Android News
Android Market has 10,000 crappy “spam” apps
March 19, 2010 | by Andrew Kameka
Android OS
There’s a lot of crap in the Android Market. You know it and I know it, so the recent milestone of the Market having about 30,000 apps was bittersweet. AppBrain now reports that there are more than 10,000 apps that are mainly “spam” apps that users do not want.
AppBrain is a service that lets users browse the Android Market from their desktop and then sync downloads on an Android phone. The company counts 28,936 apps available in the U.S. Android Market. However, there’s an alarming number of poorly-rated apps from a small number of developers who reproduce the same content to “make a quick buck.”
There are 32 “spammers” who produce nearly 7,500 apps. That means 0.4% of all Android developers account for 25% of apps. The obvious offenders are developers who build “sexy apps” and mobile browser apps that do nothing but open websites. There are a total of 359 spammers with more than 10,000 apps.
Users who browse AppBrain online can now skip over undesirable apps. AppBrain does this by filtering out apps from developers with high publishing counts and bad ratings or no downloads. Crapapps are listed in gray lines and can be clicked if you actually want them, but people who don’t want to see those apps can now focus on more valuable listings. For more information on how to use AppBrain, read our recent article.
[AppBrain]
Now we know why Apple is so picky with it's app approval process
No, we're all still somewhat confused by that. There's a pretty high percentage of useless crap in the App Store as well.
thats what i was thinking, bet there is some iphone crap too, but it'd be easy to get a crappy app through the apple process, i mean hell, there wouldn't be a lot to say no to.
My recent post The Day with the Bear Network
I think at least 4000 of these are mafia wars variants. To make it worse, they constantly resubmit/update them so that all this garbage always fills the first several pages of the 'recently added' section. Google really needs to change the recently added behavior – initial submission date would be better (create date vs last change date).
Cool. I’ve been wishing the market had a ‘filter’ function you could enter dev names into to block their listings, but this is better.
You just have to go to the android market and only view the top 10 applications. Either that or go view information about the apps before you download them. There are many sites that rank android applications.. top-5-free-andtoid-games
You just have to go to the android market and only view the top 10 applications. Either that or go view information about the apps before you download them. There are many sites that rank android applications.. top-5-free-andtoid-games
I think that adding a charge to submittal process would help reduce the number of crapapps that are submitted. There is no reason to submit 150 versions of one application each in a different language – write the program correctly, and ask the user what language they want and download that info.
I think that if I wanted to publish a 'free to download' app, I would be willing to pay a one time $5, or $10 fee to get it posted.
The other way is to have a way to get the app actually removed from the Market if you get 90% ratings of less then 1 star. As a soon as the market sees 10 ratings it starts to check and see what percent is bad, and send the developer a warning, if it dosn't get better by 20 ratings, then it removes the app.
i would not be too happy about paying to publish a free app. but your ratings idea is excellent. all websites that utilize a rating system should take that sort of action. imagine how much better sites like ebay would be.