I saw an interesting article saying that Android developers weren't happy: http://www.wirelessweek.com/News/200...ers-Not-Happy/

Much of that is to do with payment, which is not something our community needs to worry about (but Ovi may want to take note). But there were some things raised that we do need to watch in our own community.

"Eighty-two percent of those surveyed indicated the design of the Android Marketplace makes it difficult for apps to be noticed". I suspect that this is a little bit like "Eighty-two percent of turkeys suggested Christmas/Thanksgiving should be abolished" -- after all, every developer thinks the app store should be arranged so that their app comes out on top (co-incidentally, of course). But there is probably some truth behind it

If the N900 is as successful as I hope, then there will be lots of applications in Maemo Downloads. We need to think about how we continuously improve the way people can find applications they are interested in. I would be interested to see ideas for how we can make Downloads even more effective as the number of apps increases.

Graham

I think a basic thing is the "users who installed this installed also..." feature. Search results should be sortable e.g. by popularity, release date, rating, most commented etc.. To provide even better search results you need to build some kind of ontology, which helps to prioritize results and to find correct answers even if search words do not match. Ontologies contain e.g. parent and sibling relations of content, and ideally this information would be from maemo.org users. Maintaing this kind of information is too big a task for administrators.

Absolutely. The downloads section is almost impossible to navigate. The main page shows two apps on top, one with a banner "hot" and one with a banner "fresh". Under these two programs are longer lists called "fresh" and "popular" (not "hot") and, for some reason, the "fresh" list is under the main "hot" program and the "popular" list is under the main "fresh" program.

Clicking on the banner brings up a description of the top program. You need to click on the "more" button (which, in most sites, would indicate more information about the program) to bring up a list of hot or fresh programs.

Clicking on any category brings up a list which cannot be sorted for freshness. The only filter that can be applied is the OS. The listings don't show the OS and if you search for something which is available for multiple OSs it pulls up only one result with only one OS highlighted.

And, most definitely, et cetera.

I have no idea what I might be missing. I long for a search, sort, and filter capability like SourceForge.