Wih the newly proposed Carrier Billing initiative, Google seems to be intending to offload Android Market apps billing to the wireless providers.

What impact will this have on the users, the Android developers and the wireless providers themselves? The users will stand to profit from this arrangement as this will allow users in countries without access to paid apps in the Android Market at the moment to install their apps via Android market instead of via other sources. There are many ways to gain access to amazing apps such as via Mobihand.com but nothing beats having the convenience of accessing an online store via an application program and installing the applications programme directly to your Android.

Android developers will welcome the change . Although the current Android Market payment system, involving a Google Checkout account, is similar to the Apple App Store system, Google Checkout has not been embraced by Android users the way iTunes has been adopted by iPhone users. The resistance to the acceptance of Google Checkout seems to be that most users find it quite slow to go through a couple of steps before being able to complete the transaction and download the app. It also makes impulse buying that much difficult! This has definitely contributed to less than terrific app sales for the Android Market and thus lesser involvement in Android Apps developments.

With carrier billing, not only can users buy application programs with just a click, but they will only be able to see a record of that purchase until they get their bills at the end of the month. Well, this might produce some unhappiness at the end of the month for the users but to the developers, this is just so much better for their business.

The wireless providers themselves will also profit by getting to play middleman and perhaps getting a portion of the app revenue pie. If wireless carriers can share the revenue from app sales, which they are not able to at the moment with Apple, it gives the wireless carriers very powerful incentives to advertize Android smartphones much more aggressively and help drive sales of Android Market apps. Now, all these are done without Google having to put its own money in marketing the Android Market, with the added benefits of outsourcing of Android Market billing.

There are many possible downsides to this initiativethough.

Impulse buying :
Without the added step of logging in or confirming payment options, users might purchase apps unknowingly , or without being consciously aware of the costs .

No more freebies?
One of the reasons that the Android Market has expanded to this point is because of its free applications. We discovered a couple of weeks ago that the Android Market had 70,000 apps, and we know that 57 percent of them are free. With carrier billing coming into the picture, will we be seeing an influx of paid applications and lesser freebies? .

Security Concerns :
It is also possible that unscrupulous developers, phishing, or malware attacks could lead to undesired apps being charged to the account without the user’s authorization .

Still , Android users stand to gain from a stronger developer community and a more exciting market place, filled with high quality applications of both the free and premium versions. Users will just need to be careful of what they click and the costs, and pay extra attention to errant charges when the bill comes.

By the end of Aug 2010, we should begin to see this coming into play