This has gotta be the funniest video I have seen in a long time. Not only that but it does a fairly decent job at showing the frustration some of us are feeling with this Google Apps fiasco. This video was posted by Youtube user osokrayzay today.

Apple banned him so he went underground. He used to go by Khalid Shaikh on the Android Market, but lately his apps have been showing up under the alias Sapphire Apps. His company name Perfect Acumen can still be seen in his package names and the annoying flood of his “Top Sexy Ladies <insert female celeb name here>” apps (which most users seem to view as spam) keep him from being hard to find. He packages a few pictures he finds on various websites into a slideshow and attempts to sell them for $5 each. The vast majority of his apps have a 1 star rating, and mostly because that is the least you can rate an app.

Khalid Shaikh Spamming the market with low rated apps

He currently has 178 apps listed on cyrket.com and was up to over 900 when Apple banned him from the AppStore. Google, it is time to stop Market spam and give us a filter option!

*Edit* While I was writing this (and after counting) Sapphire Apps posted 2 more apps to the Android Market. This puts his count up to 180.

*Edit2* 3 more apps were posted within an hour of this post. Grand total 183 and counting. At this rate, he might hit 300 before noon tomorrow.

Droid Dev Challenge 1

With the success of the Android Bounty from AndroidandMe.com and the Android Developer Challenge from Google, I decided to start up our own little contest. The task: create an Android 1.5 compatible widget. The best submitted widget will win the pot, which will be filled by user donations. More information can be found in the Droid Dev Challenge section.

We all knew they were coming (and those of us running a pre-release cupcake already have some new ones), but having a Google employee write a how-to makes it all the more real. Jeff Sharkey, who brought us some fun apps before being headhunted by Google, is showing how you can build your very own widget in the 1.5 sdk.

Earlier today I was invited to be an alpha tester for TorrentDroid which you probably have heard of from the AndroidAndMe bounty contest. This was a contest that accepted donations towards the “bounty” which was paid to the contest winner. The winning app had to be the first to meet all criteria of the contest, which basically consisted of scanning an upc code, finding the title of the movie/cd/game and searching for it on a torrent site. Once found, a torrent file needed to be downloaded to the phone and sent to the webui of uTorrent to start downloading. The idea is that you are walking around WalMart, find a movie you want to see, scan it and by the time you get home the movie is waiting for you.

Having been searching for a torrent client for Android (which I probably will never find) for months now, I was instantly interested and applied for the alpha tests. My first impressions are that this is really going to work out and will be a popular application if the price is kept reasonable. I first setup uTorrent (in wine since I am on linux (hint hint, ktorrent support please?)) and got the webui working. I tested the app by scanning an DVD that I own (hey, I’m too lazy to go to the store) and told it to use isohunt.com to search. I picked a decent match and downloaded the torrent and told it to open with TorrentDroid. Within 3 seconds uTorrent on my desktop was downloading the movie for me. There are user customizable torrent search engine options so you can tell it to search wherever you want and you can load new engines via a text file for greater customization. This application is very usable, but also rough around the edges (hence the alpha still). With a little bit of work on the UI and making things a little easier on the non techy users I can see this app easily being one of the most used on the market in a few weeks/months.

[RiS] has released the first non beta version of JFupdater, the application that makes the update process for JF rom users a lot easier. This app checks for new updates, downloads and will flash them with your permission. It only works for the official (technically unofficial) JF roms. Anyone using a JF rom should download this from the market (and make sure to give it 5 stars to offset all the idiots who download it and say “it dunt werk what iz dah root?”) and try it out. You can search for it by typing “jfupdater” in the search section of the market.

JesusFreke just released RC9. Download JF RC9 UK here. Details can be found on JesusFrekes new Andblogs.net blog.

Or you can download and install JFupdater and use that to upgrade to the latest version. JFupdater will check (at set intervals) for new updates and if found will allow you to download them and will assist with installing them. Updating to new JF roms using JFupdater is almost as easy as OTA updates were.

Per a suggestions in #android (on freenode) I went looking for a way to create something like Ubuntu’s brainstorm site. I found something and signed up for it. The idea behind this is to have a centralized location for requesting features (or even bug fixes) and having others vote for the ones they want the most to give developers (nudge nudge Google) a better idea of what the general public wants out of Android. I have added a subdomain and pointed it to this site (Might not be working yet due to propagation times) brainstorm.android-dls.com. If it does not work for you, just go here till the subdomain works (see below). Submit your ideas, and vote for ones you like the most. If this gets used seriously I am confident Google will check it out. They seem very good at getting users feedback about Android (hence all of the google staff that chat with us in #android).

I decided against the 3rd party service that I had initially setup and instead installed Pligg. It is basically a Digg site but without the need for a “story url”. I think this will work out better in the long run and have moved all of the submissions from everyone to the new site which is located at http://android-dls.com/brainstorm. I made some edits that hopefully let you use your forum/main site login on the pligg site. If you have problems, sign into the forum first then go to the pligg url and it should show you as logged in. I might disable the pligg login in favor of a forum login link soon, but I will see how things work for now.

NOTE: You do NOT have to create an account to post your request because the site lets you use your Gmail account to sign in. (No longer valid with new pligg site)

Jsharkey has just released a few apps he says are very much beta. He had to rush them out before he starts his new job at Google working on Android with the big boys. Seems he already realized he will not have as much time and wanted to make sure they were put out there for others to work on. It will be great to see people finish the OilCan app, as a short 10 minute test got me hooked. His categorized app drawer dubbed GroupHome will be great for nerds like me who install everything from the market they see (yes, I have moved browser and market cache to SD to give more room for my packraticism). Good luck Jsharkey with your new job and thanks for the going away present!

A user (known as AtomicDryad here, Fnord elsewhere) has created a method to update to RC30 and still keep root. The details are scattered across multiple forum threads and have recently been simplified (a little) and added to our >wiki.