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SlideME's SAM Marketplace Shows up on the HTC Hero

It's finally public: the SlideME Application Manager is on the HTC Hero devices released in Malaysia and Vietnam. So now I can discuss with the community a little of the background of what was happening with SlideME over the summer and what to expect in the coming months.

If you tracked SAM releases, you would have noticed that we did four releases from mid-to-late May, all containing localization support of various languages, including Vietnamese. This was to get a version of SAM into the hands of HTC.

SAM v2.8 (released on June 9, 2009) was a major re-write of much of the plumbing in SAM. We previously downloaded the entire catalog on startup and while this worked for 30-40 apps, it was killing the SAM client performance at 150+ apps; certain application entries were getting completely dropped. We needed to fix this if we wanted to scale with an HTC release.

With 2.8, we did incremental and on-demand catalog loading. This required a lot of back-end work as well. SimpleDB from AWS did amazing things for us in regards to building out our new feed servers (I'll write more about this in a later blog).

We can't go into any details right now about who it was for, but in late June we worked on a number of important bug fixes and features that we finished the first week of July. We eventually released this to the community as SAM 2.9 in late August, but we had to do some changes on the portal first. We needed to be able to grab the package and class names from the apk during application upload. SAM uses this information to allow the user to open and delete applications. This was a critical part of the recent portal upgrade.

In August, you may have also noticed a lot of activity at Masa (Maven build plugins for Android), an open-source project I founded a while ago. The big effort in August was to support multiple builds of Android apps, using different resources for different locales. These Masa improvements allow us to build 5 different versions of SAM in a single build, cutting down a lot of manual (and error prone) effort.

We can't say who right now but we will be doing another big announcement regarding on-device distribution of SAM in the next month or so. This will cover a number of countries. We've also got some additional device manufacturers that have expressed interest, so we are are various stages of discussions with them now. From our perspective, things are going very well.

We've spent nearly two years getting the basics done to deliver a stable product that handles application stocking, user discovery, and application downloads and purchases. The billing efforts have taken a good portion of this time.

Our focus right now is to expand out the community features within SlideME. We started out with the idea of providing a social community of users and developers; that's why we founded SlideME. What we've been doing for the last two years are just the basics needed to play in this market. With all that behind us and with the latest upgrades to the portal, we are getting back to our roots.

It's for Sprint!

Sprint Hero out on Oct 11. I think it's for Sprint Hero :)

CONGRATULATIONS!!! You showed Google how to do the DRM/Market the correct way :)

SlideME is also availabe in broswer bookmarks in HTC magic

Hi, thanks for your hard work with this development, and congratulation for SlideME.

I also found there is a bookmark link (SlideME.org) in my HTC magic browser, even I used to restore the factory setting, the bookmark is still on the site. So it means the HTC vendors integrate SlideME in phone, but another saying is why they don't make a pre-installed SlideME instead of making bookmark??? Because I hope all android phones contain SlideME application due to some new users do not know where and how to get SlideME.

I really love this SlideME service, and it is a best place for all android phones.

Vutha, we were first in

Vutha, we were first in contact with HTC in early May and there was not enough time to resolve all the legal and testing issues to have SAM on-device for the HTC Magic. So those devices that shipped out in early summer only contained the browser bookmarks. I did see an HTC product brochure which mentioned SlideME, so the understanding I had was that this would be communicated to the HTC Magic customers.

We don't have any formal marketing here, largely relying on word-of-mouth among users and developers, so if you know of HTC Magic owners, please let them know about us!

HTC Customer support team is too much busy to support us!

Thanks very much for you much efforts. Yeah, i used to connect to the HTC support team through their website, but there is no any respond or reply from them. I thought they might have plenty of works to do and very busy to care about their consumers.

Anyway I really appreciated with your service, keeping up!! SlideME is my favorite