Android :: Catch 22 Re Android Market Developer Agreement
Nov 5, 2010
This is not a programming question per se but a question that may be relevant to all future Android developers.I am in the market for an Android developer phone. I can buy it used on eBay, or I can buy it new on the Android Market.All nice and dandy but in order what the Android market has to offer, I have to first register, which requires signing the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement.Well, I know that many developers signed that agreement and stayed alive, but before signing anything I prefer to read what I am about to sign. Unfortunately, certain information that is needed to be understood in order to sign the agreement can be accessed only after you sign the agreement.For example, how do I know which are the "authorized payment processors" mentioned in clause 1.2?Also, it sounds strange to me that in order to just see what developer phones are available (and their specs) I first have to register and pay the $25 registration fee. It will take at least 6 months before I will be ready to place anything on the Android market, so why should I register now?
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Apr 24, 2009
I'm sorry I know this is slightly off-topic, but since there is no group about the market... When I'm logging in to the Market console, I'm asked to agree with the "updated Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement".Is there any info/announcement anywhere highlighting and explaining the differences with the previous agreement?
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Mar 17, 2010
I have still not seen an acceptable solution for in-app purchasing, and I was hoping for an official response from Google. This has been discussed in other threads, but there is still no good solution. http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/threa.Collecting a fee to unlock functionality or to buy virtual items is not a technical problem. It is straightforward.However, the Market Agreement severely limits developers' ability to collect such a fee. It says all fees collected for the app must go through the Market payment processor.Buying another app from the Market seems the only clearly acceptable solution. But that is not ideal.It perverts the definition of an "app" and causes problems because of the refund policy.Google, how are developers supposed to handle this situation? Or is your intention that we simply not do this?
While lawyers may quarrel over the actual document, what is your intent as it pertains to buying virtual items? For example, charging $1 real money for 10 in-game gold?What if only the front end of the game is distributed on the market,and the features of the front end (the app) do not change with additional fees? This may be splitting hairs but that's what happens with legal documents, I suppose.So what is the intention of the Market Agreement here? Did you intend to prevent buying virtual items or not?
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May 28, 2010
An interesting addendum to the Gameloft debate.I bought Asphalt 5 when if came out on the Market in April. It's now been pulled (presumably connected to Gameloft going to direct distribution). One think I notice is that when I pull up my list of Downloads in the Market application it no longer shows up. Presumably this means I won't be receiving updates on it.But presumably this also means I cannot reinstall it if I clear some memory / bork my phone / have a horrible experience with the Gingerbread update &tc &tc.Are they allowed to do this? Isn't one of the reasons I buy on the Market because I know I have the right to reinstall? Let's look at the marketplace agreement which (presumably) Gameloft signed up to: Android.com.Take a close look at clauses 3.6 and 7.1.
1) I have the right to unlimited reinstalls (3.6).
2) Even if an app is taken down by the vendor, my licence rights are unaffect (7.1).
3) There are special cases where an app can be taken down and reinstall rights suspended (if it infringes copyright, is defamatory etc). However if taken down under these circumstances I am entitled to a refund (7.1).
So as I see it taking down Asphalt 5 and denying me my right to unlimited installs contravenes the Marketplace agreement (does anyone else have experience with other paid apps that have been taken down?). And even if the app was taken down because it was dodgy (which I don't think it has done), I should be entitled to a full refund.I've lobbed a request into Gameloft support to see what they come out with, but I don't hold up much hope.
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Oct 31, 2010
Something really strange happened today and I could really use some help figuring it out. I believe its related to Google's SSO infrastructure, and I don't really know how to contact Google to get my application rescued.
I have a google apps account I used to create the application, its claytantor at sightlyinc dot com not a f...@gmail.com account but its a Google Apps account, so I used it to upload and distribute my application. Today when I was using blogger my account said "do you want to use claytantor at sightlyinc dot com or claytantor at sightlyinc dot com for this account?" what kind of choice is that they are both the same? Well my guess is that somehow I chose the one that locks me out of my Android Market account because when I went to try to upload a new version of my app it thinks I don't have an Android Market account.
Paying the extra 20 bucks wouldn't bug me but there is a version of my software out there that I cant access or manage now, and that *really* bothers me. If I create a new account I will have two versions of mys software floating around the new one and the old one that has been stranded! I cant live with that.
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Mar 10, 2009
I've developed for a bunch of platforms and I'm starting to get a bit frustrated with Android/Google. It seems like you didn't quite think things through for developers.
1) There's no way to dialog on ratings. Even in a stupid web blog the author is allowed to comment in a discussion. Ratings should be more like discussions. Lots of sites do this well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
2) There's no way to remove the ratings from dumb shills for other products who trash your product.
3) There's no way to see ratings that are declared as Spam. I'd like to see what's getting marked as Spam in case it's the same shills pushing their own products marking good reviews as Spam.
