VisionMobile has launched the most ambitious mobile platform survey to date, sponsored by O2 Litmus. This survey tracks the developer experience across all 8 major platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian, Java ME, RIM, Windows Mobile, Flash Lite and mobile web). The results will be freely and widely published. As a mobile developer, this is the opportunity to make your voice heard!

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.

Android was publicly announced on November 5, 2007, followed by the SDK release on November 12th, 2007. A few days later, HelloAndroid.com comes out with an Application Database, which could be considered the first Android catalog.

Around the same time, a couple other guys and I form SlideME, starting work on an application manager and portal for Android. We decide to enter the ADC I with our solution.

On March 20th, Sadko Mobile announces DroidStor, a commercial solution.

You can protect your content that is distributed through the SlideME Marketplace by using SlideLock, a simple forward lock implementation.

Developers Get Paid the Best Way

SlideME is introducing a great new way to get paid – directly to a Prepaid Debit MasterCard®.

By choosing to be paid by the Prepaid Debit MasterCard®, you will reduce the time that it takes for your payment to be delivered while cutting the costs associated with other methods of payment. It's fast, secure and offers you the most flexibility with your money.

Immediate liquidity: Payments available in minutes anywhere in the world.

SlideME is pleased to announce support for paid applications with our release of SAM 2.3, the first billing solution for Android that includes a mobile client. You can download SAM 2.3 at http://slideme.org/sam2.apk