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With the sales of Android smartphones rising fast, sales of apps for the phones should be booming, too. They aren’t.
At least, not at the rate Android platform manager Eric Chu wants them to be. At a conference on Tuesday, the Google employee said his company is “not happy” with the number of paid app purchases, and we should expect changes in the Android Market to come.
Chu highlighted a few of those changes during a q&a session at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The company plans to introduce an in-app payments system — which lets you buy things like virtual goods within the app itself (a shiny new Farmville shovel, for example) — within the first quarter of 2011.
“Helping developers monetize is very important to us,” Chu said.
Apple has supported in-app payments since October 2009, while Android developers have relied on Paypal X for payments outside of the Android Market. In-app payments were set to launch last quarter, but a full plate of Christmas app programming kept the developers from giving Google enough feedback, says Chu.
Google also plans to continue moving forward with carrier billing, which lets you bill your app purchases to your cell phone bill. “It’s one of the lowest-friction models,” Chu said. In December, Google introduced its first instance of carrier billing to AT&T customers, so it’s probable that with positive developer feedback, Google will expand the ability to work with other carriers. Chu said the carrier set-up process was “both expensive and time-consuming,” according to Forbes.
2010 has been a boom year for mobile apps overall. Apple recently announced the 10 billionth app download from its own app store, which has over 400,000 apps to choose from. While the Android Market isn’t quite as large as Apple’s store, Android recently hit an unofficial milestone surpassing 200,000 apps available for download, according to Android statistics tracking site AndroLib. Global mobile app revenues are projected to surpass $15.1 billion in 2011, according to a report from Gartner research released on Wednesday. It’s a 190 percent increase from 2010 revenues.
As Android has matured over the two years since its initial release, developer interest has grown. A report released by IDC on Tuesday showed 76 percent of developers surveyed are “very interested” in developing apps for upcoming Android OS-run tablets. A reported 85 Android-running tablets debuted this year at Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
See Also:
- Google Removes Flash App From Android Market
- Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
- Your Froyo Tablet Probably Won’t Support Android Market
- Android Market Terms of Service Confirm Googlephone Kill Switch …
- Gameloft Sidesteps Android Market for Mobile Assassin’s Creed …
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