4) The score includes all those dumb shills so the star score is consistently low and the product will always languish.
5) We still don't have .33 for our phones. I can't mark something as Spam yet nor even see what's for sale on Market. This should have been ready when it rolled to users. Or at least tell us WHEN it will be ready. This 'coming soon' stuff doesn't do much fo rme.
6) All google lookups for doc go to the old doc site. Can't you at least upgrade your references in search to go to the new doc?
7) There's no way to post an update for a non-free product! Wtf is that? That's ok if you're producing the typical dumb iPhone flash game but for a real product?
8) There's still a huge black hole in the dev for bluetooth, as well as a bunch of missing documentation for more kernel-related stuff.
9) The web interface for market is miserable. Why can't we see all the apps there? Why don't we have the same set of controls we do from the phone along with a discussion/blog for ratings.
10) Adding a more serious set of rich-text info (with maybe a picture or two) as a hyperlink from market would be easy and really great for developers. 325 plaintext characters doesn't do much for anyone.
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Mar 11, 2009
Is it against Google's rules to use the word "Android" in a developer name?I'm leaning towards no.While it is the name of the OS, Google didn't invent the word. For example, could I make my developer name "bobTheAndroid"?(I'm asking before I make my developer account so I don't somehow lose my $25)
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Aug 14, 2010
We are converting out suite of iPhone apps written in .NEt MonoTouch to Android.
How do we catch, then publish exceptions so that they are reported via the Android Market?
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Jun 25, 2010
in the developer console, I have a couple of errors, which although fixed in the code and marked old in the console, still show up on the front page. And I highly suspect that this is affecting the rank of my apps. This is obviously a bug in the developer console:
1. at the developer console homepage it says (in bold face): Errors (2)
2. when I click on "Errors", it shows: Freezes Crashes 1 new 1 new 0 reports 0 reports 1 old 3 old 2 reports 7 reports
3. When I click on "1 New" in the "Freezes" column, it displays: Old ANR keyDispatchingTimedOut 2 reports 0 reports/week
Also, one of my apps, TapeMachine, has 4.5 stars, 973 downloads, and 83% active installs. For certain keyword searches in the market it has been the first result for many weeks. And since these (bogus) errors are here, it has lost its rank falling under many applications with lower ratings. A similar issue happened with the free version, which has 4 stars and about 20k downloads.Is there a workaround or a fix for this situation?
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Jun 22, 2010
(Question also posted here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=68dc1f694537c7dc&hl=en )
http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html
recommends searching for apps by Developer Name using the URL: market://search?q=pub:
I can't get this to work for two word names. For instance, if I want to search for all of Google's apps on the Market, I would search for 'Google Inc.' since if you look at Google Earth, Google Sky Map, etc. those are all published by 'Google Inc.'
I've tried the following:
market://search?q=pub:Google%2BInc%2E
(equivalent of: Google+Inc.)
market://search?q=pub:Google%20Inc%2E
(equivalent of: Google Inc.)
market://search?q=pub:Google Inc.
(equivalent of: Google Inc.)
market://search?q=pub:Google+Inc.
(equivalent of: Google+Inc.)
but none work.
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May 20, 2010
The new bugs feature is a great move forward to empower devs and users both, kudos Google.
However, the reports don't tell me which version of my app the report is from, which is critical for me to properly triage.
Is there any feedback channel to Google other than this group we could use to get this feature added?
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Jul 20, 2010
I have a free app that has 64% of ratings at 5 starts, but still has 9% of ratings at only 1 start, some of them even said that my app is an "useless garbage", so I think maybe I need to leave a reply to those users to explain something or answer their questions. So are there any ways that we could do such thing?
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May 21, 2010
Data there are inconsistent!. On dashboard I have TWO new bugs. Going down I see one NEW and one OLD. When I click on NEW link I see one OLD only. When I go down I see bug marked as OLD. More info for Android Market developers: application: net.hubalek.android.worldclock, Exception class java.lang.NullPointerException Source method WorldClockWidget.onReceive()
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Jun 3, 2010
The "Developer Console" page of Android market not work on Chromium browser. Some hyperlink item on this page are un-clickable, such as "Upload Upgrade", "Replace this image", and "add language". However it's work correctly on Fire-Fox browser. I don't know how to report this issue to Chromium developing team, please help me to report this issue.
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Aug 9, 2010
I was looking for per-application control over retry until and other license settings from the developer console. This appears not to be available. Do I implement a more lenient ServerManagedPolicy by twiddling with these settings and associated preferences in ProcessServerRequest? My app operates fine in airplane mode, and I can anticipate it being used for extended periods of time where internet connectivity is unavailable.
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Feb 15, 2009
The Android Developer Console doesn't allow me to unpublish my previously published applications. I thought it may be a browser/ javascript issue, but I tried several browsers with no luck.In addition, the applications I've published that are not free do not show up on the Market.
