Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple’s App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps. A study by Larva Labs (the developers of the excellent Slidescreen app) estimates that Google has paid out 50x less money to developers than Apple has. While the Android Market is available in 46 countries, developers can only offer paid apps in 13 countries (for instance, Canada has only had access to paid apps since March 2010). In addition, the price for foreign apps is not displayed in the user’s local currency and developers do not have the option of customizing pricing by country. To make matters worse, you can’t pay for foreign apps using your Amex card or carrier billing. There’s also no support for in-app payments and changelogs (to communicate app changes).

Android is open for apps. If you write an app once, it should run on all Android devices, in theory. In practise Android application developers are facing an increasing fragementation problem caused by different OS versions, hardware form factors, OEM specifics, device types (car computers, set top boxes, routers, ..), etc. Building apps that run on all (or at least most) Android devices is getting extremely difficult and expensive, thus the reach of apps is significantly reduced. The fragmentation problem is just starting and most certainly it is going to grow rapidly as more and more devices, firmware images, device types and OS version will enter the market. Fact is that fragmentation is there and that will be there always. What can we do about it? Embrace it!