Mobile Topics

A few days ago Amazon opened the doors to their Amazon Appstore Developer Portal.

As we have seen before that adding your app to any appstore can be a painful process. WIP has run Android appstore submitting competitions to see which appstores make it easiest and fastest for developers to submit and WIP has also experienced some bad forms and error messages in a lot of appstores. Well I wanted to take a closer look to see if Amazon has made this process any easier as they are predicted to be another big player in the appstore world.  Some Seattle based bloggers are saying Amazon has done a marvelous job of creating a Super-Slick Android Appstore, but I want to go through the whole process and submit WIP's own Appstore Wiki App.

Walk through
For starters Amazon is certainly getting the ball rolling by waiving the $99 yearly fee for developers who want to submit their app. Their layout is sleek, and it has the classic amazon feel. Their FAQ has lots of questions with straight...

Thanks to the upcoming Christmas and New Year's holidays, we're on a slightly accelerated schedule with the latest WIP App Store Report, a monthly report based on our App Store Catalog, the most comprehensive collection of information on mobile app stores available -- so think of this as an early present!

The number of stores in the catalog grew by only one during the month, edging up to 110 now. But it's the growth during the year that we want to focus on. As you can see from the chart above, one year ago, the WIP App Store Catalog featured just 32 stores; since then, it has more than tripled, giving developers an unprecedented array of distribution outlets. The overall growth has been driven in absolute numbers by independent app stores -- a reflection of the fact that today’s smartphones allow for open distibution channels, and that anybody with a decent level of technical skill could conceivably start their own app store. But it’s worth highlighting the growth in a few...

A few months ago, I went on an app store placement spree in preparation for the Android App Store Competition in Berlin (promise I won't mention it anymore!). The results were telling, in terms of the variance of the usability between stores, and some of the rather uninspired error messages they returned:

• "Please provide an interesting and accurate description" -- Isn't it my right to putt something dull if I do not want people to spend time reading the description and download the app instead?
• "Illegal characters in description! Use English and numbers only" -- Something any person with a sense of logic and group theory awareness will object to.
• "Upload a jpg legend..." -- Which is a nice error when, in reality, the site only accepts PNGs.

I'm just finishing a new placement spree today, and when I started, I was full of hopes that things had changed. Judge for yourself by these messages I got:

• "Password Must contain both letters and numerals" -- What if I want...