USING THE ANDROID MARKET

The Android Market is the primary resource to find applications for download. Although no requirement demands that developers use the Market, most will simply due to the visibility it provides their applications.

You can access the Market at any time using the application that comes preinstalled on your device (see Figure 2.1). The main screen on the Market application allows you to browse through popular featured applications, games, books, and movies.

The Apps tab brings up a new screen that displays categories of applications. Selecting one of these categories displays a list of the applications in that category. You can view the list by a variety of criteria, depending on your version of Android. On Gingerbread, you can select Categories, Featured, Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, Top New Paid, Top New Free, or Trending. Honeycomb adds Staff Picks for Tablets to this list. Each application is listed by its name, the name of the developer, its cost, and its current user rating (see Figure 2.2).