By Patrick Mork

As brands find success and establish a good consumer relationship on the iPhone, the next logical question is naturally: Which platform should I work on next? 

With so many platforms available the choice can be bewildering for brands and their agencies. This is a complex choice, at best, so I thought maybe it would be useful to highlight some of the key questions brands need to ask themselves when choosing which platform to spend their time and money developing on:

1. How many handsets is this platform on? This determines what the brands reach will be.

2. How powerful and rich is the platform? This determines the consumer experience and how well this can be translated into a consumer application. 

3. How rich is the platforms content ecosystem? The more quality applications that a platform has the richer its consumer offering and ultimately the more consumers will visit its ?store? in search of content. Which will ultimately lead them to discover branded applications.

4. How good is the platform?s ?store? or does it even have one?

The good news for Google?s Android is that overall it really hits the mark on the first three questions.

Adroit market
On GetJar, we now count over 40 different handsets in our device database up from less than five or so last year and downloads of Android applications are up nearly 50 percent month on month. 

Android adoption is increasing among handset vendors and now includes Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson among others.

Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T all have Android handsets and are aggressively introducing new models over the next few months. 

The platform is also rich and diverse. Android market now boasts more than 50,000 applications.
 
On GetJar we see that even though we are a cross-platform application store, more than 20 percent of our application submissions are now Android applications, making it the second-largest platform for content being submitted. 

The diversity is definitively there and when you play around with applications such as Geodelic and Waze you see that the quality of the content is at least on par with what?s available on the iPhone.

So where does Android lag? On one of the 4P?s of classic marketing: place or distribution.

The key challenge for both developers and brands regarding applications is distribution, discovery and monetization. 

As any brand manager knows, distribution is critical to getting your product to market and into the hands of consumers.

Discovery, which we refer to as merchandising for consumer goods, is the ability to have your application stand out in whichever store you happen to have it in and provide consumers with tools that help them find your application quickly and easily. 

Lastly, monetization is all about making money from your application.  This is more important for some brands than others but in the case of app stores it centers on how easy it is to pay for content, how transparent the payment process is and what the share of revenues is for developers or brands.

Android Market has serious issues in all three areas.

Blackballed
The easiest way to assess the Android Market is from my own experience here as a consumer.

A few days ago, I finally ditched my Blackberry Bold in favor of a shiny new Motorola Backflip. Overall, I?ve been really pleased by the experience of the device and the Android operating system. Until I tried downloading applications.

First, when I opened Android Market I found that I had to set up an account. Fortunately, for me this was fairly straightforward since I have a Gmail account tied to Google Checkout and, therefore, my credit card. 
The only pain was remembering my password ? like most people mine is stored online ? and the verification where you have to type in a random word which was nearly illegible. 

Other app stores make this optional or do not have registration at all to help consumers get their content more quickly and easily. Optional registration would have been more consumer-friendly here.

Once in Android Market I found a short selection of 15 applications which were ?highlighted? or ?featured.? This is like the carousel system on BlackBerry AppWorld.

The problem here is this selection is fairly limited and seems a bit random. There was not a good mix of different genres of applications, so that left me with tedious process of searching for applications by category. 

From the start you can search by ?applications,? ?games? or ?search.? Once in applications you have probably 15-20 different categories with long, long lists of applications. These can be viewed by popularity or date. 

The challenge here is that as the app store grows some pretty decent applications will get buried under a landslide of other applications.

Popular applications will rise to the top, but what determines popularity? That would seem to be downloads in this case, which means ultimately some very good applications will get lost in the noise since they may be excellent but not as popular in terms of downloads. 

Unloading
As a non-media, non-entertainment application that consumers might not typically search for, this means the probability of your branded application getting discovered is fairly low unless consumers are searching by date or you are actually promoting traffic to your application somehow.

Anyway, I trawled through a few hundred applications and finally settled on about 10 applications I liked, including Amazon, Guitar Hero Demo, Connect 4, Al Pacino Ringtones (I am a sucker for Scarface) and seven other applications and started downloading ? downloading ? downloading.   

I looked at the handy download manager and saw all my applications were downloading, but none was finishing.

So I blamed it on AT&T and put my phone aside and went to bed. 

When I woke up next morning, they were still downloading.

I tried again this morning, but to no avail. I was simply unable to download any of the applications I wanted from Android Market. It was not until 6 p.m. ? when I tried again ? that I was able actually get the applications I had been looking for.

So given that Android bills itself as an ?open? platform and that I do work for GetJar after all, I decided to go to our own site and download a few Android applications. All three applications I tried downloaded successfully but then something bizarre happened. 

When I tried to install them I got a message saying that the apps were from an ?untrusted source? and for ?my own security? they could not be installed on my handset. Gee thanks. I am 38 years old and I think I can safely determine what I would like to install on my handset. 

On my BlackBerry, for example, I could download things from both the BlackBerry AppWorld, GetJar or a half-dozen places to my heart?s content.

I then spent nearly an hour trying to change the settings on my handset to allow me to download content from third-party sites. No dice. AT&T and Google do not seem to like that idea.

Seems like Android is not as open as it could be, which is really unfortunate for brands and developers. It is a bit like telling consumers they can only buy Coke at Safeway.

Get that, Google?
Android is a fantastic, rich platform with the promise of being able to help brands reach a much wider market globally than the iPhone. 

However, to fulfill this promise Google needs to do significant work to address the issue of application discovery in the Android Market store and also need to consider how third-party distribution channels might help them push its content into the hands of consumers who want choice. 

Only when the issues of distribution and discovery are truly addressed will Android Market really be ready for brands to use as a legitimate marketing vehicle to reach consumers.

Patrick Mork is vice president of marketing at GetJar Inc., San Mateo, CA. Reach him at .