AndroLib's been tracking new submissions stats since the Market opened—stats which don't just show us when Android apps pass arbitrary milestones, but how quickly it's happening. And to answer the implied question: very.

There were more that twice as many new apps approved in the month of November than in July, and the rate of increase is only getting higher. Of course, raw app numbers don't guarantee that there will be anything worth downloading, but they do help. Even if just one in every 100 apps it worth downloading, the good stuff starts to add up pretty quickly. It's a sad formula! But it works out. [AndroidLib via MobileCrunch]

On Android, the NPR News app will be open and fully customizable by member stations and users. That means local stations can include their own content, not just the main NPR feed. You'll also be able to stream NPR content in the background while using other smartphone functions, something Apple doesn't permit.

It's exciting to see developers take full advantage of the Android mobile OS instead of just making copycats of their existing iPhone versions. Especially if it eventually forces Apple to loosen their grip to stay competitive. [PaidContent via All Things D]

The basics are all there: restaurant and business navigation, ratings and reviews, photos, and direct calling all work just fine. There's even a new feature that shows you directions from your current location to your destination in separate browser.

What's missing, though, are all the interactive nibblets that make Yelp such a fun guide to use. The Android version is read-only, meaning that for now you can look at other people's opinions but not share your own. Still, though, it's a nice free alternative to Zagat's ten dollar equivalent. [CNet]

LG says its first Android phone is about catering to diverse preferences, but beyond confirming a European release later this year, hasn't yet said if the GW620 will reach the U.S. [LG via KoreaNewsWire]

The other changes noted by Google include new app sub-categories and support for Italian. Google's post follows. [Phandroid via Engadget]

Some News from Android Market
Posted by Eric Chu, Android Mobile Platform on 03 September 2009 at 3:30 PM

I'm pleased to let you know about several updates to Android Market. First, we will soon introduce new features in Android Market for Android 1.6 that will improve the overall experience for users. As part of this change, developers will be able to provide screenshots, promotional icons and descriptions that will better show off applications and games.

We have also added four new sub-categories for applications: sports, health, themes, and comics. Developers can now choose these sub-categories for both new and existing applications via the publisher website. Finally, we have added seller support for developers in Italy. Italian developers can go to the publisher website to upload applications and target any of the countries where paid applications are currently available to users.

To take advantage of the upcoming Android Market refresh, we encourage you to visit the Android Market publisher website and upload additional marketing assets. Check out the video below for some of the highlights.

Vincent Paquet, a senior product manager for Google and cofounder of GrandCentral (Google Voice before its name change), announced that Google Voice will be coming to the Android Market and to BlackBerry, although users of the latter will have to download it directly from Google rather than App World for some reason. It'll let you have your Google Voice number displayed on the other end and show transcribed email inside the app, rather than forcing the use of a browser. The invite system of registration, however, will still be in place.

iPhone and WebOS are markedly absent; we can forgive a little tardiness at WebOS because the platform's so new, but iPhone? What gives? Isn't Skype already available? No explanation for the absence was given, but Google assures us it is definitely coming as soon as possible. [CNET]

We've given Apple's App Store quite a bit of coverage from the start, and rightly so—it was (and is) a flawed product, but it's consistently updated with new, interesting material. The other thing is, people use it. A lot.

Seeing this, other companies have since joined in, or announced plans to do so in the near future. Some of these solutions have been around for months, others for much less, but so far none have earned the same steady coverage as the App Store, and a lot of you have asked us why.

In short, these other stores hadn't really hit their stride. The Android Market suffered from late implementation of paid apps and limited developer interest; now it's got a fine payment system, more users, and sits on the cusp of exploding. BlackBerry App World materialized almost spontaneously, met with apathy by a userbase that was used to getting apps elsewhere, and debuted chock full of content we'd already seen; now, it's gaining steam. Microsoft is about to open their solution, and Nokia just did. Palm's is basically imminent. So we're doing something about it.

Starting tomorrow with the Android Market, we'll be doing periodic roundups for non-iPhone app stores. Since none of these stores have the same kind of volume Apple's does (yet!), our roundups will fall on a rotating schedule, so no matter which smartphone you've got in your pocket you can expect a heaping, fresh serving of nutritious, delicious apps every few weeks.

