[VLM]

I'm curious what if anything can be done given the ToS.

I have an android phone so I'm sitting here looking at my apps, at least the ones that I occasionally use, and thinking about glass.

I really want a geocaching app but the premium account at geocaching.com costs money so thats out. An ancestry.com account would be handy when I'm looking at paper records but that cost money so thats out. All the "personal assistant" apps would seem to be a natural fit, but again they all want money. Most game devs are not going to work for free. I cant use an evernote client because that costs money.

Dogcatcher would be awesome but the dev is probably not going to work for free.

Radarscope has the same issue as above, high res nexrad radar is cool but the dev isn't going to work for free.

Same problem with proweather alert.

Amazon.com mobile client, well I guess we can forget mobile shopping in general.

Unclear:

Amazon kindle is a pretty tough decision because there are free ebooks from amazon and its not a bad reader in general.

Runkeeper... the app works with the free account, in fact I'm not sure there is any difference between a free and paid account, at least from the app point of view, is there?

Chant got kicked off the play system for idiot neo-puritan censorship reasons but other than that would be OK.

Ambling books player... They do sell audiobooks, but I mostly listen to free libravox books, its far better than the libravox apps. On the other hand the "nice" version of the ambling player which I have cost a little money, not free.

Tunein radio cost money and the only purpose is to listen to stations most of which deliver ads as part of their stream. Some don't.

My credit union has an android app. Technically they won't open an account unless you toss $5 in a savings account, although they claim you own that $5 and will get it back at closure so I don't know if google would shut them down over it. It would be kinda interesting to get notifications everytime I (or someone else) does something with my account, or be able to see my balance if I'm paying at a store. (whoops edited to add the killer problem is the Goog TOS require full access to all features for all free downloaders, but I just realized my credit union only provides service to people in a limited geographic area by charter... so they'd have to give free houses in their area to anyone downloading the free app so they get full access to the system by opening an account, this is a killer problem which moves this and any other app like it to the dead zone)

What I could do:

I think the newsblur client works with a free account so although I have a paid account I think I'm OK.

Same deal as above with the dropbox client.

Baconreader, I guess thats OK. Its free, isn't it?

So for about $1500 I could use a newsblur client, baconreader, and maybe a couple others.

[bengillies]

Indeed. Add to that the lack of camera access (among other things), and it leaves me wondering whether it's even possible to build something worthwhile.

Especially given Google's own statements saying that pictures/video are the (current) main use case (that they've discovered so far).

[jeffasinger]

I haven't read through the API super carefully, but I believe that you won't be able to write your own camera app, but you could certainly interact with the camera, by having the user share to a contact that you create/

[VLM]

So all is not lost, but the only app I could use under the TOS would probably be baconreader.

The unfortunate part about no money in the TOS means no geocaching.com and no ancestry.com apps and those would have been killer apps, well, at least for me.

Some geocaches give credit by uploading a pix of the locale and/or cache and/or contents and the gc.com folks never used to allow mobile/app access even just to coordinates unless you had a paid membership, so probably not even a "GC HUD" while searching.

As for ancestry and genealogy I've participated in quite a few cemetery surveys and assuming decent pix quality it would be awesome to "just stare at a headstone for 15 secs" and its magically snapped, geocoded, OCRed (good luck on 200 yr old stones, but at least a good first try?), and uploaded or something like that. Or if the GPS is good enough find an ancestors grave by gps, perhaps by someone else's geocoded pix upload, or at least get within 10 feet or so.

I've often thought that OCR with a highly limited dictionary downloaded from Ancestry would work better on worn headstones than generic OCR maybe even better than the mk1 eyeball. Maybe embed some HDR type ability and false color for the stones in the worst condition. Automated technology to pattern match stones as you walk by might work better than GPS at locating a specific stone, which is another whole weird area of research, like there is a stored pattern of rough color and size to pattern match against nearby my ancestors stones so it could successfully successively approximate.

Maybe when the apple iCompetitor (the iEye? iEye iEye Cap'n) comes out these ideas will be very profitable to some developer.