Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple’s App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps. A study by Larva Labs (the developers of the excellent Slidescreen app) estimates that Apple has paid out 50 times more money to developers than Google has. While the Android Market is available in 46 countries, developers can only offer paid apps in 13 countries (for instance, Canada has only had access to paid apps since March 2010). In addition, the price for foreign apps is not displayed in the user’s local currency and developers do not have the option of customizing pricing by country. To make matters worse, you can’t pay for foreign apps using your Amex card or carrier billing. There’s also no support for in-app payments and changelogs (to communicate app changes).

Below are just a few examples of what’s wrong with the Android Market. Those 144 spam ringtone apps (which are clearly infringing copyright) are currently cluttering the top ranks of the Multimedia category. I was not surprised to find that they were being monetized through Google Ads.

Trademark and copyright infringement is widespread in the Android Market:

The music downloading app “Tunee” (one of many such apps) is one of the Top Free apps in the Multimedia category with more than 250k downloads. While some would dishonestly try to pretend that such apps are meant for downloading public domain classical music, the developers of Tunee are very clear about their intent. Their screenshot shows copyrighted music by the band Muse (Warner Music Group) being illegally downloaded.

These apps are damaging to companies that are building legitimate Android music apps (e.g Rdio, Spotify and MOG), not to mention Amazon whose MP3 store comes bundled with most Android phones in the U.S. Is Google’s strategy to turn a blind eye to illegal music downloading until they launch their own music store?

Developers and users are getting fed up and it’s time for Google to clean up the house.

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The Nexus One ships with a 2.6.29 kernel but if you like living on the bleeding edge you can install your own kernel (e.g. the experimental 2.6.32 kernel). Below you’ll find an update image I built which includes a 2.6.32 kernel, su, scp and ssh.

Steps to unlock your Nexus One bootloader and install your own firmware:

• Verify USB debugging is turned on in your Nexus One settings (Applications -> Development).
• Install the Android SDK and fastboot.
• Power off your Nexus One. Hold down the trackball and power the device back on.
• Run ‘fastboot oem unlock’ and then follow the instructions on the device.
• Download Amon_RA’s custom recovery image for the Nexus One.
• Run ‘fastboot flash recovery recovery-RA-nexus-v1.5.3.img’ and then reboot your Nexus One.
• Copy nexus-2.6.32-root-signed.zip to your Nexus One SD-card and then run ‘adb reboot recovery’.
• Once the device boots into Android system recovery, select “Flash zip from sdcard” and then nexus-2.6.32-root-signed.zip.

With root on your Nexus One, you can use apps such as n1torch (use your Nexus One camera flash as a flashlight).

Note that for security reasons you may want to replace the standard su with something like superuser.

Btw, my company, doubleTwist, is hiring engineers in San Francisco and Android experience is a plus. Perks include a doubleTwist engraved Nexus One

The Nexus doesn’t come with any iTunes-style companion software, either. Enterprising techies know about the free DoubleTwist program for Mac or Windows, which simulates iTunes for the purposes of loading up your phone with music, photos and videos.

This week, Walt Mossberg in a follow-up to his Nexus One review:

Google doesn’t supply any equivalent to Apple’s iTunes or the BlackBerry media-syncing software. However, the third-party program doubleTwist, available at doubletwist.com, is designed to function as a sort of iTunes for syncing Android, Palm and BlackBerry devices.

What are you waiting for? Go download doubleTwist now and sync with your Nexus One

We’ve also put the mounting instructions up at Mount Android (requires Chrome, Safari or Firefox).