There is a great market potential for Apps developers in Android market but the down side is that not all the countries are supported merchants yet, hence merchants in a given region have the freedom and flexibility to publish and sell their apps while others will just have to wait, there is a backdoor for this in the mean time and that is to use a credit card registered to a trusted friend or family in one of those regions.
Fig 1: Supported locations for merchants as of October 2011
In the mean time exploring, developing and publishing minor apps.
Fig 2: Android Developer Console
I have been developing apps for android 2.1 update 1 so as to allow my apps to be available to as many android versions as possible, backward compatibility won’t be an issue. To add on that Android market automatically assigns apps to the respective devices according to the Android version they are running on.
Fig 3: Total active installs of my Text to Speech application
As an observation the platform gap isn’t that huge in terms of percentage but once you calculate that in terms of figures it is obvious that 17.3% is still quite a huge number, as seen above it is wise to start and stick for awhile on developing apps for Android 2.1
Any sponsors for a new Android phone or tablet?
Thank You.
Al-Kathiri Khalid 