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Comment by goodside | Hacker News Reader

"[The App Store is] a platform that can change at any time cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog. There is no alternative platform, despite what others may say about Android, it’s immature and their app store(s) are a wild west nightmare."

These aren't unrelated.

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It's interesting that the author took that blog post to describe the exact opposite. Apple is treating the developers and users like they are immature, with the "because I said so" and inexplicable nondetailed explanations treating everyone with kid gloves. Even Jobs' response sounds like something a parent would say when a kid keeps asking "why?" continuously.

Then there is the "wildwest" of the Android market, where you have to watch out for yourself because anyone can do whatever they want and no one is looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do. That sounds like more a more mature environment to me.

I think you're confusing "mature", treating people like responsible adults, and "mature", a market that has fully expanded and is not growing. If the author from Australia cannot sell an app, than the Android Market is an immature economic market.

The App Store is both mature and immature, and the Android Market is both mature and immature at the same time.

I wasn't confusing them at all, I know exactly what the author meant and I purposely chose the other definition. There's a lot of whining coming from what amounts to Apple fanbois on this issue, when the right thing to do is vote with your dollars and your time. I have a lot more respect for the developer who blogs about how they are moving to another platform and actually does it than one who complains about having hooked their wagon to the wrong star. It's interesting that people like this choose the platform where everything is decided for you (users and developers) rather than helping to make another platform that provides them more freedom to be more finished and polished. They'll use the excuse that they just want to get things done and don't want to be bothered with the lower level details needed to make their app look good/attractive/functional/whathaveyou -- 1) then why bother programming at all, 2) good luck differentiating your app (remove the widgets so your picture frame app follows the new guidelines, now your app duplicates Apple's functionality) when you can't go beyond the preconceived ideas of how apps should operate.

That being said, I'm not sure the author would want a mature market that has "fully expanded and is not growing" anyway. This seriously limits the growth potential. Who's developing for WebOS? By your definition the WebOS market has matured, has expanded and is not growing. However, both the iPhone and Android ecosystems continue to grow, so then neither have "matured".

It's a mature environment but not a mature market, because apparently anyone not living in the 9 countries approved by Google cannot sell their apps on the market.

As someone with a very deep understanding of at least one of the platforms, I would argue that the differences are primarily technical. That is, there are technical barriers to doing bad things on iPhone (APIs are much more limited in scope) that don't exist on Android.

Of course, it's easy to link to private APIs on iPhone, but the app submission process has a totally automated system that verifies that you don't.

So Android isn't even a contender, yet just last month we got the sales numbers posted and they were of the charts.

Methinks the person hasn't actually tried it.

The posters also said that they were in Austrailia and couldn't post paid apps, if I understood from the comments directly.

Australian devs can sell globally as the markets open up. I don't think the desire for picture frames is limited to his country.

I don't think you understand. To sell apps in Google's app store, you need a Google Checkout seller's account. To get a Google Checkout seller's account, well, we'll let Google speak for itself.

Supported locations for merchants

Currently, developers in the below countries may register as Google Checkout merchants and sell priced applications:

    * Austria
    * France
    * Germany
    * Italy
    * Japan
    * Netherlands
    * Spain
    * United Kingdom
    * United States

We're working hard to add more countries, but we're unable to provide any guidance on timelines. Please stay tuned!

This situation has not changed in more than a year, and you can't expect someone who wishes to base a business on developing Android apps to wait on that sort of time scale.

I was unaware of that, and would likely have remained unaware of it as long as developers outside those countries complained not about that very obvious and specific limitation but instead continued to make vague claims about "maturity" of markets.

To be fair, the Android Market does still have plenty of issues. Searching is horrible and the organization is terrible for finding new apps. Those are the main two issues I've noticed as a user, but I can see why those would deter somebody. However, if it's a choice between arbitrarily deleted and just not having your app get noticed (which could also be an issue on Apple's App Store), the latter seems like a much more sensible option.

"[A] platform that can change at any time cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action ..."

That sounds pretty damn immature to me.

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