I received an email with the title “Hominize Android, you profit more than Android!” some weeks ago, and I was so close at just deleting it. This is my usual response to mails that seems to be spam, however, as this mail at least had two words in the title I found quite interesting, I read it.

It was an ad for Android developers for a Chinese market place called Ndoo. I thought no harm done in contacting them, and see how that works, with the full awareness that if they would ask me for cash I’d be out! So I sent an email saying that I was interested, but wouldn’t be able to translate my apps into Chinese. The answer came almost prompt (I think they work long hours…), that they could translate my apps for free!! No cash exchange at any point! Additionally at this moment they only accept free/ad based apps, as payments haven’t been set up yet. So this is I no way spam, I think they are doing this to get the market up and running fast.

They’ve now translated the first app for me, and apart for a few glitches in communication (both from my side and theirs) the experience has been very smooth. They have also uploaded the game to the market. You can see it here. My stats show that people are downloading from it, slower than SlideME and Google, but much faster than e.g. Amazon (there you seemingly need to be an app rockstar to get downloads as there are no embedded advertising for new apps), getjar or appslib. It will be every interesting to follow the development.

I can only recommend this to other developers who might want to try something different with their apps.