I think the Android Market is in need of some work. First of all, the statistics reported to Android developers are broken. Here are the statistics for the two applications I have on the market…

ASpell is still showing zero installs and WordNet has been stuck at 1377 for over a week now. I am not the only one with problems.

The second problem is that the comments and ratings on Applications have become meaningless. Many of the comments and ratings are a combination of…

• Comment spam advertising web sites
• People trying to post the first comment on an application rather than actually reviewing
• People criticising the people posting the first comment or comment spam
• People asking for totally unrelated applications or not reading the original description
• People posting unintelligible comments

How can Google solve this problem? A ‘rate the ratings’ system could possibly help but it wouldn’t remove offending comments and would probably just clutter the market. The system would also still be open to abuse because it’s easy to get new Google User Ids and sign in as different users.

A better system might be for people submitting applications to be able to flag comment entries as poor quality. I can’t see T-Mobile or Google employing people to police the market so there needs to be some sort of self regulating system. Obviously, application authors have an interest in only favourable reviews so it might be best to also have some aggregate system where when more that a given number of application submitters has flagged a poor comment author, then all that person’s comments would be automatically removed from the system. Maybe even ban that person’s phone from the store altogether.

UPDATE: Within an hour of posting this, my install statistics started working again!
UPDATE: There are more comments on the comments system. John M gives a great summary…

"This is what it has become: three people post that they were first, then there are 20-30 comments bashing those people with racial slurs and curse words, then 2-4 real comments, next are 1 or 2 people begging for a flash player followed with 20 people telling them to stop asking for flash player, then it is an artist of some sort promoting there website, then another 20-30 comments telling them that isn’t to promote stuff."

One day soon, companies like T-Mobile will have to make money via the (30%) commission from the sales on the Android Market.  I can’t see T-Mobile being that happy with the comment system as it is now.

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• Publishing an Android Application

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 8:01 am and is filed under Mobile, Android. Both comments and pings are currently closed.