Please see UPDATE
I’ve been an quite vocal advocate of Android as an alternative to Apple’s walled-garden of mobile applications, until I discovered today that anyone who lives outside a very short list of countries is still unable to publish paid applications.
In a time when 3rd-party applications are clearly one of the most compelling drivers for popularity in the mobile operating system market, it seems absolutely astounding that Google would exclude the majority of the world’s developers from contributing to the Android application market in a commercial capacity.
Clearly this stems from deficiencies in Google Checkout’s ability to cater for international merchants, but there appears to have been no forward movement on that front for at least a year now, and no meaningful response from Google as to what, if anything, is being done. There are numerous long-running Google Groups threads requesting such, and local online media has even run the story.
With Google Checkout clearly being the culprit for hampering quality application growth, and alienating developers worldwide, and with an obvious lack of commitment from Google to rectify the problem on that front, surely it’s time for them to admit that they’ve failed to resolve it, and to consider the extremely simple option of allowing Paypal for international developers (much as that would stick in their craw)? Surely it’s the lesser of two evils to vastly improve the available application pool, and appease the world’s developers, by allowing payment via a competitor, since there is no revenue coming from these regions in any case, and apparently no effort being imparted to alter this?
Discovering this information made it suddenly obvious why there are so few quality region-specific applications in my area (Australia), and this in turn clearly proves the point that this stifling of commercial creativity is bad for the platform end-to-end. Developers suffer, since they can’t make a living, and end-users suffer since the Android market lacks the content available in other application markets.
This has of course also completely killed a number of projects I had prototyped. This is how not to do an application store.