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Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#71

Post by alohahacker »

juliano_q wrote: post #18
Kylekramer wrote: post #12

You trying to get blood from a stone here. Google cares for your problems in only the most indirect of manners, so bitching is not really going to help. It is the reality, you are going to have to deal with it. But the thing is, it is a fairly level playing field. Everyone else in the store is dealing with the same thing, more or less. So work with it, not against it. Look for conversions that come from things other…

Yeah, it is probably only a SEO issue. Study why other apps are showing first. Adding shopping list in the end of the name and in the description of the app will probably fix it.

not a seo issue at all.

the algorithm was totally broken. luckily for most of us they started fixing it yesterday and today.

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#72

Post by alohahacker »

thijser wrote: post #46

There are alternative frontends to the Google market, such as AppBrain, of which I'm one of the co-founders. Exactly due to the problems you describe, we have been able to get a loyal following of both users and developers, for whom we develop better tools to browse through the Android market. Your app is actually listed #10 in our all-time popular shopping charts: http://www.appbrain.com/apps/popular/shopping/ You m…

appbrains search has always been solid!!

good job guys!!

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#73

Post by alohahacker »

angryasian wrote: post #67
bond wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it seems you're mixing things up. Having a change in policy has nothing to do with bugs on the way the market performs. One thing is a shift in direction from Google and another is bugs that prevents developers and users from finding apps. On a other post you talk about marketing as if would make any difference. There's a lot of developers complaining users couldn't find their apps after they were told to look f…

I've been trying to be constructive and help you guys, but clearly you just wanted to come here and complain. You guy should just give up, because google won't fix their customer service and won't fix your search rankings and probably in general won't do anything to help you. The next think you should try is making another app on either market and complain about all the deficiencies of either market instead of focusi…

they are actually fixing the search algortithm due to the massive complaints they have gotten recently.

especially in the support forums. hes just stating the truth. i know because im experiencing the exact same thing.

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#74

Post by alohahacker »

shareme wrote: post #26
CCapigami wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are pretty different in regards to application quality right now and when we released the first version of our application. Just wanted to share that.

Have you considered going through android market/developer relations instead of general support? If you google enough times you will find names and email and position titles(ie what areas of developer relations they handle) In fact there is a specific page listing all this stuff even..

a good thing ive found because im facing the same issues is google and find memebers on the android team on google+/quora?twitter and let them know firsthand the problems

this has seem to work for me and escalates the prob very fast! :)

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#75

Post by alohahacker »

I'm also an android developer and have experienced all these problems in the recent weeks. Here is my take on the following points:

#3 seems like its in the new market and hopefully google will fix this problem soon because it makes no sense at all. Its def a new bug in this transition to the new market that goog is probably aware of.

#4 google support has always been horrible. try calling the android market reps in support. the more devs call and express bugs they can usually foward issues to the dev team. Also stalk people on the android team on quora/twitter/google+. this works too! tried and tested ;)

#1 stats have always been bad. they go up and down and don't work for large periods at a time. our stats froze for about 2 weeks. hopefully this doesnt effect our ranking but with the secret algorithm we will never know. luckily we use google analytics and other tracking methods to account for this.

#2 market search is prob the most stressfull thing we had to deal with. for the past two weeks nobody could find out app in the market. it simply just dissapeared. we had 1000's of downloads a day that went to under 100. this def hurt our revenue and app usage decreased due to the lack of new users. prob end up costing a couple thousand in revenue. luckily it seems like they are making an effort to fix this as today we started appearing again and the search results seem to be improving by the hour.

Is the market perfect? hell no! the android market is def bipolar and has alot of problems. For us we cant live with it cant live without it. the past couple of weeks have been crazy due to the all the problems our app was having with the search bugs, etc.

Hopefully as developers we can continue to help each other find ways to overcome the bugs and help google build a quality market. Having a market that works is def a win win situation that I'm hoping to be a part of.

On the flipside these bugs have caused me to develop IOS versions of my app which I probably woudlnt have done if these bugs didnt exist. So looking foward to try that new venue ;)

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#77

Post by cpeterso »

dpcan wrote: post #37

The worst part is, not only are you right on the money, but you're top #4 are not everyone's top 4, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. For ME, I want 2 things, and have been BEGGING Google for them for a year now. 1) Let me reply to comments so I can SUPPORT my customers. 2) More game categories. If there were more categories my apps in Sports would not be LOSING to chess and penguin games.

> Let me reply to comments so I can SUPPORT my customers.

Similarly, a bug reporter/tracker in Market might discourage people from posting negative reviews to report a bug.

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#78

Post by gte910h »

onwardly wrote: post #38
gte910h wrote: post #17

Swap to iOS. People pay for things there and there are developer support people you can talk to. Swap to Win7Phone. You may be the only person in your category still. The developer outreach is hilariously good (Shout out to Atlanta's Glenn Gordon [Microsoft] for treating the community right).

Second the shout out to Glenn Gordon, he's great and put Win7Phone on the (road)map for us.

I give the man an incredibly difficult time for some of MS's missteps with the platform, but he handles it all with aplomb. But he himself: Good stuff.

It actually looks like I've mispelled his name:

https://twitter.com/#!/glengordon

Glen Gordon.

Re: Google's Android Market is crippling small development teams

#79

Post by tensor »

ceejayoz wrote: post #65
tensor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean to say you won't pay for an ad-free version of an application for which the free version contains ads? That seems rather strange.

I think he meant that developers should provide a paid, ad-free version and/or a free, ad-supported version. An ad-supported version that also costs money (even if it's less money) kinda sucks.

Ah. The former model is what I suggested in my original post. I must have worded it poorly. I too, will not use ad-supported apps beyond testing functionality. It drives me crazy when there is no paid ad-free version.
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