Of course, you're all part of this: if anything useful, interesting or strange shows up in your phone's app store, shoot us a link at our tips line, with "BlackBerry/Android/Whatever App Roundup" in the subject. Happy downloading.

The first thing you'll notice about these efforts—coming from such traditionally competitive companies as Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft—is just how similar they all sound. App World? App Catalog? App Market? Mobile Marketplace? This outward likeness actually runs pretty deep—these stores are advertising uncannily similar feature sets, for both users and developers:

Although it might not evident in the feature-by-feature breakdown above, there are two distinct kinds of app store: The primary store, which is the first and only source of an OS's apps (see Apple), and the secondary store, which is built around an existing stock of third-party apps, and with preexisting developers in mind (see BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Nokia). It's a combination of these different lineages and divergent policy choices that make the smartphone app store experience so varied.

Apple's iPhone App Store
At least for now, the App Store is the standard by which all others are judged. Beyond that, it's given us a rough guide for what works. With a $99 dollar developer's fee and a novice-friendly SDK, the barriers of entry for an iPhone developer are fairly low. Distribution, payments and to a large extent marketing are managed by iTunes, which iPhone owners are necessarily familiar and comfortable with.

And, of course, there's the iPhone: This store may only serve one handset (and its very similar nonphone brother), but it's a wildly popular one. This makes the app store uniquely attractive to developers, because it provides access to the largest uniform app-buying market in the world. Microsoft can argue that Windows Mobile 6.5 will connect developers to x gajillion different customers through y zillion different handsets, but this variety is a curse: Handsets have different resolutions, processors, 3D hardware, input types and basic feature sets. A motion-sensing 3D game with a GPS social networking feature won't work on a lot of WinMo handsets, but a 2D, keypad-controlled Asteroids clone won't make a developer rich.

But the App Store is far from perfect. Apple, like all App Store owners, has the final say in what gets listed, delisted or banned, and they aren't afraid to remind us of this. Along with the typical risque/racist/infringing content prohibitions, Apple enforces strict and often limiting rules against apps that compete with the iPhone's native set—iTunes, Mail.app, Safari to name a few—and apps that their partnered carriers aren't too fond of, i.e video streaming and tethering apps. Now, all these rules are showing signs of loosening with OS 3.0, but as long as the App Store is the sole source of iPhone apps, any rules will seem like too many rules—especially if you're accustomed to a totally unregulated system like Windows Mobile 6.1's. Hence, the gray market.

Android App Market
This second major entrant into the app store race represents a consciously different approach than Apple's, but not in that many ways. Immediately, we see a lot to compare: A single-handset userbase (at least for now), low costs for developers and a presence as the primary—though not sole—source of apps from Day One.

But the App Market is a different breed than the App Store. Most importantly, it's not the only place you can get apps. Google has been much more lenient about what they allow in their store since the beginning but in the rare case that they don't approve of an app, as in the case of tethering apps earlier this month, you can just go download an .APK file and sideload it onto your G1 anyway. This is a healthy middle ground for everyone involved; Google doesn't alienate users by destroying entire categories of apps, but isn't forced to come into conflict with carriers because of overly liberal policies. Google has also made their Market more friendly to consumers, with a no-questions 24-hour return policy.

Great! Then why is the App Market so underwhelming? Well, the G1 wasn't exactly a runaway hit, and the store got off to a slow start. Paid apps weren't made available for months after launch, and when they arrived they didn't benefit from the convenience and familiarity of a storefront like iTunes. Moreover, there's no guarantee that things will change that much in the coming months—more handsets from more manufacturers will boost Android's user numbers, but will lead to the WinMo-style toxic fragmentation that Apple so adamantly avoids.

BlackBerry App World
Matt took a dive into the newest mobile app store, and found it agreeable, but not spectacular. RIM's is the beginning of this "secondary" app store concept, and it shows: You'll be hard-pressed to find anything here that wasn't previously available elsewhere. It is simply an aggregator for existing applications.

This was a given, as developers have been cranking out BlackBerry apps for years now. But App World was a great opportunity for RIM to give the lethargic dev community a shot in the arm. Instead of doing that, they've made the store almost hostile to would-be app writers.

