Sadly, I've seen no developer-centric push from Google. The SDK and tooling are excellent and the platform is very open, but the Android Marketplace itself is crap. The app descriptions and screenshots are paltry, there are no statics or metrics of any kind (other than total number of downloads and users), payment is not available in most countries, in-app purchases are nowhere on the roadmap and there isn't even a web-interface to the store!
For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty.
On the other hand, there's precious little I've missed from the Apple store when installing apps on my Nexus One. The App Store has its own problems - in particular, I never did figure out how to easily rate an app except by deleting it.
The biggest annoyance for me WRT Andorid apps is the complete chaos in the SD card root directory. It's a free for all, with no naming conventions or directory structure whatsoever. I hide most of my files in a couple of folders like _music, _video etc. so they float to the top of the cruft when mounted - otherwise I'd be afraid they'd be clobbered by some app's random directory choice.
It really is. I'm still stuck on 1.5 so my experience may not be on-par with what the 2.x folks are seeing but about 30% of the apps I download from the Market just crash now. I'm super disappointed the latest update to Subsonic is totally unstable. It puts a little notification item up each time it crashes (please stop doing that, by the way) so I know it crashed 7 times today. I wouldn't have installed the new update if I knew this was going to happen. I don't see anyway of going back to the stable version I was using a few days ago that worked pretty well besides a bit of a clunky UI. That type of stuff frustrates me so much.
"For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty."
True, but OTOH, you don't need it. You can locate apps reviewed and recommended on Web sites, and install using a qrcode.
I'd still like to see the marketplace improved. Given that there are few restrictions on what gets in there, having some better search and filtering tools would be a big win.
Perhaps (s)he -- a commenter on Hacker News -- doesn't need it, but the non-techy people that are driving the App Store's incredible sales LOVE having all these apps in one place, no typing, just tap "buy".
Well, for starters, they could allow developers to either get paid through channels other than Google Checkout or push Google Checkout merchant accounts to more countries. I was pretty enthusiastic about writing apps for Android until I realized that it was impossible for me to get paid for it.
Being Canadian, I also can't get paid, but I still wrote my app (as a hobby). I've started including Google Adsense in my app (admob is another choice I think), but people hate ads without the ability to buy.
For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty.