[Android Apps and Games] snoopy33:
Thank you Pat123 for the notification.

I had a look to the website, and following is my thoughts regarding the future of OSkin.

First I want to say that I have no more information than anyone, so I base my reflexion on the information provided by the website.

First thing I have noticed is the job link. Yeah, that's the first thing I notice!!!!

Rapid look at it, I realized they will pay people to make theme and to dev the application, they present themselves as a company, they have a place where to work and so on.

For all these things they will need money.

Then I clicked on Terms and Conditions. They are very classical, limitation of responsibility and so on.

In the text, you can read what happens when you buy stuff on their platform, when you can ask for a refund and so on.

So there is no doubt they will sell stuff.

What stuff, tow possibilities, a paid app or some paid themes.

They say App and you will be able to install free theme. So there will be paid themes too.

For legal reasons, these themes will be probably made by the people they want to hire in the job link.

Great.

OSkin only cost is my time. Storage, sharing is done by leveraging existing platform (GDrive and GPlus).

What it means, is that we are comparing a free application with only free themes from the community to an established company application with paid themes (-> probably the most interesting one will be the paid one).

Moreover, this part of the text has been removed from the website, but when Pat123 posted the link there was a small text saying that they are adding themes to the server as fast as they can. You will also notice that they don't say you can generate themes, but just install them.

If they want to sell themes, it makes sense to not make user able to share easily their creation because first you would create challenger to your own products and it would be too easy for someone to make derivative works from yours.

So I am almost sure that their application is really JUST to install themes, and not to share them yourself.

OSkin is an application to copy and install themes, so it makes sense for themes creator (the one who publishes their theme on MyColorScreen, or Google+) to use my application.

Moreover, I think my solution is more scalable as I don't need employees to create Themes! 1000 people wants to share a theme with OSkin, 5mn after you have 1000 themes on G+, with employees would be a bit slower ;)

And even if you don't look at their business model, I think they have a big flaw in the website, and probably in the coming application.

Go on MyColorScreen, the most viewed theme of he week has been seen 6K times. Good. Click on just page 4. Themes are viewed 200 times. And it drops dramatically like that. And page 16 is the last one.

It means, among 50K themes, only 16*30 themes have been viewed during the last seven days. In English it just means that most of the 50K themes are never viewed as soon as they are few weeks old. So most of the 50K themes have almost no value for a user.

Would people use Pinboard if it was a giant list of pics and pins? Of course not. To share big amount of data, with only a small part relevant to you, social networks are more adapted.

By sharing and working on G+ OSkin let people discover stuff in a more natural way, with sharing possibilities and more to come.

Finally, about compatibility a great force of OSkin is using root, and being virtually compliant with everything.

I have no idea about how Themer will work, but there is not 100 possibilities. It can be a buzz launcher like (-> a home), an application without root support and being compliant with few widgets and using some interface to extract and impart data or a root application like OSkin.

I don't believe to the home option, otherwise they would not have chose Themer as a name. Terms of Use let me think the same way, no mention of something related to a home. And they speak a lot about third party application.

Root market is too small if you want to pay several employees! So my guess is that it will be an application compliant with CWM and Zooper plus one or more home.

So with OSkin you can do more things, because of the (theoric) universal compatibility.

BUT Root is not safe and not every body has rooted his device.

Next step will be to go to non rooted devices with same function than Themer (I mean the function I think it will have). It will require to work with widget makers. I hope there are no exclusivity agreement. I don't think because Buzz is already compliant with Zooper and CWM.

As a conclusion, this news makes me realize how the idea is good, and how OSkin has its place in the Android world, so I think end of the game is very very very very far.

Regards

BTW: first review of OSkin: http://www.addictivetips.com/androi...aving-sharing-your-android-home-screen-setup/ :) I think OSkin is at a very early stage but hey that's nice to see a review!