Paid Android Apps Coming in 2009

By Nick Mokey December 30, 2008

Google’s utopian-style Android Market, where everything is currently free, is about to get an infusion of capitalism. According to a new e-mail sent to Android developers, the marketplace will begin its march toward maturity (and profits for developers) in early 2009.

According to Android platform manager Eric Chu, Google hopes to begin rolling out payment systems to support paid Android applications within the first quarter of the year. The paid marketplace will first be available in the United States and UK, followed by Germany, Austria and Netherlands, then France, Italy and Spain. Many of the listed countries don’t yet have access to even the free version of Android Market, but Google will include them when it begins its international rollout in January.

Though paid apps may mean an end to such a plethora of free offerings for Android, fans of the operating system also hope it will attract more developers motivated by profit, the same way Apple’s App Store has done for the iPhone. Keeping on par with Apple, Google will allow developers to keep 70 percent of an app’s selling price as profit.

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If you have one of these apps on your Android phone, delete it immediately

The app drawer on the Google Pixel 8 Pro.

The NSO Group raised security alarms this week, and once again, it’s the devastatingly powerful Pegasus malware that was deployed in Jordan to spy on journalists and activists. While that’s a high-profile case that entailed Apple filing a lawsuit against NSO Group, there’s a whole world of seemingly innocuous Android apps that are harvesting sensitive data from an average person’s phone.
The security experts at ESET have spotted at least 12 Android apps, most of which are disguised as chat apps, that actually plant a Trojan on the phone and then steal details such as call logs and messages, remotely gain control of the camera, and even extract chat details from end-to-end encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp.
The apps in question are YohooTalk, TikTalk, Privee Talk, MeetMe, Nidus, GlowChat, Let’s Chat, Quick Chat, Rafaqat, Chit Chat, Hello Chat, and Wave Chat. Needless to say, if you have any of these apps installed on your devices, delete them immediately.
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A chat app doing serious damage

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A person holding the Nothing Phone 2.

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“With Phone 2a, we’ve really doubled down on the core user needs — performance, camera, you need it,” says co-founder Akis Evangelidis. He further adds that with the Nothing Phone 2a, the company is leveraging the core niceties of the Nothing Phone 2, which chased flagship standards. Nothing confirmed the Nothing Phone 2a's existence in a "Community Update" video uploaded to its YouTube channel.

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How to force close apps on your Android device

The app drawer on the Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Smartphone apps are great. They're quick to load, and generally well optimized. But have you ever noticed that they tend to get faster at loading after you've used them a bit? That's not your mind playing tricks on you; it's because your Android smartphone doesn't tend to close apps even when you're done with them. Instead, it keeps them tucked away in its memory. This makes going back to apps faster, and if it becomes a memory hog, Android generally knows how to fix that.