Gruber  talking about the Android Market:

Maybe it is a Wild West free-for-all. What a fucking mess.

— Gruber, “Jon Lech Johansen: ‘Google’s Mismanagement of the Android Market’”

Google’s answer to a closed and protected Apples App Store is an open and unprotected Android App Store.

From my point of view, that’s the wrong answer. And I think in some ways it’s not even very Google-y.

What I expected from Google was:

• A managed store, exactly like the Apple App Store
• An unmanaged and simple way to add apps to my Android device
• A common developer API to handle payments and setup

In this way, you’ll have the best of both worlds and you allow even third parties to build their store… but with your API. And Google could even add an extension to its search engine to search for apps and directly install them.

Update

About five years later (2015), now Google is reviewing all app submissions, thus going for an approach similar to apple.

Today, Android apps are approved in hours, not days, despite the addition of human reviewers.