SlideME considers safety to be a top priority, and we do our best to ensure all applications that are distributed through our channels are both safe and secure. Let us showcase some of the ways in which SlideME is a safer store than other alternatives:

1. All applications on SlideME are scanned for viruses and exploits. We use multiple scanners in order to ensure safer applications. Recently we teamed up with Bluebox Security to integrate their Android exploits scanner into our systems. As a result, we are among the first application stores to scan for the Master-Key exploit (and other exploits that were not even made public yet).
   
2. All applications on SlideME are manually reviewed by our editors. Our strict approval process ensures that all applications are tested and quality-checked by our review staff before they can be published.
   

With the huge demand for applications to be low-cost or free in the Android ecosystem, it can be difficult for developers and publishers to monetize from their work. A high quality application with hundreds of hours invested deserves adequate compensation, and in turn would help fund future high quality applications. Many low quality applications seek to makeup for the lack of invested hours by aggressively stacking advertising into each individual app. But where do we draw the line with advertising? How much advertising is really necessary for an application to make a profit? Do low quality applications deserve to net a larger profit by including many forms of advertising, or should they be limited in relation to the amount of effort and time invested?

When managing the inventory of your paid applications, you can choose any one of the following options:

1. Stock a number of copies for sale
2. Provide a number of static license keys that you pre-generate for each copy for sale

OR

3. Use the new SlideME [Remote Keys] Licensing API to dynamically license keys for each copy for sale

How does this remote licensing option work differently than using static keys?

Did you know you can easily promote your apps on websites, blogs, and forums using SlideME Widgets like the one below?

SlideME Widgets work a lot like ads, except they can provide more details than simply a purchase link. These widgets are designed to display relevant up-to-date info about your apps straight from the SlideME Market, such as the developer, price, or even your application icon. Using the provided HTML code, you can embed these widgets into nearly any internet medium that provides HTML capability. You could place them on your website, on a company blog, within internal or external forums, or even marketing emails. We provide a variety of Widget designs you can implement with little effort.

We are asking the community what top apps that they would like to see on the SlideME Marketplace. We will contact those developers and see what we can do on getting those apps stocked.

Feel free to post suggestions here.

At SlideME, we introduced the highest payouts for developers in the industry, with typical payouts of 95%. The remaining 5% went directly to the payment processor. Our position has always been not to make money on downloads. Sadly, those days are coming to an end.

We naively envisioned that developers and content would arrive in large numbers on SlideME due to our global billing support, which Google lacked. And with this content, we expected we would line up operator support and white-labeling of our solution. After 12 months, this has yet to happen.

For those of you who haven't heard about Speed Forge 3D. Many are considering it the hottest game yet for Android. The video looks awesome. You can find it at SlideME: http://slideme.org/application/speed-forge-3d

This is a minor release that provides sorting options for main catalog entries. There are also a number of bug fixes including: storage locker appearing blank, needing to login twice to storage locker, a possible crash after watching app video, a crash if user scanned a QR code and the catalog info had not been previously stored in SAM's catalog.

This is a major 3.0 release of SAM. Features include an image gallery for up to three screenshots and the ability of the user to play youtube videos of the applications. There is also a new feature for viewing, sorting and installing applications directly from the SD Card.

SAM 3.0 supports it's own intent for launching on application links, allowing users to scan QR Codes or click links, taking them directly to the application within SAM.

This release also includes important fixes for improved application search and for encoding problems during login.

For nearly the last two years, we've been focused on our core project SAM (SlideME Application Manager) but have never been able to release it into the Android Market due to Google's non-compete terms.

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.

SlideME is pleased to announce SAM 2.9, a minor release of our mobile marketplace for Android applications. Features include user options of opening, re-downloading and deleting applications from within the storage locker.

This release also has important bug fixes for problems with auto-updating of newer versions of SAM and for login errors that some users experienced with the storage locker. SAM also now detects when the SD card is not available.

Last week, Henrique added support for device detection and a mobile theme to the SlideME site. Loading is a lot faster and all the views fit nicely on the G1 screen. If you want to get an idea of what it looks like from the PC, you can go here: http://m.slideme.org/

Early last month, just a few days before our intended release of paid applications on SlideME, someone raised the issue on the Android lists about whether our apps were protected from copying. I had naively assumed that Google protected the installed application space; and after a quick check found out that this was not the case. A Google engineer also confirmed this on the lists. You could pull off any installed app using the Android developer tools.