It has been a rollercoaster week for Android. Aside from overtaking iOS and Blackberry in US Market share, iPad 2 hype and the influx of malware reports in the Android Market EcoSystem have been racking up. Yesterday, Google trolled through its Android Marketplace to find 21 malicious apps that had over 50,000 downloads.
Now, Google may have defectors in its hands. An Allied Group of Android Developers have created the Android Developer Union, which claims its members are “fed up with the conditions of the Android Market. The group has seven demands, including renegotiating Google’s tax on app sales, public bug tracking, and algorithmic transparency, all of which Google has apparently denied.
Unfortunately the group is providing little transparency itself. So far, only one name is associated with the union - Rich who says he was passed between auto-responses and mild threats when he tried to find out why his app was pulled and he had failed to make any sales.
There’s some suspicion that this “union” is really just a one man operation – that one man being Rich. He claims that after his poor treatment within Google, he has invested his time into calling fellow Android Developers to jump ship to other platforms unless improvements are made.
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