I sure love these Google Fridays - the Android team tends to release quite a few little updates to the web Market that make us feel warm on the inside, and it turns out this week is no exception.
You can now email developers with a question or a bug report right from the web Market - a feature previously available only in the device Market. For example:
The email url is a simple mailto: link, which should pop up your favorite email client (Gmail in my case). This change should most definitely increase helpful feedback to developers as well as provide users with an ability to ask pre-sales questions.
I did want to point out a few things, however:
- The email addresses are public, even if you're signed out, and are therefore quite vulnerable to harvesting for spam purposes. I'm quite shocked Google actually went this way instead of providing a web contact form without exposing the emails themselves. Gmail's anti-spam features are great and all, but not everyone is using Gmail.
- No clever email obscuring is being done to trick at least the dumbest spiders.
- I wonder if the amount of email will become too much of a burden to some popular developers, who will now get suddenly overwhelmed with new support cases.
Still, we welcome change (I don't remember the last time the iTunes web front added any features), and this one is definitely something I've been looking forward to for a while now.