CES 2012: Qualcomm Snapdragon GameCommand to Launch on Android Market.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, is expected to launch the Snapdragon GameCommand™ application to the Android Market on January 10, 2012, the opening day of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). At its heart, Snapdragon GameCommand will give mobile users a way to quickly discover, organize and access the latest Snapdragon optimized, featured and exclusive games. It will also provide feeds from top gaming news sites to help consumers stay up to date with the latest gaming news.

Snapdragon GameCommand will enable users to easily access and play many of the over 100 Snapdragon™ GamePack featured games on a wide range of mobile phones and tablets. The Snapdragon GamePack includes several titles exclusively available on Snapdragon devices running on Android for a limited time, including "Fight Game Heroes" from Khaeon Gamestudio. "Fight Game Heroes" features head-to-head battles with real MMA fighters, including multiple combat champion and UFC fighter Alistair "The Reem" Overeem. Visitors to CES will have the chance to meet the 6'-5", 265-pound Overeem in-person and watch as he takes on Qualcomm executives in live rounds of "Fight Game Heroes" at the Qualcomm Booth in the LVCC South Hall, Upper Level, Booth #30313. 

Other exclusive games that are accessible to consumers with Snapdragon GameCommand include titles such as "Bunny Maze 3D" from Eyelead Software and "Desert Winds™" from Southend Interactive. In "Bunny Maze 3D", players help the adventurous Bunny get back his stolen carrots, in a cheerful journey through a magical world. In the "Desert Winds" mini-game players take on the persona of princess Amira as she battles gruesome creatures of the desert to save her people.

"With mobile gaming proliferating at a blistering pace, apps like Snapdragon GameCommand make it easy for consumers to discover and access the most advanced Snapdragon optimized games," says Dave Durnil, director of advanced gaming at Qualcomm. "With exclusive and highly-anticipated games like 'Fight Game Heroes' and 'The Reem' Snapdragon mobile gaming is really starting to heat up."

Snapdragon GameCommand is expected to be available in North America at launch and will be available in other markets at a later date. 

About Qualcomm 

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) is the world leader in 3G and next-generation mobile technologies. For more than 25 years, Qualcomm ideas and inventions have driven the evolution of digital communications, linking people everywhere more closely to information, entertainment and each other. For more information, visit Qualcomm's website, OnQ blog, Twitter and Facebook pages.

About QuIC

Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, focused on enabling and optimizing open source software for use with Qualcomm technology. The company is focused on technical innovations to mobile open source software that leverage the unique capabilities of today's mobile devices, with a particular eye to optimizing platforms and the applications that run on them via tight hardware integration. 

QUALCOMM and SNAPDRAGON are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the United States and may be registered in other countries. SNAPDRAGON, GAMECOMMAND and DESERT WINDS are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated. Other brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Qualcomm Contacts:

Tina Asmar, Corporate Communications

Phone: 1-858-845-5959

Email: corpcomm@qualcomm.com 

Warren Kneeshaw, Investor Relations

Phone: 1-858-658-4813

Email: ir@qualcomm.com

SOURCE Qualcomm Incorporated

2012: Google’s Android Market passed the 400,000 app mark.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Distimo said that Google’s Android Market passed the 400,000 app mark at the start of the year, having reached 200,000 in April 2011 and 300,000 in August 2011.

 Free content dominates the store, with more than two-thirds of the available apps falling into this category. The analytics firm noted that this has grown steadily from 60 percent in April 2011, driven by the increased popularity of the freemium business model.

 The company noted that while Apple took 22 months to reach 200,000 apps and Android Market took 31 months, momentum then shifted in favour of the Google store – it took four months to pass 300,000 and four more to pass 400,000, compared with eight and seven for the iPhone store.

 This echoes earlier reports of Google’s Android Market download performance. Again, while Apple had a head-start in the market, momentum shifted in favour of Android as the smartphone user base grew.

 It was also noted that Android Market now has “almost more than 100,000 publishers active in its application store.” Developers publish 4.1 apps on average, down from nearly five twelve months ago.

 Distimo noted that the recent milestone relates only to current applications in the store, and not those previously removed by Google or developers for various reasons.

More than 37 percent of the 500.000 Android market apps, have been removed.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Analyst firm research2guidance said that while the number of apps submitted to Android Market has passed the 500,000 mark, compared with 600,000 for Apple’s App Store, more than 37 percent of these have subsequently been removed – compared with just 24 percent removed from the App Store.

The company suggested that although Apple regularly cleans its store of “inappropriate or outdated content,” the more rigid submission requirements may prevent developers from publishing multiple trial or low quality apps. In contrast, Android Market includes “a lot of market testing, trials, demo and malware content.”

It was also noted that more than 78 percent of the apps removed from Android Market were free, indicating that publishers may be putting more effort into paid-for products, ensuring they are kept in the store for longer.

research2guidance said that the share of deactivated apps in the WP7 Marketplace stands lower, at 13 percent, although this is still a “comparably young store.” After a similar period of time, 14 percent of Android Market apps had been removed.

According to the company, Android developers have placed an average of “more than 6” applications in the Market, compared with “just over 4” for the App Store.

Google hits 3Billion Android apps downloads

World Wide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Google’s Android Market has hit 3 billion installations of mobile apps worldwide, just two months after hitting 2 billion installations. Momentum is clearly growing fast; it took Google 20 months to hit its first 1 billion installs on Android, but then only another five months to hit 2 billion. 

And in its most recent quarter, Google’s app installs were up 50 percent compared to the previous quarter. Such growth is driven by the 350,000 daily activations of Android-based handsets (almost 2.5 million a week).

In comparison, in January Apple reported that it hit its 10 billionth download for iOS apps, compared to hitting its first billion in April 2009. It hit 5 billion in June 2010.

New Android Market on a Galaxy Tab. Screenshots.

WorldWideTech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

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:

Over the next several days, Google will be updating the Android Market on devices running Android 1.6 or higher to introduce a number of changes that will affect users and developers alike. According to email sent Saturday to registered developers, the changes include:

• 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.

In addition to the pictures listed above, developers can also provide a 1024×500 Feature Graphic, and a 512×512 High Resolution Application Icon. When zdnet tried to update their app’s content rating the developer’s console said the high res icon was now required, while the others are optional. I’m hoping that’s a mistake that will be fixed because for one of my apps a full color 512×512 icon would be larger than the whole app.


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