Colin's Journal

Perma-Link

The Android Market continues to struggle in providing a great end user experience.  To illustrate, here’s what I went through when purchasing Carcassonne tonight:

• I had bookmarked the Carcassonne page on the market a few weeks ago, so when I decided to buy it, I followed the bookmark.  The advertised price was £1.75.
• I clicked on purchase, and the site prompted me to login, which I did.  The “review your purchase” pop-up appeared, but listed the price as €1.99, and was missing the Confirm button.
• Deciding that the phone version may work better, I searched on my phone for Carcassone, and saw the price listed as £3.49.
• Thinking that a lower price sounded better, I tried various re-loads of the page in my browser with no luck – the “review your purchase” pop-up grew a “Confirm” button, but it was greyed out and would not work.
• I tried searching in the web based version of the market for Carcassone.  The result was a listed price of £3.49.
• Giving it one last go, I followed the search result link, and it brought up the page showing the price as £1.75.
• Selecting purchase I was shown the confirmation dialog with a price of €1.99, and a working “Confirm” button.
• Upon clicking Confirm the app started downloading on my phone – and the website showed a confirmation that I had purchased the game for £1.75.
• Finally my Google Checkout receipt arrived, showing the actual transaction cost €1.99

It’s fairly amazing that my own app (ExpenseClam) receives any purchases at all given the difficulty involved!

I should add that it was worth persevering – the game is rather good!

Tags: android, market
Posted in Android | Comments Off on Android Market Experience