Monday, October 25, 2010

Android Payments Snarl Spurs Upstarts - BusinessWeek

More Android user experience fragmentation ahead

To make it easier for consumers to make payments via Android handsets, a small group of companies last week introduced technology that would bypass the payment methods Google has approved. Zong, a mobile-payments company, says it joined two other payment firms, Billing Revolution and AdKnowledge, as well as PapayaMobile, a Beijing-based developer of social networking and gaming applications, to offer software developers a set of payment options they can easily add to Android applications.

Numerous programmers lament the difficulty of building payments systems for Android. "Payments are a big problem on Android," says Sam Altman, chief executive officer of Loopt, a location-based social network that runs on several wireless phones. "It's not the biggest problem, but when you consider how you're going to spend your time and resources, it's certainly something you have to consider." And the more difficult it is to get paid for products or delivered via mobile apps, the less incentive some programmers have to write for Android.

Android Payments Snarl Spurs Upstarts - BusinessWeek

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