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Sep 27, 2010
In the agreement of the Dolphin Browser HD, it states that Dolphin will collect data about the user in something called user experience analytics.I've been trying to find information about this, to no avail. I've searched everywhere.Has anyone read this agreement?Can anyone give me information about what they collect? It seems very open statement, in which they could practically take anything.
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Sep 25, 2010
public class SMSWidget extends AppWidgetProvider {
private static final String queryString = "@inpion";
private static final String SMS_RECEIVED = "android.provider.Telephony.SMS_RECEIVED";
@Override
public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
//get SMS Message
if(intent.getAction().equals(SMS_RECEIVED)){
Bundle bundle = intent.getExtras();...............
in my app,i send sms but in home screen ,AppWidget cannot receive it,only notification can notify me,i want to the message frist was received in my AppWidget not appear in notification bar?
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Aug 19, 2009
I'm writing an app dealing with JPEG pictures. The main Activity let the user slide between a set of pictures, but if these pictures are too large (imagine a set of pictures taken with a 12Mpix camera, not resized), the pre-loading of the second picture throws an OutOfMemoryException that leads to an immediate app VM shutdown whereas I surrounded my calls to BitmapFactory.decodeXXX() whit a try/ catch(Exception). So, the user gets an error message making him think the app is unstable, and the app didn't have any chance of telling him what really happened. How can I handle this a more "user friendly" way? Can I predict the memory size that will be necessary to load a compressed JPEG picture?
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May 19, 2009
I can't seem to catch SQLiteConstraintException from SQLiteDatabase. Has anyone else encountered this?
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Jan 11, 2010
I was in my jeep the other day when I heard a ad for some song and a itagging...That got me thinking. Now before the fanboy name calling starts, this is not a comparison to iPhone. I have never owned one, nor shall I ever. I think for the android based phone to compete more with the whole iphone market, I think we need to develop our own brand of iTagging, our own brand of iPhone docks, and our own version of iTunes. I understand that the iPhone has been out for a long time and has had the media market to back it up. Heres the thing. There are way more versions of android based phones that there will be of iPhones. I know that there are a lot of variations of the phones, but its nothing adapters cant fix for the docks. as for the itagging, and the itunes apps, its nothing a dev cant handle. I am not a Dev, nor am I a manufacturer, but Im sure some of us can find a friend of a friend who knows this guy that lives down the street to help out our cause...
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Mar 4, 2010
This would be some excellent support for the faithful Android developers. I have eight apps but live in Canada so I haven't been permitted to post them on the Market yet. Still I'm hoping Google might take this into account for Canadian developers who can't yet meet the sales criteria. I applied anyway and hope Google will respond so I can begin mobile testing.
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Jun 10, 2009
I've tried, but couldn't find anything. Is there any way to determine that the key is longpressed?
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Jul 24, 2010
There is a site in the uk called m.catchuptv.com that steams live tv on to the phone. it was originally an iphone thing, but now works on android. The last couple of days it has stopped working where it times out and cant connect to the server. I dont know if its my phone (htc desire) or its the site. it works best over wi-fi.
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Jun 24, 2009
i need to start a background deamon not just when an application need to bind with, i have searched a way to auto-start it. One interesting reply was given in this maillist and i wanna more explanation on the way to catch BOOT_COMPLETED_ACTION from an IntentReceiver? The previous thread that i have found on this maillist was this one:
" Use an IntentReceiver and catch the BOOT_COMPLETED_ACTION. Then in the IntentReceiver call Context.startService() (but use carefully, only when you really need a background service to run all the time). "
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Sep 27, 2010
I want is that android phone catch sound and pictures,and I need get the sound and pictures data. I'm a rookie.
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Aug 21, 2009
I want to listen the android standard exceptions to manage it. But I don't put try/cath in all my code. Anyone knows if i can redirect the error output to my code. I've seen this System.setErr method, but It doens't works for this purpouse.
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Jul 6, 2010
how can I catch a HTTP 403 error? I use the HttpURLConnection to establish a HTTP connection with Base Authentication. When the authentication fails I get a FileNotFoundException :-( Why I doesn't get a HttpResponseException?
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Apr 8, 2009
My application uses WebView to load javascript which calls into Java class (through webview javascript iterface). Can the JavaScript catch exceptions thrown from Java?
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May 25, 2010
I have five screen in my application. While in performing one action in fifth screen I encountered with Stop Application message. On which, I am getting 3 times "Stop Application" msg box, which covers 3 previous screen and comes back to the first screen. I understand I must have encountered with Error may be IndexOutOfBoundException which I have not addressed it in my code. I was wondering why it asks for extra 3 times "Stop Application" system message. It is fine to display an "Stop Application" system message if I encountered an error in any screen it should stop that particular screen and should come to the next screen on. How can I trap/catch such incidents not to occur in the consecutive screen. If the above description is not clear at any place please let me know that I be more clear to you.
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