Android Market to Allow for Paid Apps and Geo-Based Targeting Soon

It’s going to be an interesting first quarter for the Android Market.  It won’t be long until paid apps start showing up for people to download.  An email made its way to registered developers last week with details regarding the eventual rollout of money-making applications and games.

Additionally, I would like to confirm that Android Market will support priced applications starting early Q1 2009, as we’d originally stated last fall. Given the country-by-country work required to set up payment support for developers in different countries, we will enable priced app support in Q1 for developers operating in these countries in the following order: (1) United States and UK; (2) Germany, Austria and Netherlands; (3) France, Italy and Spain.

It should be fun to see what sort of apps and games start surfacing once developers are able to recoup the costs for time and money spent putting them together.  The overall quality of apps ought to go up across the board.  However, one should be careful not to think that all apps will be better than today’s offerings.  There are already a lot of quality things floating around in the market for free.  Just because you can charge for something doesn’t mean it is worth the money.

On top of the paid app rollout, there will also be geo-centric stuff for developers to help target their audiences based on their location.  This ought to help cut down on two a few things that have cluttered the market such as people commenting on apps they can’t read or understand as well as rating things poorly for similar reasons.  We’re also crossing our fingers that the ridiculous comments and “First”ing will taper off once people have to pay up front.

If you’d like to read the rest of the email that was sent out, head over to phandroid for a look.