Hit the app market before the sting

Organisations and software developers can build and upload their applications to the Google Apps Marketplace now and avoid a 20 per cent royalty fee to be enforced “within months”, the company says.

The fee will be imposed on licence profits made from the sale of applications within Google’s App Marketplace. Google promotes applications within the marketplace that integrate with Google Apps such as gmail and gtalk.

US Google evangelist, Don Dodge, said at Google DevFest 2010 in Sydney this week the marketplace does not yet have a billing Application Programming Interface (API) nor does it impose royalty fees on the sale of applications in the marketplace.

“The billing API will make it easier for customers to sell their applications, especially to international markets,” Dodge said.

He said Google is "reliant" on Android to certify countries so Australians developers can sell internationally via its pending billing countries.

"There is enormous pressure on them to do it ,” he said.

The Mountain View giant also plans to promote business to customer applications within its marketplace next year. Only business to business applications are currently accepted.

Dodge said offering business to consumer applications on the marketplace could help kick start adoption by allowing developers and IT-savvy customers to access software and promote it to their organisations.

The former Microsoft turned Google evangelist said all applications will be cloud based within 10 years, and dubbed offline or locally-installed applications “a short-term strategy”.

He said mobile devices will replace desktops as the processor and storage technology of choice because they have continuous Internet access and are becoming more capable of handling local compute requirements.

“Users will just put their phone into something like a dock, and that will have all the applications you need, and the rest will be hosted in the cloud,” Dodge said.

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