Recently my faithful mobile handset dropped dead after five years of duty as a phone and a bluetooth DUN. I reached the shop trying to get myself a similar device and the salesman lured to Xperia arc and started explaining the features. The one feature (ok fact) that sounded too ridiculous was 2,50,000 applications available and the numbers are increasing way too fast. I ditched any advice to go for a hi end phone and settled for a candybar one. I think that there is an android bubble and need to understand how big it is. First look at the market place shows that it allows any application to be available for use without QA from them. This one window allows vendors to mutate, replicate, spam their products on the market. Examples – Ringtones classified as mp3 players, wallpaper changers with just one wallpaper but rendering too many ads, very simple applications which could rather be rendered as a web page. Finding a useful product out of the store is an uphill task.

Secondly; like how every company wanted their website during the dot com boom, similarly they seem to be in line for mobile applications for themselves. Most of the applications are concentrated on content rather than getting innovative by using the accelerometer, camera, GPS, cell site information, NFC and others. Layar is one such application which is a true blue mobile application. My gut feel is once the excitement levels plateaus and the awareness of the mobile applications increase, then we will see high quality products on the market. As a developer I restrain myself not to create a mobile app which can anyways be rendered in a web browser with a good UI.