[rogerbinns]

What I find fascinating is the app store URL. It includes en-US and the app is identified by a GUID so you have no chance of working out what it is other than clicking on the link. Locales of fr-CA and fr-FR worked but not en-UK or en-GB.

Apple has a country code, the app name and a numeric id. But the app name is just decoration and is ignored, so you could easily mislead by putting in anything you want. From the country code it looks like they believe only one language is spoken in any country (eg I couldn't select between French and English for Canada). The ids aren't in numeric order - probably some sort of timestamp instead.

Google uses a descriptive URL without country or language parts, and then the app is identified by package name (bundle id equivalent for the iOS crowd) which looks fine to us techie folk and mostly follows being the DNS name with some extra gunk such as com.rovio.angrybirdsspace.ads

Amazon Android URLs are amazon.com/<App Title>/dp/<ID> where the app title is just decoration and can be changed to anything and ID is hexadecimal(ish).

They all have various issues. I think locale information as part of the URI path is silly. Titles in the URLs is nice but open up social engineering attacks. As a techie I like the Google approach of identification, but that too is prone to social engineering (to my knowledge they do not verify a correspondence to the publishing organization DNS). But it is prettier than random numbers. A GUID is Microsoft's hammer and solution to everything. In this case it just makes the URLs unnecessarily long.

[jimueller]

I disagree that the long URL is a problem because I don't see people typing in mobile app store URLs. Either they search on the name or click a link. I do agree that it would be nice to have an app name that matters somewhere in the URL.

[rogerbinns]

I'm betting you are on iOS :-)

Links come from all over the place such as email and websites. I hope people have got into the habit of checking links before clicking on them!

In any event on Android from a web browser not on your device you can go to the Play store web site and install apps on your device.

It looks like you can do the same thing if you are on a system that has iTunes installed for iOS although it is more clicks and possibly involves cables.

[jimueller]

Actually, I'm one of those Windows Phone guys and I run CyanogenMod on my HP TouchPad, so I am familiar with the web versions of the Play store and Windows Marketplace.

I find I usually click on App URLs from sites like Engadget, that I trust.

[rogerbinns]

On Planet Android there are frequent posts along the lines of "10 best apps for X" (where X is something like exercise, cooking etc) or roundups of new games for week. It is reasonable to assume the posts are written because they are read.

Can you get an install to happen to your device when going to a Windows Marketplace page on a desktop (without tethering your device etc)?

[AshleysBrain]

Microsoft have always had a funny habit of using GUIDs for everything.