An update to the thread that was originally posted here, What is the Business Model for Android Developers.
After perusing the forums and thinking about google’s statements, I think that we can safely say that the direction they want us to take is toward desktop-izing this platform. You have your staple apps that must be on every desktop, and Google wants us to hurl our ideas upon the pikes of their judges, though I might be dramatizing slightly, so that out of all the entries, a mere 50 are brought together to represent the type of things that this phone will be used for. It’s a bit of a cheap move to pull the ‘we’ll know it when we see it’, but unrestrained innovation is the only way to truly progress. To break in on an established industry, where players like Symbian run the arena, the OHA needs to be able to do things nobody else can, but everybody else wants to.
And really, I think that an analysis of the factors leading up to this contest will point out something. There are 109 weekdays left before this contest closes, by my count. This platform is brand new and the SDK is introducing new semantics and a new architecture based around VM’s housing all userspace processes, and the checks go out in that amount of time? That is madness. These projects will be very rushed.
Consider, though, the disparity between first and second round funding. While Google knows that the amount of time we have isn’t enough to build an application, they also know that ‘for free’ isn’t an option for complex, world-changing ideas to develop. Most of us are focused on the $25,000 first-round, but realistically, that is the bait. The fifty groups funded there will now be given a chance to show fiscal responsibility, to drive their application’s development, and to use resources to achieve a goal. After but a short period, ten receive $275,000, and ten receive $100,000. This means that a whopping 40% of the groups who passed the first round will be funded with at least four times the first check.
For that reason, I think that what Google wants to see from us the most is a complete, mature business plan that will stably ensure that their resources will be put to the use for which they were intended. Technical competency with the Android platform is essential, and people must understand that the work put into this hardware needs to be displayed. Applications that rely heavily on peculiarities of the internal structure of the Android platform will be leaned towards, for the precise reason that they demonstrate why it is /different/. Its superiority can be established later, but the differences must be tangible and must surprise the users.
In short, I think it may very well be that a donations-based project could win funding. I would think that open-source with subscription to data services, such as for remote lookups of pre-compiled data to speed the user experience, would be looked kindly upon, especially if they were well documented and served others. I also would say that a decent library set to provide certain types of complex functionality, though it’s hard to think of any not already included, would be good as well.
~Treth
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