Amongst the rest of Google news today from Google I/O is some information that our brothers in green at Android Central have brought up, concerning changes to the Market. This info comes in the form of a larger allowable app size and a developer device exclusion ability. While I’m sure these two updates will be a bit polarizing for the Android community, in the end I think they’ll be healthy. Care to know why? Click in after the break!
First off, Google has increased the size of the maximum size of submitted applications to 4 Gigs. Now this is a massive size, and I honestly don’t know what would use all of that space except perhaps a VERY pretty tablet game, but the increase itself was definitely needed. Remember that Market apps have a 15 minute window with which to test them and that that window begins as soon as the app finishes downloading. Now think of those games that require you to download an additional 500 megs of data upon firing them up, and you’ll realize that the 15 minute window is useless on those apps, considering that the extra download isn’t even done within that time. This bigger cap will allow developers to include that extra data right off the bat so that a customer can use that 15 minutes to, you know, actually try out the product. Plus maybe more developers will be more willing to use this extra download room for some higher-end graphics for new devices.
The second bit of news here is that the Market now allows developers to include and exclude various devices when submitting apps to the Market. This may seem a bit unjust, but how many times have you seen people knocking an app designed for newer phones in its comment section simply because it wouldn’t run on their first generation device? Any sane person should be able to realize that a graphically taxing game requiring a dedicated GPU isn’t going to work on an outdated device, but there are people out there that do expect this. With this new ability, developers will be able to keep this from happening, thus reserving their comments section for useful comments. This will also allow the developers to focus on bringing good graphics to newer phones without having to cow-tow to inferior chipsets, while releasing a less demanding version for legacy devices. The No Phone Left Behind system really needs to die out to an extent, and I think this is a good way to make it happen.
So I’m sure people out there are going to both agree and disagree with my opinions here, but we would love to hear your take. How do you feel about these changes? Let us know in the comments!
[via androidcentral]