Opinion: Open app stores are a double-edged sword for mobile gamers

After months of hype, you can finally buy a handset running Google's Android operating system. Well, you can in the US, anyway - us Brits are having to wait until next week to get our hands on the T-Mobile G1.

But alongside the handset's US launch has come the debut of Android Market, Android's equivalent of the iPhone's App Store. It launched with around 50 apps, including games from Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Namco.

Here's the thing: Android Market is even more open than the App Store, in terms of developers and publishers getting their games onto it.

All they have to do is pay a $25 registration fee, and they're then able to upload their apps to the Market, without even the kind of approval process that Apple uses for the App Store - itself pretty open in terms of who's allowed to publish on it.

It's good and bad news for us gamers.

It's good, because anyone can develop for Android Market or the App Store. They're as open to submissions from indie developers and bedroom coders as from the big publishers.

The result are some gems you'd never find on a traditional mobile operator portal.

Aurora Feint is a great example on the App Store. It's a free puzzler with RPG elements, not entirely dissimilar in concept to Puzzle Quest, albeit with a different puzzle mechanic.

Games like Trism, Toy Bot Diaries, Kroll, Enigmo, Dizzy Bee, Tap Tap Revenge and many more show the benefits of these open app stores.

But it's bad because... anyone can develop for Android Market or the App Store. Alongside these gems, there's lots of rubbish. Apple and Google are leaving it up to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

And that's the problem. Once you have nearly 1,500 games available, as iPhone does, the challenge is how you find the good ones.

You still can't sort App Store games by user rating, for example. Gamers are being given a world of choice, but not the tools to make sense of it all. And while Apple does spotlight quality games on the App Store homepage, it's only a step in the right direction.

The openness of the App Store and Android Market is great for mobile gaming - the many talented developers out there finally see a way to turn their cool ideas into games that actually make money.

But with openness comes the potential for confusion. Having launched their respective stores, the task now for Apple and Google is how to improve them to make it easier for users to find the best apps and games.