Google is about to hire "dozens" of mobile developers to stock up its Android marketplace, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google has made it very clear that it will be focusing on mobile this year, and on mobile commerce in particular. Stealing PayPal's VP of product development is a good start, but the chocolate …

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Monday 31st January 2011 12:29 GMT D. M

Just fix the damn market

1. How hard is to allow all to access paid apps? There are still some regions cannot pay for apps.

2. From time to time, people still cannot download apps from market, Google still didn't fix the downloading problem.

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1. Monday 31st January 2011 13:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Errm
  
  Isn't it local tax and laws that prevent payments in many countries...
  
  I have never had any problems with the google side of things with regards to the marketplace, I do have occasional carrier network problems thou...
  
  Looks like Android is now the number 1 OS...
  
  http://www.eurodroid.com/2011/01/stats-android-is-now-the-worlds-leading-smartphone-platform/
  
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Monday 31st January 2011 12:42 GMT MinionZero

@Google now also want "Mobile payments"

So Google are not contented with trying to assimilate almost every search thought on the planet, not to mention global wardriving. No not enough, so now Google are going after spying on everything we all buy as well.

Soon opting out of Google's growing omnipresence isn't going to be an option.

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Monday 31st January 2011 12:53 GMT dotdavid

About time

Hopefully some of these new devs will work on fixing some of Google's existing Android apps. Some of them are embarrassingly broken (My Maps Editor anyone?) and have the air of hobby apps done in some Googler's spare time (which they probably often are, in fact).

Not to mention the persistent app2sd-related installation problems plaguing the Market at the moment.

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Monday 31st January 2011 12:53 GMT Tom 7

No thanks

I'll write my apps to run on the machine that works underneath android - in less than 5 years Android will be yesterdays OS and apps will be running directly on the OS and hardware that never really needed to be corralled unless the idea all along was to add yet another tollbooth on the internet highway.

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1. Monday 31st January 2011 13:32 GMT vic 4
  
  way foward
  
  That certainly makes sense, wonder why everyone else hasn't moved in that direction instead of using so called best practices. Hope you are targeting assembler rather than low level C, a new standard may come along. Just hope everyone sticks to releasing on the same hardware/OS underneath the hood.
  
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1. Tuesday 1st February 2011 13:09 GMT Jerome 0
  
  Education
  
  As long as people keep "buying" the entirely free, ad-supported apps, this is a self-supporting system?
  
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Monday 31st January 2011 13:16 GMT David Dawson

What are they up to

Eating their channel partners lunch? A la Microsoft in the 90s

If they want it to be full of decent apps, why not give subsidies, or prizes, or backhanders to some decent dev shops to write the applications.

This will mean that only Google can make money ....

...

...

oh, sorry, what was I thinking!

Beer!

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Tuesday 1st February 2011 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward

Not the right direction

I see, the Android Market isn't packed enough with stuff.. now Google, instead of trying to make it right for the developers and the users, ramps up in-house development, possibly putting itself in direct competition with those undecided developers that are struggling to find a reason to give Android another chance.

The top priority should be to cleanup the market and help external developers to write good apps and sell them.

As things stand, it makes no economical sense to develop for Android, if you can go for iOS instead. Quantity of phones means nothing.. it's the market that matters.

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