Without any particular advertisement, other than a post here and a message on The Code Project, the app got 452 total downloads, and has 402 active installs (89%). It received 8 +1s and 6 5-star reviews (1 review and 1 +1 are mine of course).

I don't consider my app polished at all. It barely does what I need with a tolerable UI and small footprint (<100 KB), but the positive response from the market makes me wonder if the quality problem of Android apps is even worse than what we suppose.

BTW, Dropbox, you can have my app for $1M.

I've read this blog post. This sums it up well:

Nobody wants an Android tablet.
Almost no one has the latest version of Android.
The companies that most aggressively marketed the "Android" brand, particularly Motorola and HTC, are floundering. Samsung, you will notice, markets Samsung.

App developers continue to make far more money off iOS.

Ignoring all the commercial issues of Android vs. iOS, I still can't believe how a performance-concerned company like Google has been totally unable to build a fast mobile operating system. To that regard, Android is starting to be tolerably fast and fluid only today, with ICS and dual- and quad-core devices with 1GB of RAM. Surely controlling the hardware gives Apple an advantage, but it's clear that Google has failed spectacularly at this engineering challenge, and now it's too late. Microsoft has done the Right Thing in throwing Windows Mobile away and rebuild their mobile platform from scratch, and I think Android is today what Windows Mobile was a couple of years ago.
Google's engineers have failed because building software for the web is very different than building software for mobile devices. Plus Java sucks and it's slow (and it's owned by a patent troll).

But lets not make fools of ourselves. Android has nothing to do with building a great mobile experience. Android is simply a way for Google to get more ads revenue, taking it away from competitors (namely, Bing). Google is doing this by "taking ownership", one byte at a time, of all of your emails, all of your pictures, all of your messages, and now all of your files. And it's doing this on the "desktop" web, and on the mobile web. It's a radically different business model. Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, and all the happy company are trying to sell you products and services at a certain price which you may or may not be willing to pay. Google is trying to commoditize everything - devices, operating systems, browsers - in order to serve you more and more ads. 850k new Android devices per day means 850k new ad viewers per day.

Ads in Google searches are a proven business, and they're the primary source of revenue of the company. I suppose they work as well on mobile. At least they're tailored to what you're looking for right here, right now. That's the type of ads we perhaps do not love, but that we accept without too much complain.

And then there are in-app ads.

In two years of using Android, I have yet to see a useful in-app ad. They're 99% junk. Real, decent, at-least-half-useful ads are deserting the mobile space, despite all the hype end efforts spent (wasted?) by Google. I can see at least one major problem: space. The screen is very small, and you can only fit limited ad content on it without disrupting the app's usage experience. I'm not sure how much advertisers are willing to pay for a handful pixels inside an ugly app, making it even more uglier. Besides, developers have understood this phenomenon and are all turning their apps into a weird form of ransomware, asking you to purchase a paid version to remove ads and set your screen free.

I'm sure that if Google (and Apple, and Microsoft) removed in-app ads frameworks, the quality of the apps (and overall app store revenues) would see a great increase. Something like this:

Free or paid apps, but please no ads.

I discovered Peter Cawdron thanks to his sci-fi novel Anomaly. It was a while ago, and since then every time the guy publishes a new book for Kindle, I'm probably the first one to purchase it. At €0.89 a pop, they're a bargain. But the small price should not give you the wrong impression: Cawdron has a very readable and capturing prose, and plots are never trivial nor boring.

Anomaly is a full-length novel, and to some extent it's a more usual piece of sci-fi, covering the first encounter between the human race and an alien entity in New York. It's a very good read and I totally recommend it, but as I said it's somewhat conventional. I'm sure it would make for a pretty good movie.

Serengeti, Trixie & Me and Savannah* are short stories focused on hypothetical human galactic exploration. It's quite easy to imagine spaceships that travel across the Milky Way in a matter of a few days - or hours - and armed with the most destructive weapons you can think of. It's quite easy to imagine alien civilizations that are quite the same as ours, only with some minor different traits. Well, Cawdron hasn't fallen for it. He hasn't followed the easy route. Instead, he imagined a totally different future, much more plausible, and somewhat melancholic and lonely. Deep space is unimaginably vast, and no one can hear you scream there. The three stories are bound together by the same grand human exploration project, and cover the histories of three different space ships and crews in their quest to find intelligent life in our galaxy and beyond. You will not find obsessive attention to technology, because the author just gives you some hints about what will probably be possible in the future, but without sounding too unrealistic or far-fetched. After all, it's not important how a space ship can travel hundreds light years across the galaxy. What's important is what its crew find in space.

In my opinion, Cawdron has demonstrated to be a very versatile science fiction writer. He has the uncommon ability to imagine and describe not only the interactions - whatever that means in each particular case - between humans and aliens, but the very humane reactions and emotions that men and women feel - fear, rage, pity, greed - in such encounters. Some have "accused" him to not giving characters enough profoundness. It might be true, but I think it's very subjective, and science fiction should not give too much weight to individual characters beyond what's strictly necessary to convey the meaning of what's happening. Personally I prefer fast-paces prose, without too many bells and whistles. So, I suggest you to head over to Cawdron's Amazon page and start reading.

