Android Market

The company is searching for individuals or teams who already have new ideas or mobile application under development. These are going to be developed alongside the company to add new applications to the Android Market.  The newly hired employees would be working in Google offices around the world. Current employees are being assigned with other tasks to boost their initiative of development of mobile applications.

With these changes, the company intends to push forward with its Android development and promoting the Android Market. At present, Google is involved in developing around 20 Android applications. Most of these applications are extensions of their online applications such as Google Maps and Google Earth. Other applications such as Google Goggles and Google Sky Map were developed as a part of Google Labs, which is a giant search engine program for developers to encourage them to develop applications rendered by the company. The ratio can be seen with the Android Market offering  100,000 applications  to Apple’s App Store which offers 350,000 which is a huge difference.

Google Play applications icon
On Google Play free applications are available worldwide except Iran, while paid applications are available in 129 countries. Applications can be installed from the device or the Google Play website.[6] According to Google there were over 450,000 titles available as of March 2012. Google Play can update the applications the user selects automatically, or users can update then on a per-case basis or update all applications at once.
Google Play filters the list of applications to those compatible with the user's device. In addition, users may face further restrictions to choice of applications where developers have tied-in their applications to particular carriers or countries for business reasons.  Carriers can also ban certain applications, for example tethering applications.
Some carriers offer direct carrier billing for Android Market application purchases. Purchases of unwanted applications can be refunded within 15 minutes of the time of download.. There is no requirement that Android applications be acquired from Android Market. Users may download Android applications from a developer's website or through a third-party alternative to Android Market.

At 8 June 2012, developers in 31 countries were able to distribute paid applications on Google Play.However, developers pay $25 for registration to distribute on the Android Market. Application developers receive 70 percent of the application price, with the remaining 30 percent distributed among carriers and payment processors. Google itself does not take a percentage. Revenue earned from the Android Market is paid to developers via Google Checkout merchant accounts, or via Google AdSense accounts in some countries.
On 17 March 2009, about 2,300 applications were available in Android Market, according to T-Mobile chief technical officer Cole Brodman. On 10 May 2011, during the Google I/O, Google announced that Android Market had 200,000 applications listed and 4.5 billion applications installed.

SDK ( Applications )

Android software development kit (SDK) version 1.0 was released on September 24, 2008. This is the first stable release of the Android platform and should allow developers to prepare applications for commercially available handsets. The Android SDK is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and includes tools as well as an Android emulator to run applications.

Previously released Android SDK introduced many of the features of the new version. Some features, e.g. Bluetooth and GTalk APIs, were dropped from Android SDK 1.0. Android itself is based on a Linux 2.6.25 kernel, with a Dalvik virtual machine to run Java applications, the development language for Android applications. The open source release of the Android operating system code is, according to Dan Morrill, Android Developer Advocate, due from the Open Handset Alliance by the end of the year.

The emulator is standalone and can be run in order to give users and developers a chance to interact with the operating system found on Android handsets. To try the emulator, download the Android SDK, open a terminal or command line (this is done in Windows XP by ....), go to the tools directory, and run the emulator application. The emulator may give an error saying a data directory does not exist. If it does, create the directory mentioned in the error and run the emulator again.

It should be noted that applications prepared with beta versions of the Android SDK cannot be installed on handsets. Such applications need to be adapted to Android SDK 1.0.