14 DAY TRIAL // The Android Market has become a popular service since it was launched, and the average user of an Android-based G1 phone at T-Mobile USA is reported to have downloaded around 40 apps from the marketplace, yet it seems that the number could be improved significantly, at least this is what T-Mobile CTO Cole Brodman is reported to have said.
“Users have a hard time searching through that long tail,” Brodman said during an on-stage interview at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference in Redwood City, California. According to him around 80 percent of the G1 users out there use their handset to browse over the Internet daily, while also going for the applications on the Android Market, which offers paid apps as well.
Cole Brodman also stated that there were 2,300 apps offered via the Android Market, and that the portal seemed to actually lack a good search and some customization tools that would offer users the possibility to filter better the apps they were interested in.
Although currently the applications in the marketplace are ranked according to users' ratings, while customers are also enabled to see the apps based on popularity or availability, these options might just not be enough for the total number of software solutions available in the store. According to T-Mobile's CTO, the marketplace could use a mechanism that would be able to provide users with the applications that they would like to learn about most.
In addition, Brodman also stated that feature phones could also benefit from an application store if one were available for them. Of course, the feature phones are less powerful than smartphones, yet they sell much better than the latter, and a software marketplace for them would still be a good thing. As many of you might already know, last year the carrier launched Web2Go, a new interface to facilitate the Web surfing and Flash and Java application downloads for feature phones.