was comments marked as spam now instantly disappear.
Hopefully, this is just the beginning of many more updates to come. We know expanded payment options are somewhere on the roadmap and I have heard enhanced application discovery is also in the works.
If you could add one new feature to the Android Market, what would it be?
Gallery
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Taylor Wimberly
Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He loves playing with all kinds of gadgets, but most importantly cell phones. His other hobbies include cooking (BBQ hero!), politics, football, and watching every MMA event possible.
27 Comments
Nice, yeah I was looking for it but now I understand. I’m running the latest stable CyanogenMod so I’ll need the experimental. Which experimental are ya running? Is it okay to play around with or should I just wait for the next stable release? Thanks man!
-Mig
I would not put experimental on my daily use phone. I have the luxury of an extra Android phone that allows me to play around. Really, this Market update is nice but nothing special.
Yeah, I thought so. Thanks for the speedy reply!
I’d like to pick up an extra phone to experiment with? Any suggestions on where to do so online? what type of device?
I use the experimental builds on my daily use phone. I play dangerously. I have a backup G1 in case anything goes wrong…
Running experimental ROM’s are risky….. to a degree. Just run a Nandroid backup every time and you’ll be fine. Cyan’s latest experimental is awesome. Very fast and no problems with it thus far. Everything works dandy for me.
You can get a used G1 on ebay for under $200. I’m sure someone else may have a better suggestion.
BETTER SEARCH OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BETTER SEARCH
You are correct. It now returns results even when you put a space between the words. The old version really struggled with that.
It still needs app filtering so I don’t have to see the hundreds (thousands?) of ring photo apps.
I agree with that! I also vote for a “Mark commenter as douche” button.
Longer descriptions… 325 characters is ridiculously small. For example, this article used about 5x that many to describe the new market app.
Also, more than 2 screenshots…
With the limits we have now it isn’t possible fully to describe even simple applications.
The Market needs an easier Search function. You currently have to put the Correct name in for it to appear
The new market is great looking. It is about time we got a better looking UI for it. Also with the experimental CM you get an updated camera/camcorder and YouTube apps. The ROM is super stable for what I have been playing with and I think he might base his new stable off of 4.1.10.1.
Sort by rating!
Feature I’d like to see:
Instead of the most popular all-time apps, we should be able to see popular today, last week, last month, etc.
There are way too many apps to keep track of everything that comes out, so I’d at least like to see what’s hot.
Believe it or not, the current system does the Most Popular of either the week or the day(I’m not sure which). If you look there are apps that have only 1000 downloads that show up on the Most Popular list. For example, when I released my app a couple months ago, within a week it showed up as #48 as was in the middle of apps that had been downloaded >250,000, which wouldn’t make sense if it was an all time list(my app was good but not THAT good lol).
Of course, it would be nice to see an option to switch between day, week, month and all time. Also, what if they implemented something like YouTube where you can see what people are downloading right at that moment, like a trending thing almost…that would be pretty cool
Is anybody else concerned about the “comments marked as spam now instantly disappear” feature? What’s to stop a developer from deleting negative comments? Does it keep the rating? If it deletes the entire entry, the rating and comment system would be rendered useless. Hope there is a system of checks and balances!
The new market looks nice, but I agree that it really does not give us something special to differentiate from e.g iTunes Store.
I’d love to be able to blacklist/hide apps published by those annoying developerd that release 100 apps a day featuring pictures of some super babe i’ve never heard of.
Needs developer blacklist so I can filter out all the “Sexy Ladies” crap.
the feature i would LOVE for the market to have is a field, when you leave a review of an app, that is auto populated, stating which device and possibly ROM you are using.
a lot of people leave a lot of reviews on a particular app, but no info on which setup they are using and it is definitely relevant to the reviews.