Is the Android Market headed for disaster?

Is the Android Market headed for disaster?

A fellow developer informed me that he doesn't see Paperdroid Pro in the Market app. I had no clue on why this would happen, so he sent me this very informative link.

The picture that emerges from reading that thread and the ones linked within it is grim. Briefly:

• Paid apps are a no-go (in theory) on rooted devices
• Carriers have the ultimate power in deciding what's in your Market and what's not

On the former: my rooted Magic shows me everything (in Italy, with any carrier; and Market Enabler works just as expected). This just proves even more that there's a lot of confusion out there. 

The important point is the latter. Although carriers are just starting to implement it, it is clear that this is where the Market is headed. This poses some problems.

There are already confusing reports of  people with the same (unlocked) device and slightly different firmware getting or not getting the ability to see some paid apps. Other unlocked devices have access to everything, others still have no luck at all. I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see that the carrier you happen to be on at the moment also plays a role in which apps you can or cannot see.

Let's try to stretch the imagination a bit and see where all this could lead:

• the exponentially rising number of device/firmware/country/carrier combinations breaks any hope of having a way to predict how in each case the Market will filter available apps. Moreover the Market is already having serious trouble coping up coherently with new devices/firmwares. The frustration of developers and users shows a similar exponential increase.
• given the rise in paying and licensing problems, some carriers decide to try to bring the mess under control by disabling the Market altogether when on WiFi ("these naughty customers are trying to circumvent the rules!")
• the following logic step would then be to just have a whitelisted app catalog - I'm not talking about the already existing Carrier picks; I'm talking about "this is all you can get because we're f@#&^in' tired of those two customers complaining to us about apps they claim don't work (and we like licensing deals with major app vendors)". If you think that's impossible because (US) carriers are fighting a marketing campaign on the sheer number of available apps, go see the pathetic AT&T campaign and notice how after heralding the availability of a gigazillion apps on their handsets, they duly list, as examples, the usual four or five obvious tasks (and they seem to forget that of course there are already several Android apps covering each of those needs). Then add the fact that Google (rightly) is and will be unwilling to take any liability burden. Welcome back, walled gardens.

This is the App Store, with a worse implementation, an even more arbitrary (borderline random) functioning, and without the benefits of the massive scale because of the extreme fragmentation.

In the short term, all this, plus the increasing fragmentation in the Android world in general, only means trouble for developers and users.

In my opinion, though, Google is on the right path, long-term wise. By allowing carriers and manufacturers to pursue crappy strategies, it makes sure the ecosystem base stays open enough to allow for innovative actors (Google itself?) to easily raise the (very low) bar and drive dinosaurs to well-earned extinction. 

Back to my tiny, utterly irrelevant world: it seems I'll have to publish Paperdroid Pro in some alternative market after all: andappstore or slideme?

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