Updated Android Market available for HTC EVO before official rollout
Over the next two weeks, Google will be pushing out an update to Android Market (version 2.2.6) that overhauls its user interface and includes a slew of new features. You can wait for the HTC EVO 4G to get the update to check out all the changes a little later, or you can just download the .apk posted by Lodell from the xda-developers forum to experience the new Market now.
Either way, the Market you'll see will boast a new app carousel on the Home and Category pages to showcase featured titles, dedicated widget and live wallpaper categories, all app details listed on a single page (no more tabs), and a generous 50MB app size limit. Other unknown enhancements to "make [the Market] the best content distribution service for the Android ecosystem" will be added in the coming weeks and months.
It's a meaty update, to be sure, but there's one change that is likely to be less welcome than the others: the 24-hour app refund period has been reduced to just 15 minutes. While I think it's nice that we're even given refunds at all and 15 minutes should be sufficient in most cases, the reduction is drastic and already the topic of many complaints.
The new Market has been running smoothly on my rooted HTC EVO (SteelROM RevH) for the past few days, but it may not run well on all custom ROMs (CyanogenMod included) out there. You should be able to uninstall the update without issue, though, so it's worth installing to see if it works on your EVO. If you like to err on the side of caution, then do a Nandroid backup first (tutorial here).
Maybe I'm just not used it to yet, but I kind of like the old Market better. The tabs on the app details page were better to me than having to scroll down to find what I want, and the revamped UI isn't much more than a superficial facelift.
[xda-developers via Android Police]