* I haven't read Savannah yet, but I can't wait and I'm sure it will be awesome.

The Good
The system is overall much more polished than 2.x. The global user experience is surely good (but I already expressed some perplexity on the recent apps switcher button).
For someone who listens to music while commuting like me, the sound quality is satisfactory, and anyway much better than that of the HTC Desire.
Battery life, after a few charge/discharge cycles, is quite good. With my typical usage I get to the end of the day with around 40% of juice still available. With limited use and a WiFi connection, the battery easily lasts for 2 full days, perhaps 3.

The Bad
It's somewhat unstable. I don't know if it's the combination with the Galaxy Nexus, but I experienced several resets of the phone in a number of occasions. I couldn't identify a pattern, but it seems something related to high memory usage.
Launcher (the application that displays the home screen, manages icons and widgets) crashed a few times, typically when updating apps.
Moreover, just yesterday I noticed that the WiFi connection was being dropped when the phone was idle, to be reactivated as soon as I turned the screen on. A reboot fixed the issue (the uptime was around 12 days).

The Ugly
When a phone call arrives, it takes forever before the phone displays caller ID information. The phone rings and vibrates, the led lights up, but screen remains dead for 2 or 3 seconds.
Animations are quite annoying after a while because, even if they're very smooth most of the time, they're too slow and inconsistent when navigating across screens. I'm not sure if it depends on apps, but the end result is a bit disappointing.

The Verdict
All in all, it's a pretty decent mobile operating system. I think it's starting to show some aging problems, but nothing too worrying (for now). 4.0.4 should fix the instability issues, and is being rolled out now, but I read reports of a much worse problem causing cell signal loss in idle (so I guess rollout is suspended for now, in fact it's still nowhere to be seen for me). I bet we have to blame Samsung drivers.

Side Note
It's more and more frequent that mobile operating systems have critical bugs and issues, often impacting devices' ability to function properly. This is very bad, although inevitable as they get more complex and sophisticated. All software has bugs, and while that's normal, it shouldn't be considered right and we should demand fast deployment of updates (and with fast I mean happening in days, not weeks or months). I would expect much faster response times from at least Google...

Even worse, 1.3.35 is not mentioned in the testing builds list, which only includes 1.3.34 and 1.3.36.

Perhaps they are pushing experimental releases to some users to see if they work well. Normally I wouldn't mind, but in this case, given the critical importance of the application, I'm a bit worried. I'm sure no data will be corrupted/lost/whatever, but as you know I'm a bit paranoid. Let the finger crossing begin.

The Good
Sound quality is somewhat superior, especially when compared to my previous cheapo Creative headphones. They're still distant from "serious" headphones like those I use at home, but they're closer. I guess there are much better in-ear headphones out there, so sound quality could get an additional boost.
In-ear headphones have the ability to shield away most of ambient sound, so you not only can listed to the music at a lower volume, but you don't have to hear all those noises usually heard on mass transit - including people talking.
Thanks to the better sound quality, I could use less aggressive equalizer settings, improving the sound quality another bit.

The Bad
For the entire duration of my test session, I've always felt like I had something huge stuck into my ears. That is probably because I actually had something huge stuck into my ears. The feeling is a bit weird, but I guess you get used to it.
Because I couldn't hear much coming from the outside world, I was almost ran over by a bus - and probably many other vehicles I didn't even notice. I think there's a radar app you can install on your phone to get proximity warnings.
Not hearing your own footsteps is surely weird.
I have some concerns that the headphones can get dirty over time, although it's easy to detach the silicone earbuds and wash them.

Verdict
I'm not sure yet. I'll use them for a few more days and then decide. If I like them, I think I'll purchase another pair based on reviews found on the web.

This is true for all smartphone OS vendors. If one shuts down, or decides to close the business unit, our smartphones would become something very close to a brick, only much more expensive. Sure, we could still use them for basic activities like phone calls and texting, but all the functions that make smartphones smart would disappear. App stores, push services, and all the like would stop working, not to mention OS updates.

I can't see Google or Apple dropping out of the smartphone business any time soon, but for Microsoft I still have some doubts. Windows Phone is not yet widely-adopted and no one knows for sure if it will ever be. Time will tell, but I believe that if within one year Windows Phone will still be a rounding error in smartphone purchase stats, then existing owners should start to worry.

Meanwhile, Nokia phones sold in 2001 are still working perfectly, and will probably keep going for the next century or so.

Is it spam? Is it a mistake? We asked for clarification but heard nothing. Also, can you notice the faint grey background of the text?

I don't understand.

*) I have no idea what are the toolbar's features, but I'm pretty sure it's useless, bloated and quite possibly dangerous for your PC's security. Now prove me wrong.