I'd pay $10 for an SD card apk installer app.

[BruceMcF]

Thanks to B&N allowing adb install for the Nook HD, I am torn between a new Nook HD and a used Nook Tablet. Luckily my money to buy them is temporarily tied up, so I don't have to make the decision right now.

Here's something that could well tip the decision.

(1) There's been long running discussion of "getting Google Play", but after my experience with a $70 Android player (4.3" low res display, older style touchscreen, PSP-alike case) that does not have Google Play, is not rooted, but does have an apk installer, an apk installer would do me fine.

(2) One part of reluctance to allow a general apk installer would be people loading their Nook HD flash with stuff that yields no income to B&N, and makes it less likely they will buy movies and subscribe to media rich magazines.

(3) Another part is the difficulty in getting movie/TV download rights on a device if the storage is generally user accessible. B&N doesn't want to do anything that would limit its Nook Video selection.

So the idea is this:

An apk installer that installs to the micro-SD card. The icon on the B&N home would open up a panel of apps installed to the micro-SD card, and at the same time mount SD card directories over top  the normal file hierarchy so ONLY the micro-SD card is accessible. When you click back to the B&N home, those hierarchies would be unmounted and it would be back to the regular HD system.

An advantage of this approach is that you could install different sets of applications on different micro-SD cards, if you wished.

Charge $10 for it, for the same reason that Amazon charges $20 to take adds off their Kindle Fire line ~ the Nook HD is sold at little or no profit margin, and charging for the apk installer offsets that.

Include apk's for the 1mobile, GetJar and F-Droid markets to get people jumpstarted on 3rd party app markets for installation on their micro-SD card.

[5ivedom]

It's a very interesting idea.

If you're suggesting $10 to allow installing apps from other stores on SD Card, then why not add an option for paying $20 or $25 and opening up the Nook completely?

*****

It's very interesting. I just read another thread where someone mentioned 1mobile. There seem to be a lot of Android App Stores. I know of GetJar and have used it.

So B&N does have some options. Stores which sell just apps and won't try to steal B&N's books and movies revenue streams.  B&N should consider partnering with GetJar or another Android Store.

[BruceMcF]

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5ivedom wrote:

It's a very interesting idea.

If you're suggesting $10 to allow installing apps from other stores on SD Card, then why not add an option for paying $20 or $25 and opening up the Nook completely?

---

For the primary reason given ~ opening up the Nook completely can be problematic with current movie digital distribution license terms. For instance, Flixster will download to my 4.3" Android player, which is not rooted, but has an apk installer app. Undermining Nook Video in pursuit of a tie breaker would, for me, break the tie in the other direction.

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5ivedom wrote:

It's very interesting. I just read another thread where someone mentioned 1mobile. There seem to be a lot of Android App Stores. I know of GetJar and have used it.

---

I discovered 1mobile because some of the apps that I wanted for my Android player were unavailable or only available in a very out of date version at GetJar, and I didn't want to give Amazon my credit card number on the device. In reading various reviews of 3rd party Android markets, 1mobile came up as highly rated.

In addition to apps on my Android player that I downloaded from the Nook app store for my NC (the Nook reader app, Crackle, Stitcher, Netflix, Flixster, Twitter, Angry Birds), it has most of the other apps that I ended up installing on the device, including Crunchyroll, Viki, JManga's Manga viewer, Funimation, FBReader and Wattpad). Add the free open-source software from F-Droid (K-9 email, Open Intents file manager, and some open source games), and very little of what I end up using on the Android player actually originated from GetJar.

[5ivedom]

You have to wonder if this 'openness of Android' thing is going to come back to haunt Google down the line.

Well, actually we already see Samsung and Amazon and B&N showing the risks of the open strategy.

If a store like 1 mobile or Amazon App Store or GetJar becomes markedly better than Android Market, then we might see users being to shift in huge numbers.

*****

Google did have its best earnings year in 2012. But it's all search.

[bobstro]

You have to wonder if this 'openness of Android' thing is going to come back to haunt Google down the line.

Not so long as a significant number of those users on alternate app sources still load and use Google Maps. Apple's recent failure with maps shows just how hard it is to compete with Google in that arena. Every time somebody turns on their GPS and fires up maps, Google's data set gets just a little bit better. That, as we've seen, gives them a toehold in even the most resistant marketplace.

[BruceMcF]

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5ivedom wrote:

You have to wonder if this 'openness of Android' thing is going to come back to haunt Google down the line.

...

If a store like 1 mobile or Amazon App Store or GetJar becomes markedly better than Android Market, then we might see users being to shift in huge numbers.

---

But there's no sign of this happening. For one thing, when you are on a bank site and it has a "Get Android app" badge, its going to link to GooglePlay. For another, the versions on the 3rd party markets often lag behind ~ sometimes seriously: the version of the Crunchyroll app on the GetJar market is the version before it supported access to the member's series queues.

[5ivedom]

Good Points.

Google Maps is definitely a big advantage and it grows stronger.

Yes, the power of the default is very strong. Most people will keep linking to Google Play and it will be the 'default' app store on most Android devices.

Only Samsung and Amazon are dangers to Google's control over 'Android' mindshare/prime position.

[BruceMcF]

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5ivedom wrote:

...

Only Samsung and Amazon are dangers to Google's control over 'Android' mindshare/prime position.

---

Yes ~ the 1mobile and GetJar market niches for 3rd party multi-platform app markets are not going to go away, but neither are they liley to try to aim for primacy, since success is such an unlikely outcome.

And just after mentioning that 1mobile can lag behind GooglePlay versions, I got a 1mobile notification on my little $70 Android player about 11 app version upgrades ~ including the Crunchyroll app that I used as an example ~ so it looks like they did a post-Xmas season sweep.

Actually, if B&N can't be bothered to write their own apk installer app, they might work out a deal with 1mobile based on a paid 1mobile market in the Nook app store, installing apps into a distinct "SD app tray", using the directory mount approach. It would address the number one weakness cited in all the main tech press reviews of the HD/HD+ as well as in the Consumer Reports review of the Nook Tablet. And it would leave all of the Nook internal flash available for B&N media downloads.

And a lot of Android apps on the GetJar market are applets that are lightweight frontends to online content. A facebook frontend would be an icon and a very small applet that called touch.facebook using your preferred browser. A Crunchyroll frontend (for NT and above) would be an icon and a very small applet that linked to the crunchyroll in mobile mode for videos and the forums in PC mode. A Chase banking frontend app would be nothing but calling up your choice of web browser in mobile mode.

The youtube case would be the most sophisticated version of that, where there is a server applet as well for putting a touchscreen UI layer on top of a mouse-centric video player.

It seems that if B&N allowed it, a Nook developer could offer a "Web front-end applet factory", with canned applets building scripts for ten to twenty widely used sites and a tool that can take a web link and build a new applet.