Vodafone is launching its own app Channel on the Android Market. The Channel will be exclusive to Vodafone users with an Android phone from Vodafone. Users with a Vodafone Sim card but no Android phone from Vodafone will not be able to have access to this exclusive channel.
Here’s a quote from Vodafone announcement,
From today, millions of Vodafone customers will have access to the new Vodafone content channel in Android Market. The first such channel in Europe, it offers customers a regularly updated selection of Vodafone services as well as the best news, sport, information and gaming apps, all sourced from Vodafone’s global and local partnerships, often on an exclusive, free or discounted basis.
Vodafone knows how lucrative the app business is and is making a clear statement with the introduction of this channel that it wants a piece of the pie. Vodafone is also claiming that it will approve apps for the Vodafone channel. The wireless carrier is going with quality apps over quantity. This is actually good, even though the Android market is an open place, where no one monitors your apps, this freedom of operation has sometimes been harmful to Android users. There’s actually a lot of useless apps in the Android Market. You can also say that there are a lot of poor apps too, problem that Apple’s App Store does not have since Apple closely monitors the apps submitted.
So yes monitoring can be good sometimes, for now the Vodafone Channel is already available in the Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and UK. The Vodafone should expand shortly to other European countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
What do you think, should Google step in and monitor Apps submitted to the Android Market like Apple does? Any bad experiences with the download of an Android app? Let us know!
Related links
– Sprint introducing bloatware removal option starting with HTC Evo 3D