Listing your wares in App World costs a hefty $200, which gives you the right to upload 10 apps, but doesn't come with any new SDKs or development tools. The payment system is PayPal, which is clumsy to use and a pain to set up. A minimum non-free price tier of $2.99, probably intended to filter out spammy apps and cover PayPal's transaction fees, discourages developers from even trying to make simple, useful apps, eliminating the $.99-to-$1.99 sweet spot that has been central to Apple's success. App World feels like an afterthought, and a reluctant one. UPDATE: It should be noted that the 70% dev revenue share figure in the chart is incorrect, and has been update to 80%—a marked advantage over the other stores.

Windows Mobile Marketplace
With Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft will introduce the Windows Mobile Marketplace. So far, their announcements have shown an awareness of the pitfalls of both Apple's and RIM's approaches: They're emphasizing non-exclusivity and app approval transparency, a 24-hour return policy and wide device support, but also making sure to get big-name app and game developers on board to ensure that users actually have something new to look forward to at launch.

On the developer side, it's a mixed bag. As in every other store, the dev take-home is 70% of each sale, but the listing fees aren't great. $99 gets you five apps a year, but anything beyond that will cost an additional $99. I'm sure this will help vaccinate the Marketplace against the fart app epidemic that Apple has proven so prone to, but it'll do so at the expense of potentially useful free and $0.99 apps—again, a crucial price range. One important factor that's still TBD is the payment system. Microsoft says they'll support both credit card payments and carrier charges, but hasn't yet said how that'll look. In both cases the process will need to be as seamless as possible.

Nokia Ovi Store
You probably haven't heard much about this store, set to debut within a month, but it's kind of a big deal for the 40m+ Symbian S40 and S60 users that it'll serve apps to. It's planned to shoehorn into Nokia's new Ovi app suite, which we were introduced to with the XpressMusic 5800, and provide a go-to source for not just apps, but ringtones, wallpapers, and basically everything else that you might have found in a 2001 vintage carrier WAP store.

There has been a decided lack of fanfare surrounding this launch, probably because there just aren't that many Nokia smartphones in the US. But its success or failure will be informative: It will be the most open of all the app stores. For the time being, there is no developer fee, and app listings are free and unlimited. You can easily publish tons of different kinds of content—Flash Lite apps, Java apps, Native S60 apps, multimedia uploads and others—which will be subject to a vetting process that Nokia has assured will be minimal. As Nokia-averse Americans, we can view the Ovi Store as an experiment in laissez-faire app-mongering—a multi-handset, mixed-media, unfiltered feed of Symbian content.

Palm App Catalog
And finally, we have Palm's App catalog. This is the store we know the least about, but that is already set for a different course than all the others. At launch, the only handset it'll serve will be the Pre—though Palm has indicated that other WebOS handsets are inevitable. It'll be the first—and likely exclusive—source of WebOS apps, and developers will be furnished with a solid, though fundamentally limited, SDK.

Palm's still-vague plan for the App Catalog will no doubt be central to the success or failure of the Pre, but we can make an educated guess at what to expect, assuming that Palm doesn't get taken over by idiots in the next couple months: Palm will vet the apps thoroughly, provide an in-house payment system, and make development simple and cheap (previewed Mojo SDK apps have shown great promise). The end result will probably look something like the iPhone App Store, but with one huge difference: there will be no local natively running apps—the Mojo SDK doesn't provide for that, just for what amount to turbocharged, locally-stored web apps. Granted, these web apps will have privileged access to some of WebOS's core functions, but it's doubtful that high-end gaming, as we've seen on the iPhone, will even be possible on the platform. These limitations (along with WebOS's multitasking advantages) will affect the nature and quality of the apps that are listed in the store much more than the Catalog's policies, though exactly how, we'll have to wait and see.

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about app stores, SDKs or the finest in fart-app technology to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Documents to Go supports file formats up to Office 2007&,dash;technically those file extensions include .doc .xls and .ppt, along with Adobe's .pdf for good measure. But apparently that $20 price is only an introductory deal, with the app price bumping to $30 after some arbitrary amount of time. Get it now through Android Market. [DataViz via UberPhones]

If you don't have GV on an Android phone, Google Voice must first call your cellphone and then connect you to the outgoing call that way. GV saves you this go-between by dialing out directly to your contacts' phone numbers using the Google Voice switchboard. Just set it to "Dial out" instead of "Call back" and you can more easily use your consolidated number for outgoing calls.

