Our two games have been suspended from the Android market, which is especially painful because of the good ratings and the long process to get into the upper spots in the “popular games” listing.

It was not possible to edit the information of the suspended projects in the market website. All I could do was sending a mail to the generic Google address which sent me the DMCA notice, with the question if I could update the game with another name and sent them the .apk file. I (surprisingly) got a response, but telling me I would need to submit it as a new project.

I’ve submitted the game again as “Four Online“, available in “Games -> Brain&Puzzle”. If you happen to have the original “Connect 4 Online” installed, you’ll need to remove it in order for “Four Online” to work.

I hope you enjoy the game and maybe it will (again) climb up to a good spot in the popular games listing. If you have any feedback or experience issues, please let me know!

P.S.: Be sure to check about trademarks before you release your next project! ;-)

left to right: Application Categories; Comics; Health

Many of us expected this to happen with the next Android update to version 1.6, which also includes a white Theme for the Market.

Each of the new categories currently contains about 50 apps. I expect the list to grow rapidly; due to the small amount of applications new apps are a lot more visible to users, and now it would be easier than anytime later to secure a top spot in the “by popularity” listings.

The next update of MyMarket (planned for today (Wednesday) or tomorrow) will also include the new categories.

If you know about other submissions, let me know as I try to keep the list updated.

Unfortunately Google seems to dismiss the opportunity to create more emotions and buzz inside the Android community, for example by a quick blog post about the status quo and further progress. The latest blog on the android developer blog is “ADC2 Submissions Closing Monday!”, and the ADC2 homepage still says “Submit your app today!”.

Nevertheless there is a interesting thread being started over at the Android Developers Google group with the title “Hmm… at last ADC2 is out of our way … tell about your app and experience“. Quite a few developers which submitted to the ADC2 posted about their projects with a bit of background to each. It’s very interesting to read, especially since new posts are coming in all couple of minutes. I’d suggest you guys head over there and give it a heads-up about your projects if you’ve submitted any!

Here is a list of apps and games which were mentioned (in chronological order, updated at 09:00 gmt):

If you know of any other submissions, let me know - I’ll try to keep the list updated.

Again, it’s really interesting to read that thread, especially because almost every developer/team provides some background about their progress. Don’t miss that! :-)

[Update] The Google Group seems to have had some problems today. I’ve posted about MyMarket via the web interface and it didn’t show up. An hour later I’ve typed it again (and changing the settings to my other mail), and it didn’t show up neither! Now 8 hours later, I have three posts in this thread :( I’ve reported them and hope a mod will pick it up.

An updated list can be found here!

Related Posts

• A sneak peek at ADC2 submissions (Updated)

Notable improvements in this version:

• US & EU market results (changeable in the settings)
• “Recommended” listing displays the number of user-votes
• Faster update of “My Downloads”
• In My Downloads, items with updates are listed on top
• Screen rotation works with filters, search, etc.
• Autocomplete for the search box (with last 10 searched)
• Quickfilter: When browsing the apps or games list and adding a new filter, the last clicked items title/dev-name are suggested in the keyword textview (as autocomplete)
• Last used tabs are remembered everywhere
• Scrolling really far down works smoothly
• Various minor bugfixes and improvements

left to right: Recommended (with votes), Detail & comments preview, Settings

left to right: Listing, Filters, Autocomplete

We hope you enjoy version 1.0. Feel free to contact us if you have any ideas, suggestions or problems! More detailed infos and screenshots can be found at mymarket.cc.

Related Posts

• MyMarket Update: My Downloads & Recommendations
• MyMarket Update: App Details with Description, Downloads
• MyMarket Update with Custom Filters
• “MyMarket”, a customizable Android Market overlay

My Downloads

“My Downloads” displays a list of your installed apps and games with available updates, as well as a quick-link to uninstall a specific app. Users can refresh the list manually via “Menu” -> “Refresh”, and MyMarket can automatically search for updates (can be changed in “Settings” (via the main Activity’s menu)). A click on the red X icon brings you straight to the “Uninstall Application” dialog of the Android phone.

left to right: Update, My Downloads, Remove Item

Recommendation System

We finally had enough recommendations from users to build a working recommendation system based on the users votes. The recommendations are hourly generated, and Applications and Games get in the list by having more than 3 votings by users. The more votes (recommendations) in the last weeks, the higher the app is up in the list. I hope this becomes a really interesting recommendation system, especially since an app will never stay on top because it historically had a large amount of votes. If there are enough users recommending apps in MyMarket, perhaps we can add other categories like “most recommended in last 2 days”.

left to right: Main Screen, Recommendations, Description with first comments

Other Improvements

• MyMarket now displays the first 3 comments with the description of an app
• The SQLite db is saved in /sdcard/mymarket/mymarket.db
• Minor, mixed bugfixes

Next Steps

• Most important we are working on bringing the US Android market results to MyMarket. Currently we are only able to display European results.
• Better search (currently MyMarket shows only one page with 10 results)
• 3D icon according to the Android Icon Design Guidelines :P
• Faster updating of installed apps
• Customizable interaction with the lists (eg. swap long and short click)

Thanks

This whole project could never be where it is without all the reviews, comments, ideas and suggestions of many users of MyMarket. We heartly appreciate the inputs and have implemented many functions we never thought about in first place, but which someone suggested. I guess that’s the advantage of being an independent software dev team just having fun with a small project.

Please keep communicating your feedback, ideas and suggestions — we will consider each and every feedback we receive, and are already working on the next update. Btw., the best ways to provide feedback if either by mailing us or leaving a comment here. Thanks!

