Rise of Android Themes & Skins A Surprise to Google Engineers

Post from: Google And Blog Rise of Android Themes & Skins A Surprise to Google Engineers Dan Morrill , a Google Developer Advocate for Android , stated this week he was surprised by the rise of demand for skins and the theme “phenomenon” for Android . Dan stated in the Android Discuss Google Group that Google engineers have noticed this trend in the desire of users to skin their Android phone and will be adding this as a theme category in The Android Market shortly. He also states that sorting apps by rising stars and having a desktop web UI is also on the roadmap for The Android Market , but there is no timetable or further details on this. These improvements among others I hope will fuel greater Android apps as well better interface & protections for the developers who will be greater incentivised to provide these applications. A GAB reader, Derrick , sent me an email today asking me to post more stories as I haven’t even posted in over a week to which I replied that I don’t want to just post for the sake of posting & burp out the same blah information all the other Android sites shoot out at basically the same time – I honestly didn’t really find anything this week to be interesting enough to be worth the time of my readers. Also my recent thoughts have mirrored those in an email sent to me recently, “ I thought paid apps would release a flurry of premium apps, yet the opposite. So many subpar apps at a cost, even worse are those with great ideas, PR releases, and descriptions, yet when you launch them… they’re crap ” This has led to some FrAppDay posts not even being posted, but I think I have seen the light lately with some great apps like PDANet  which allows Internet tethering from your Android phone to your laptop without root access even though in the Beta release it seems relatively slow and has some disconnect issues. Antonio Wells of AndroidTapp has also been heartened by the applications of late and provided these recent Android application summations for FrAppDay here at GAB : Exchange by TouchDown allows you to connect to corporate email (Microsoft Exchange 2003/2007) on your G1 or Android powered phone. Full Email, Calendar, and Contacts all with “Push” support using ActiveSync. Technical support for the product is awesome and fast WordUp! brings the fun board game Boggle to Android. Play with 4?4 or 5?5 grid to create as many words as you can with adjacent letters before the time runs out AutoLock is a very useful utility for extending the timeout of the ?Screen Unlock? feature for the G1 or Android powered phone aHome offers the ability to customize the Home screen with skins and icons T-Mobile My Account allows you to check your minutes, your balance and pay your bill in one app Minutes Tracker helps you save on cellular minute overages by showing a notification of your “Remaining Minutes” after each call

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Rise of Android Themes & Skins A Surprise to Google Engineers