Google Rises To Apple's Challenge With Paid Android Apps

Google Rises To Apple’s Challenge With Paid Android Apps

Posted in iPhone News by admin. Published February 18th, 2009

Google Rises To Apple’s Challenge With Paid Android Apps

It seems that this year’s Mobile World Congress, which would begin in Barcelona today, would offer the search engine giant Google a great platform to showcase its capabilities in mobile devices, as the company not only has Android powered handset there in the market, but a full-fledged mobile applications store for the same.

Taking its rival Apple head on, Google has already unleashed its mobile applications store, tagged as “Android Market”, which currently has as many as 800 applications available on it, though far less than that of Apple’s massive 15,000 applications.

Ann Mei Chang, director of mobile engineering at Google, asserted that the company is looking forward to launch applications that could allow mobile users to perform tasks that can be performed on PCs currently; but mobile has its unique capabilities, he said, as mobile voice search feature isn’t as useful for desktop computers as it is for mobile phone devices.

Meanwhile, Google has also extended the capabilities of its Android Market by allowing developers to charge for their applications on the platform very soon, the company announced, as the company has begun accepting charged applications from developers in the UK and the US for its applications platform, from where they can be purchased by buyers in US by the middle of this week.

The move clearly indicates towards its quest to expand into smartphone domain, currently being dominated by Apple, even as it pulls out from other ventures like broadcast radio.

Our Comments

The Mobile World Congress appears to be the turning point that many were expecting for Android to really rise up to the challenge from Apple’s App store. Google has the added advantage that it will be having several smartphones launched in the next few months.