The biggest change in the new Android Market isn’t necessarily in the look and feel, but in the new policy that only allows refunds within a 15-minute time limit rather than the previous 24 hour window for refunds.
You can also now download application packages sized up to 50MB instead of the previous 25MB, which may lead to more advanced games on Android.
This is a list of the changes:
- Reducing the purchase refund window to 15 minutes (!). Previously, users had 24-48 hours to try an application and get a refund if they didn’t like it. Some developers worried that a long refund period could lead to abuses, but users were limited to one refund per application so I don’t understand the reason for this change.
- Users will be able to filter applications by content rating. Developers must set a content rating for their apps by December 15th: Mature, Teen, Pre-Teen, or All. Applications or games without a rating will be treated as Mature.
- The details page for every app will show a 180×120 Promotional Graphic at the top, provided by the developer in the Developer Console.
- Developers can also specify more than 2 screenshots, in several different sizes (currently 320×480, 480×800, or 480×854). Presumably the number of sizes will expand as different resolutions become more common.
- Market will support filtering based on screen sizes and densities, as well as on GL texture compression formats. Filtering is based on
and elements in an app’s manifest, instead of console settings. - The Market is getting new “dynamic” categories that will be based on an app’s manifest. If your app includes wallpapers or widgets, Market will automatically add them to the new categories.
- The maximum size for application packages is increasing from 25MB to 50MB.
Of all the changes, the most welcome and overdue is the content rating. Hopefully this will put an end to the crappy soft porn apps that are currently flooding the “Just in” box. That’s assuming the makers of those apps will correctly rate their apps, and there’s no guarantee they will. Deliberately mis-labeling their apps, though, would give Google a good excuse to kick them from the market. If they’d allow users to filter by star rating that would help too, since these apps usually get bad ratings.
Filtering by screen sizes will allow developers to keep their apps from showing on devices with new screen sizes and densities until they’ve had to test them. It will also let devs release two different versions of an app if they so choose - a regular version for phones and a “HD” version for tablets - and have only one show up in the Market on any particular device.
Still missing is a way to filter apps by CPU and GPU power and type, the amount of main memory, and specific device models. Look at what happened with Angry Birds: If a developer like Rovio knows that their app doesn’t work on some models or configurations, they ought to be able to make it so people can’t download the app on those phones until they’ve had time to make it work. Of course, it would be better if every app worked on every device, but since that’s not always possible then keeping users from getting frustrated with non-working apps would be a worthy goal.
Source : http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-gadgeteer/hands-on-with-the-new-android-market-on-a-galaxy-tab/4203?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE
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