Do we need another Android app store?
Apple has all of one place to get apps from. Android on the other hand has many. You can get them from the Android Market itself, or from any number of other app stores. Here’s a quick list of 10 of the alternate app stores. Now the Android Market is by far the largest of them, and also the most used, but that doesn’t mean that the other ones are without merit. Like the Amazon Appstore, some of the other ones will have different pricing on certain apps, or be giving them away like Amazon does. A lot of the time the difference in pricing is pennies, and thus not really worth the effort to look around. But what about apps that are removed or banned from the Android Market, and are completely legal? Apps like one click root apps, emulators, tether apps or Visual Voicemail apps. What happens if you want one of those apps, but you can’t find it in the Android Market?
Well there is no easy way to find those apps. Most of the apps that are perfectly legal, but removed from the Android Market for one reason or another are still available, but you have to do some searching to find them. Most of the apps in this category have to do with rooted devices. If your tablet is capable of getting on a wireless network, a lot of times you are at the whim of your carrier as to what apps show up in your Market. Whether an app is perfectly legal or not, any of the carriers can choose to block certain apps from their devices. I don’t know about you, but one of the reasons I chose Android was for the freedom that comes with it, so someone blocking certain perfectly legal apps doesn’t make me happy. Apparently it doesn’t make the guys over at CyanogenMod very happy either.
CyanogenMod is thinking about starting an appstore. This appstore would be for apps that require root or are removed from the Android Market, and thus might be blocked by your carrier or device manufacturer. It will be a repository for apps for your rooted devices. There are many different reasons why people root, and usually customization is high up on that list and not just visual customization. With root access you can use apps to overclock your device, gain access to every file and folder on your device, use it to tether your internet access to another device, and lots of other great things. This appstore would take a lot of effort out of having to scour the internet to find the latest .apk of your favorite root app. Even if you do find a place to download it from, how are you to know it is the latest version? I think CyanogenMod has a great idea here, and I hope they decide to go through with it.
[XDA]
