Last night an email came in from the AndroidMarket team laying out some plans for the new year.  Thus far, participation in the Android Market has been sort of like living as a mushroom, so it was really nice to get some indicator where they are heading that is not rumor based.

The first significant point is an announcement that they will be expanding availability into additional markets.

I'm happy to inform you that Android Market will become available to users to download apps in additional European countries starting early Q1 2009. Some of the countries we will initially support are Germany, Austria, Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

My excitement over this announcement is tempered by the fact that they don't really have any devices in many of those markets and that it's a bit of work to localize applications when you don't speak the language.  But knowing where they are expanding makes it possible to have localized apps ready to go when they do come online.

Another interesting part of this is the ability to target the regions developers want to make their applications available in.

Note that your apps will not become available in these new countries unless you specifically select them in the publisher website, after we update it.

I imagine that this capability will also allow the applications to be censored in areas where they don't have the same freedoms that America has, but that's just speculation on my part.  Google wouldn't announce anything like that until a foreign government made it a public issue.

Their announcement also confirms that their schedule for releasing priced applications seems to still be on track for early Q1 2009 and gives some details that mesh with their announcement about additional countries.

...we will enable priced app support in Q1 for developers operating in these countries in the following order: (1) United States and UK; (2) Germany, Austria and Netherlands; (3) France, Italy and Spain.  By the end of Q1 2009, we will announce support for developers operating in additional countries

They still are totally lacking details about the mechanism that will be used for accepting payment or how compensation will be delivered to software developers.  Hopefully they will give some indicators before they start the process.

What they don't do is discuss the major shortcoming of the market to date: zero integration with the internet.  I would have really liked to see them announce that they were making a web front-end for users that would allow developers a higher level of communication about their applications.  Currently, the information is limited to a 250 character description that makes it difficult(impossible) to address things like required security permissions and such.

So far, the Android system had been rock-solid on the G1 and the development suite has been mostly a joy to work with.  Hopefully 2009 will also bring an OS upgrade that completes some of the last pieces in terms of capacity - specifically fleshing out the bluetooth stack.

Any way it goes, with the announcement of several new devices early in 2009 and the expanded audience for the Market, this should be an exciting year for the new platform.