The Weather Channel: Who Do You Think You Are?

Let's take a brief look at permissions The Weather Channel application requests.

• Services that cost you money: Send SMS messages - Who is the application going to send SMS messages to?
• Services that cost you money: Directly call phone numbers - What numbers is it going to call?
• Your location: Coarse (network-based) location - All right, I understand it wants to know where I am to tell me what the weather is.
• Your location: Fine (GPS) location - Why does it want my exact location? Oh, I see, to show me ads. Thanks, but no thanks, you guys can easily do the same using just coarse GPS location.
• Your personal information: Add or modify calendar events and send email to guests - What? Excuse me? Why would Weather Channel want to intrude into my calendar, and, worse, send emails to guests?
• Your personal information: Read calendar events - This one even seems benign in light of the previous one, but still - why?
• Storage: Modify/delete USB storage contents, modify/delete SD card contents - Again - why? I can guess that it wants to cache data, but surely not as much that it requires special permissions to USB storage and SD card?

Note that the detailed explanation of why these permissions are required is not available from the developer (at least as of the moment of writing).

Summary

The Weather Channel application requests unreasonably wide permissions with no justification to do so. If you value your privacy, you should never install it, or uninstall it right away if you did install it in the past (when permission set was more reasonable) and forgot to check permissions as updates were coming.

Corollary

The Weather Channel is not the only application abusing permissions. Android core development team must come up with a way for the end user to selectively deny permissions requested by an application, so the end user doesn't fall prey to sloppy or malicious applications. There is some progress, but the definite answer from Google is not available - I wonder if there is a collusion between Google and big players in Android Market, just like there seems to be one with YouTube upload manipulation.

Android Quirks

Today I noticed that an attempt to start the Barcode Scanner always results in Android Market being started instead.

This happens regardless whether it is being started from the pullup menu, or either of three Android 1.6 desktop panel icons. No amount of installation, uninstallation and shuffling around seems to help.

The only way to start this application now is to go to the Android Market, find the Barcode Scanner, and click "Open".

Alas, had to use an alternative, for that is very inconvenient.

Anyone seen this?

Android Market Updates: I Give Up

As far as I'm concerned, the main problem with Android Market is drowning in an ocean of shit.

The "default" Android Market is useless - you have to be actively looking for something in order to find it, and it has to be "top". Thus useful, but niche applications go unnoticed. There is no search. There is no feed.

cyrket.com, on the other hand, does provide a feed. Good luck using it, though. Daily volume is over a hundred items, you've missed a weekend - it's over 300, you've had a busy week - it's well over a thousand. Most of it is farts and sexy lady whatever, repeated every few hours (yes, developers have realized that you have to release a new version pretty much every day to stay on top avoid total oblivion).

I've been using the cyrket.com RSS Feed since the day it appeared, but today I'm calling it quits - the signal/noise ration has become loathsome, and I'd rather miss something useful than spend hundreds of non-renewable hours of my life sifting through junk that is flowing at ever increasing speed.

What I would ideally like to see (consider this a free idea) is an Android Market notification service that would allow me to

• notify me of totally new applications only;
• notify me of new releases of applications I've subscribed to;
• allow to blacklist publishers, or, even better,
• allow to blacklist anything based on regular expression patterns.

Then it can become more or less usable. Not before.

Android Market Trend: Greed

There was abundance of good Android applications on Android Market from the very beginning, when it was free. Then, paid applications showed up, and "Pro" and "Donate" apps started appearing.

Then, developers realized that the fact that there's been 250k downloads for the free app doesn't necessarily mean that there will be at least 10k downloads for the paid app, you're lucky if you get 10 - sometimes it's the user's greed, sometimes it's just the fact that the app is good enough as free, but doesn't withstand any criticism as paid, and paying for it is mostly a honor of recognition thing.

Then, the developers got greedy and started silently removing features from free applications and offering them only with paid versions thereof. Take into account the fact that you can't downgrade the application on Android (and I suspect that you can't even hold upgrading, Market does it for you automatically if you keep ignoring the notification long enough).

My prediction is that it's going to backfire, this way or that.

Yes, I know that it sucks that people are willing to take your work for free, but don't want to pay (I am a software engineer as well, remember?).

However, whereas more expensive objects' acquisition is decided upon the price and the merits, the price here is so low, it's immaterial in comparison with impression. And if you're pulling features out of your free stuff - not only you're not allowing new Android Market users to see the benefits of it, you're also creating the impression of racket. You're betraying my trust into you, and taking away what you already gave me.

You are not irreplaceable. Even if I was considering making a donation worth a few minutes of my time (longer to process the transaction than to earn it), I'm not considering it anymore. There will be others that will fill the gap created by you, and they will do it better than you and possibly cheaper than you, for they'll learn on your mistakes.

Play nice, will ya?

If There Is One Lesson Android Market Taught Me...

...then it is: don't be a smart aleck and name your application in a way that conveys with cristal clarity what the hell it is doing. Preferrably in three words or less.

Android Market For The Web

Alas, the long awaited Market presence on the web is finally here, at Cyrket.

Let's see now how much time they need to grow ripe to the concept of RSS.

UPDATE: Don't know when they actually got to it, but as of March 1st the RSS is available. Now it is really usable.

When The Geek Phone Is Assaulted By Mere Mortals...

...then the infrastructure caves in. *And* the geek phone.

I guess the audience is catching up, and the regular users that bought the phone not because they knew what it is, but because they saw the ad or otherwise chose it over something else, finally discovered the Android Market.

Application downloads started since yesterday still display "starting download" (tricks with "restarting" don't help), and the whole phone feels as sluggish as 256M RAM computer trying to run ten applications under Windows XP. There's seven application download processes runnig in parallel, with zero success.

I guess I could've eased its task and cancel some of downloads to bring the phone back to normal, but that'd be cheating - regular users won't do that, so I'm gonna follow their lead and see how soon does it come back to normal, if ever.

That's a second serious dent in G1, first being the voice dialer.

Update: Don't know what was the role of the Market server, but 24 hours later the issue was solved by a simple reboot. Welcome to the Windows world.