Applications

Oct

Last Week's Best New Android Apps And Games (10/4/10 - 10/10/10), Now With Screenshots

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Apps/Games, Best Apps/Games/LWPs Of The Week, Games, News

Last Updated: April 13th, 2011

Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications and games that went live in the Market in the previous week or so. Compared to last week's roundup, this one is huuuuge and is a real testament to how seriously developers are starting to treat Android.

Please wait for this page to load in full in order to see the AppBrain widgets.

Best New Android Apps

Napster

Android Police coverage: Napster, A Subsidiary Of Best Buy, Launches Official Android App

Listen to your choice of over 11 million full-length songs—anytime, anywhere, all for just $10 a month.

Oct

AppBrain Now Lets You Easily Filter Adobe Air Based Android Apps

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Apps/Games, Games, News

With the release of Adobe Air on Android last week, many users were left wondering how exactly they could use the new 15+ MB clunker. A day after the release, however, the Market was booming with Air apps, ranging from the most basic demos to video calling to gems like this one.

Manual and therefore static by nature attempts, such as this app list by user webkitchen, were a good start but they were simply not sustainable. Seeing this, AppBrain.com, our favorite method to browse Android apps, yesterday released an automatic filter to aid us in this quest to weed out Air apps.

Oct

Firefox For Android Finally Hits Beta Status, Set To Silence Critics

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Applications, News

As we've seen in the last few days, The Artist Formerly Known As Fennec has really been hitting its stride lately. Riding on this wave of improvement comes a shiny new Beta status, making Fennec now, officially, Firefox 4 For Android Beta.

We won't labour you with details, as many words have been written before about F4FA's arduous journey towards usability. Just get out there and download it.

You might also want to check out Mozilla's official blog post, and their little promotional video at the source link below. Sadly, our main man Matt Brubeck is not featured, but he's probably too busy making Fen*cough*Firefox 4 for Android Beta even better.

Oct

[Updated] Google Starting To Flip The Switch On Purchasing Paid Android Market Apps In New Countries

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Apps/Games, Games, News

Last week, Google announced that over the next 2 weeks, support for purchasing paid apps was coming to 18 more countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan.

This morning, reports are trickling in that the switch has been indeed flipped, at least in some of these countries. So far, we've been able to confirm Sweden, Denmark, and India. Tightly coupled with today's rollout is a Market update that converts all application prices to buyers' native currencies.

In case you were wondering why the Danish and Swedish currencies are the same, I did some research and found out that "ca." means "approximately," and both Swedish and Danish currencies are shortened as "kr" - Swedish krona and Danish kroner or krone.

Oct

Android Market Now Shows Application Prices In Your Native Currency

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Apps/Games, Games, News

Today, Google flipped the switch on paid app purchases in more countries, such as India, Sweden, and Denmark, just as promised, and with that came another subtle, yet important, change. Instead of showing prices in developers' native currencies, all application prices are now converted on the fly into your own currency.

Here's what the Market looks like for me in the US now - notice the tilde (~) symbol next to converted prices:

Here is Sweden:

And here's Denmark:

Image credits: [1] [2]

Oct

Last Week's Best New Android Apps And Games (9/27/10 - 10/3/10)

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Apps/Games, Best Apps/Games/LWPs Of The Week, Games, News

Last Updated: April 13th, 2011

Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications and games that went live in the Market in the previous week or so.

Please wait for this page to load in full in order to see the AppBrain widgets.

Best New Android Apps

imgur for Android

imgur for Android allows you to upload images to imgur from your android device, directly from the app or from the share menu. It not only keeps a history of uploaded images but also includes imgur account support.

Our coverage: Imgur App For Android With Account Support Now Available For Download

imgur for Android

Voice Plus

Allows you to set rules for which number dialed will use your Google Voice number.

Oct

LauncherPro Updated To 0.8.0.0, Adds Swipe-up Dock Notifications For LP Plus Users

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Applications, News

If you're not using the launcher that came with your phone's version of Android, chances are you're either using ADW Launcher or Launcher Pro. Launcher Pro may not be open-source like ADW is, but it includes some enviable features. This is not the total re-write that dev Federico Carnales blogged about a few days ago, but it is still an upgrade worthy of a new decimal increase.

Besides bugfixes, this latest update brings another cool trick to the table, specifically swipe-up pop-ups in your launcher's dock which show details of relevant notifications. Currently there is support for missed calls and unread SMS, but more will appear in later versions.

Sep

http://squio.nl/blog/wp-content/2010/05/Android_Market.png

Google Set To Expand Paid Android Market App Support Beyond Current Tally Of 14 Countries

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Apps/Games, News

Those of you following the official @AndroidDev account on twitter may have spotted a cryptic tweet sent out yesterday, urging developers to check their e-mail inboxes. Contained within was an e-mail with some exciting news: Google will be bringing access to paid applications to more countries. The when and the where have still yet to be determined, but Ireland bleedin' better be one of those countries.

Considering the fact that the Android Market is currently available in a pitiful 14 countries, listed below, any increase will make for a dramatic improvement. However, when you look at how many countries the iTunes App Store is available in (90), there is still a lot of ground to be made before catching the Apple juggernaut.

Sep

Nielsen Mobile App Report: Android Users Respond To Advertisement The Most + More [AppNation]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, News

I am live here at the AppNation conference in San Francisco, and after San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's welcome speech, in which he tried to get a bunch of developers to make apps for the government for free (yeah, riiight), we are looking at a mobile report from Nielsen, called The State Of Mobile Apps.

Nielsen, one of the largest media research companies in the world, compiled a report containing a few interesting metrics, such as:

Most Popular Apps
Application Discovery Methods
Free VS Paid Apps
App Billing Preference
a few Advertising related stats

You can download and read the full report below, but before you do that, I wanted to highlight one metric that I found the most interesting.

Sep

Now We're Talking - Google's Latest Follow-up To The License Verification Fiasco Showcases 4 Methods To Make Pirates' Jobs Much Harder

Posted by Justin Case in Apps/Games, Dev, News

Update: Tim Bray responded in our comments letting us know Trevor Johns, a hands-on guy in the Android back-rooms, was the author of the post.

After we blew the faults behind Google's License Verification Library out of the water last week, Google's Tim Bray promised us some tips for protecting our applications against piracy, and in the latest post at Google's official Android blog he delivered them. Tim's article is loaded with easy to follow sample code, and advice that just makes sense. Mr. Bray covers several protection methods including:

obfuscation,
customizing the Licensing Library,
making your application tamper resistant (with a code sample that is nearly identical to what I published a week ago),
and using a secondary server for added protection.