The Android market does not make me want to buy apps. This is its greatest failing.
Apple's app store actually feels like a store. It's fun to spend money there. There are many different ways to discover new apps of all types. Each one typically has as much info and screenshots as I want to see.
In the Android Market, I have the category charts that never change, the firehouse of junk and spam that is "just in", or search, which is only really useful if you already know the name of the app you want. The descriptions are tiny, the screenshots are ugly and often missing, and the comments are mostly YouTube caliber.
If they can't make it fun to buy Android apps then the whole platform is going nowhere.
I don't believe I've ever had fun buying PC software, but that platform went somewhere. What is your reason for believing the smartphone market is different?
"somewhere" being primarily Microsoft, Adobe, and virus scanning applications, all of the above for large amounts of money and frequently purchased as necessities. The market for smaller desktop applications is pretty hard, and seems to mostly get along by the PC user-base being utterly massive, not by any ease-of-use.
Applications on OSX are a bit nicer, as there's rarely an install/uninstall process at all, and an enormous amount of the people I know with macs have bought several smaller applications for various minor needs. Nothing that can't be faked by text files / Excel, but a nicer interface makes a difference. Things like Sparkle also mean people update far more frequently. I don't see that much in my Windows-using friends, especially in the non-geek sectors. But OSX has a much smaller market share, and I have a feeling that a lot of the successes are due to things like MacHeist, pulling in $1/2 million+ over a couple days, which do make buying software fun. One can argue that they also dilute the money pool by devaluing them when not on sale, but the amount of effect that has is nebulous at best.
Apple's app store actually feels like a store. It's fun to spend money there. There are many different ways to discover new apps of all types. Each one typically has as much info and screenshots as I want to see.
In the Android Market, I have the category charts that never change, the firehouse of junk and spam that is "just in", or search, which is only really useful if you already know the name of the app you want. The descriptions are tiny, the screenshots are ugly and often missing, and the comments are mostly YouTube caliber.
If they can't make it fun to buy Android apps then the whole platform is going nowhere.