Sending text messages works in a similar fashion, only

GV is developed by a third party, so if Google changes up the way the system works, the app may break. But until then, it's a convenient setup for those hoping to consolidate lots of phone numbers into a single Google Voice number.

[Thanks to Gina at Smarterware / Lifehacker for the test!]

This week's Android news on Giz:

• Google's G1 Tethering Move Sets Precedent For Carrier-Specific Android App Markets

• HP Tests Android For Netbooks, Says WSJ

• Reports: Google Pulling Tethering Apps From Android Marketplace

• Reports: Google Pulling Tethering Apps From Android Marketplace

• Next Android Device (G2?) Gets Flash Support
• ShopSavvy Android App Now Displays Local Store Inventory in Real Time

• Every Smartphone OS Endures Pwn2Own Unhacked

• 'My Account' Android App Manages Your T-Mobile Affairs, Stimulates Your Miserliness

By popular demand, we're beginning to highlight a particularly great Android app (or apps) every week. If you have any brand new apps you've tried and love, please let us know in the comments! Thanks.

The string of comments following the post indicate that most users won't be able to throw their money at fart apps just yet (there are fart apps, RIGHT!?), but gradual, trickling OTA G1 updates are par for the course. The first (small) batch of apps will look familiar to users of Apple's App Store—Unit converters! Breakout games! One dollar clocks!—though it is conspicuously (and unexpectedly) lacking of any marquee titles. It's far too early to judge, and baby steps are fine, I guess, as long as I know I'm getting my Guitar Hero someday. G1ers, let us know what you find—good and bad—in the comments. [BGR]

The game will be a port of Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile with touchscreen gameplay and 15 tracks (mostly classic rock). An exact date of the release has not been announced, but it is expected to hit the Android Market soon. [The Guardian via Kotaku]

Other policies include:

•The Market will allow unlimited reinstalls of purchased apps.
•Upgrades must come directly from the developer.
•Sexually explicit material is banned from the Android Market.
•Billing disputes must be held with the developer or your credit card company.

Much of that information was to be expected, but an app return policy is a really big deal. I can't tell you how much I would love to shove Sim City on the iPhone back in EA's face right now. It's been out for months and they still haven't fixed a bug that causes it to crash on launch for some users. I can only hope that Apple will eventually follow Google's lead on this one. [Android via IntoMobile]

The previous official line was "early Q1 2009", and if you can believe it, we're almost at the halfway point of this here Q1, so the timing makes sense. Hopefully this can jumpstart what is currently, still, a pretty quiet dev community. [WSJ]

Opera Mini is notable for its practice of first loading your requested page on its own servers, which compress the pages and images before squirting it out to your phone over the network for quicker load times. And speed is definitely its forté on the G1—on T-Mobile's 3G network in NYC, pages like the New York Times, ESPN and Gizmodo all loaded with only a second or two of "Processing" delay. Granted, what you see are horizontal lines instead of text and a few shaded boxes instead of images, but zooming in doesn't cause any additional loading delay, except for some images. Zooming is pretty easy with a double tap or trackball click, and it works just like it does in other version of the browser. Hitting the G1's "back" button zooms you back out, which is unintuitive at first but ends up making sense.

Javascript sites that have lots of dynamically loading bits, even those optimized for smartphone browsers like Google Reader or Gmail, will often revert back to their more dumbed down static HTML versions. It's hard to find a page that loads completely bork-tastically though, as all of the pages we used in the Battlemodo loaded without any problems. No Flash, obviously, but YouTube's non-mobile front page still loads as you would expect.

As far as betas go, it's not terrible, but text entry fields have a strange bug which results in them taking up the entire screen (as you can see in the gallery), and the only way to go back is to press the "Menu" button and close out the form. So while you probably wouldn't want to switch to Opera for all of your browsing—it's a great backup to have for a quick load of a newspaper site or anything else fairly simple, especially if your connection isn't great.