The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on the future strategy of Microsoft's cellphone development in which they revealed in the closing paragraph that Google are poised to launch their paid app market later this week.
Google, too, hosts an application store, dubbed the Android Market, for phones running its Android mobile operating system, the first of which is the G1 from Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA. This week Google will start allowing developers to charge for software sold through the Android Market, according to people familiar with the matter.
Given the recent RC 33 Android updates that add improved functionality to the Android Market, and more importantly remove the ‘beta' terms – this claim doesn't seem so far fetched.
[ Thanks John! via WSJ.com]
@Marc
Good for you. But who will pay the developer’s bills at the end of the month? Even hobbyists must feed themselves.
G1 UK people are still stuck on RC8 (UK version of RC30)
when are the UK peps going to get their update?
without it we wont be able to get the paid for apps
@Jake There’s a lot of great for-sale software out there, certainly. There’s also an enormous community of free software. I depend on numerous apps that I find via Sourceforge and elsewhere.
Actually it gives the developers the only incentive to develop any worth application. Getting paid for what we do is a normal thing in the capitalist society.
I think this is critical to Android moving forward as a platform. It gives developers a greater incentive to produce high quality applications, and will encourage higher quality overall. I don’t personally look forward to paying for these apps, but I would imagine there are some quality apps that are done right now that devs are sitting on because they want to wait until they can charge for them.
Great find!
Combing through that WSJ article to the end in order to get that nugget.
I cited this article for the find as I wasn’t sure if TalkAndroid or a T-Mobile forum member found it first
https://www.googleandblog.com/wall-street-journal-outs-google-paid-apps-android-market-plans/3738/
,Michael Martin
Google And Blog
I think it is coming, but I personally don’t care. Some of the software out there will continue to be free and what isn’t will probably be reimplemented by FOSS developers. Having a paid store isn’t a critical thing for Android IMHO. The power of Android is that is is indeed open. You don’t have to pay Google to develop on Android and the SDK is freely downloadable. What this does is open up the gaming area as the art in the games is the most expensive part. Things like Shop Savvy can be easily be replaced with open source apps that will use open and free resources.