Related Posts

• MyMarket Update: App Details with Description, Downloads
• MyMarket Update with Custom Filters
• “MyMarket”, a customizable Android Market overlay

left to right: options, detail infos, enable/disable filter

MyMarket can be found in the category “Applications” -> “Tools”. Please let us know what you think about it, as well as any ideas, comments and suggestions!

Related Posts

• MyMarket Update with Custom Filters
• “MyMarket”, a customizable Android Market overlay

• JSON serializes data using UTF-8 / 16 / 32 encoding, with turn-key libraries for most programming languages. Any data structure can be serialized with JSON, although binary data (such as an image) has to be encoded with an algorithm like Base64 before.
• Protocol Buffers is an open-source project developed by Google and released under the BSD license. It uses a binary encoding which makes the serialized data a bit smaller and does not require binary data to be encoded before. The data-structures have to be described before serialization by creating a .proto file, compiling it with protoc and including the header files in the project. The libraries from Google are available for Java, Python and C++, with third party implementations for most other programming languages.

For the performance tests we imagine a news aggregator application, which requests 10 news items from a server. Each item has the following data structure (using around 2.3 kilobytes with an 48×48px image):

    class NewsItem {
        String title;
        String text;
        String link;
        byte[] image; /* 48x48px */
    }

The app could be faster by receiving just the infos in a first request and the images in a second, but to compare the serialization speed of JSON and Protocol Buffers we use one combined response (JSON: 23.6kb with base64 encoded images, PB: 18.3kb due to binary encoding).

1. Library Size

Let’s start with having a look at the different libraries and their size in kilobytes:

Protocol Buffers isn’t the smallest library which might not matter on many systems. Using it in an Android app would often 5 to 10-fold the application size, whereas JSON is integrated in the Android stack by default.

2. Serialization Performance - Python

The following chart portrays the (de-)serialization time for one request with 10 news items, measured in 1.000.000 runs on a typical Linux system:

JSON clearly outperforms Protocol Buffers in this scenario using Python, with CJSON serializing almost 8 times faster than SimpleJSON. Adding the option optimize_for=SPEED to the .proto file increases the speed of Protocol Buffers by around 5% (~ 100us).

3. Serialization Performance - Java / Android

The next test measures the time needed to de-serialize one request of 10 items into a usable data structure on the Android platform with Java. Here we notice the ease of use of the Protocol Buffer’s data structure, since the only step required is:

ItemList itemlist = ItemList.parseFrom(buffer.toByteArray());

With JSON we have to extract the infos into a custom class and decode the image with base64:

Item[] itemlist = new Item[10];
JSONArray items = new JSONArray(new String(buffer.toByteArray()));
final int max = items.length();
for (int i=0; i < max; i++){
    Item item  = new Item();
    item.title = items.getJSONObject(i).getString("title");
    item.text  = items.getJSONObject(i).getString("text");
    item.link  = items.getJSONObject(i).getString("url");
    item.image = Base64.decode(items.getJSONObject(i).getString("image"));
    itemlist[i] = item;
}

The average time needed for these operations is quite different on Android:

In this case on the Android platform, Protocol Buffers outperform JSON by a factor of three (we’ve tried this with 1, 10, 100 and 200 de-serializations, resulting in Protocol Buffers being up to 5 times faster than JSON).

Summary

The performance of Protocol Buffers depends heavily on the scenario including the platform, programming language and complexity of the data structure; performing between 15 times slower and 5 times faster than JSON. JSON was generally performing very well, especially in Python with CJSON outperforming SimpleJSON in serializing by a factor of almost 8.

On an Android system, Protocol Buffers de-serialized data around three times faster than JSON, with another major advantage being the ease of use of the data structures. You only need to call parseFrom() once to have a fully usable class, whereas JSON requires unpacking the data into a custom class. One downside of using Protocol Buffers with Android is the size of it’s Java-library, which requires almost 800 kb (whereas JSON is available in the standard Android stack).

Update: As commenters pointed out, the Python implementation of Protocol Buffers is especially slow, and this comparison would only be complete if the performance with C++ would be measured as well (which I’ll do the coming days if nobody volunteers first :)

References

• JSON
  • on Android
  • CJSON
  • SimpleJSON
• Protocol Buffers
  • Documentation
  • Third Party Libraries
• tests-source.zip

• SQLite3 Database: The data about removed and bookmarked items was stored in the /data/ directory, and has now moved into a database on the SD card. This makes is not only easier to query the information, but also enables users to reinstall the app or even reset the phone without loosing any stored infos.
• Customizable Filters: It’s now very easy to exclude any keywords in the title or the dev-name. Just click on “Menu” -> “Filter”, and you have a nice overview with checkboxes to enable/disable any one.

left to right: menu item ‘Filter’, enable/disable filter, remove

The next steps on the roadmap include a search function and displaying available updates in the bookmarks. This could be useful if a user is interested in a specific app, but wants to wait for the next update. We have a couple of other ideas as well, and would be very happy to keep hearing what you think about this project!

Related Posts

• MyMarket Update: App Details with Description, Downloads
• “MyMarket”, a customizable Android Market overlay

A short click on an item opens the menu, a long click opens the Android market

We are happy to have released version 0.9 today in the Android Market (in Applications / Tools)! Any ideas, suggestions and bug reports are strongly appreciated — please let us know in the comments below, or by mail.

Related Posts

• MyMarket Update: App Details with Description, Downloads
• MyMarket Update with Custom Filters