14 DAY TRIAL // The Android Market is designed to be for Google's Android phones (or, better said, for T-Mobile's G1 since it is the only Google Android phone on the market right now), what the App Store is for iPhones, meaning the place where users can download applications for their mobile devices.
It is already a known fact that the Android platform is an open source one, thus it's free to use for any developer out there, which is a new thing in the mobile phone industry. This means that developers won't have to pay any fee to develop Android-specific applications, which makes many believe that, this way, Android Phones will benefit from countless different apps in the near future.
A thing that Apple’s App Store doesn't allow is for its consumers to try out the applications before buying them. This is a restriction developers don't really appreciate, and is one of the reasons behind their lukewarm App Store sales. In an interview Andy Rubin gave to Olga Kharif from Business Week, he said that Google would not impose many of the restrictions that Apple developers have been grumbling about.
Another thing that the Android Market won't do is to place limitations on how much bandwidth an application may use. T-Mobile USA, the provider of Google Android G1, announced that it would ask developers to pay a monthly fee of $2 per month, if their applications used more than 15 Megabytes of bandwidth per user per month.
In this case, Android Market could prove to be a more lucrative environment for developers, thus becoming a real opponent to Apple's App Store. There is also the chance that developers may choose to migrate from the App Store to the Android Market, but this is just a speculation at this point. However, when it comes to Google’s Android plans, one thing is for sure, as Andy Rubin stated, "We want the next killer application to be written for cell phones, not the Internet."