I hit the the ‘Buy’ button on the app’s page in the Android Market. I was taken to a screen where I had to fill in my credit card details; so far so good. I filled everything in and hit the submit button. After a bit of network traffice (I could tell from the indicator at the top) I got a “Server error” message asking me to retry, cancel or return to the main screen. I retried a number of times but to no avail – the same error kept coming back at me. In frustration I turned to my desktop and logged into my Gmail account (the same one my phone uses) and tried signing up Google Checkout that way. This time I was able to submit my credit card details just fine. I got back on the phone and hit the ‘Buy’ button again. It picked up my card details from my Google Checkout account and took me straight to the confirmation page. I confirmed the payment and it informed that my download would begin soon and that the notification would appear in the top bar.

I got the notification and went to a detailed view of the download. But nothing was downloading. The progress bar was showing a fuzzy animation but the only text I could see was “Authorizing credit card…”. So I checked my Google Checkout account from my desktop and saw that the order had gone through. Even as I started writing this blog entry (20 minutes from initial payment) it was still stuck at this authorization phase. Eventually my phone informed me that my download had been “unsuccessful”. So I went back into the app page and clicked Install. This time the download started working. Hooray!

A quick search on the web (using Google Search – a product of theirs that actually works well) I can see that other people have experienced these problems too. From reading the comments posted up by other people it seems that this is a fundamentally badly run payment system. People have tried factory-resetting their phones, using different credit cards, using new Google Accounts and what-not. And apparently it did eventually work for some although the time between making the payment and actually getting the download varied from a few minutes to a few hours, all the while showing the “Authorizing credit card…” message. What’s more, numerous people rang up their bank only to find that although Google Checkout said the order had gone through their credit card hadn’t actually been charged. Bizarre!

From what I’ve heard about the iPhone purchase process, it’s far less painful and more reliable. What I really don’t understand is why Google don’t invest more in bringing Google Checkout to a higher level of quality and service. All the current evidence points to the conclusion that enabling a paid-for app market in Android really isn’t a priority for them.

After leaving Symbian I went to work a mobile software startup whose primary concern was a mobile social networking app written in Java MIDP. Now, if you want to stay as true as you can to the “write once, run anywhere” principle for mobiles then Java is really the only choice since almost every phone out there has some sort of Java support, albeit each with its own various inconsistencies and quirks. Writing a mobile Java app was also a whole lot easier than writing one in Symbian C++. The availability of great development tools (Eclipse, JUnit, ProGuard, etc.) didn’t hurt either! Having worked on a mobile Java client I decided that if I was to build my own mobile app I’d have to do it in Java.

Then iPhone came along and 2 years later it’s now obvious that if you have a good idea for a mobile app and don’t mind learning to develop on the Mac then you might as well as write your app for the iPhone, thus giving yourself a real chance to earn a decent income from it. Many of my fellow engineers have had iPhones for a while and some of them are even starting to write apps for it, some lured by the prospect of making a killing, others just wanting to do something cool for what is hailed as the “Jesus phone”.

My T-Mobile contract is about to expire and I started seriously thinking about whether to upgrade to an iPhone or an Android handset. After much deliberation, I bought myself a lovely little T-Mobile G2 Touch instead (also known as HTC Hero). It runs Android 1.5, the latest stable release of Google’s mobile OS. Android development is essentially done in Java (the bytecode format and VM varies) using APIs which are different to the MIDP ones. You can use Eclipse to code, test and debug your apps. It’s an open source OS, which means you’ll be able to find deployable versions of the OS on the web which even include features from the upcoming 2.0 release of Android (e.g. multi-touch) folded into the current stable release.

If you read around you’ll find that the Android Market and consequent ecosystem for paid apps is almost miniscule compared to the AppStore (see article and comments and follow-up), but I’m hoping that this will improve in the near future. And anyway, if the Android app platform doesn’t really take off then atleast I’ll already have some mobile app development experience by the time I get my iPhone

Update (Sep19): I’ve shifted the instructions for updating the HTC Hero/T-Mobile G2 Touch firmware into a new post