Switching from Android to Windows Phone Part 3: apps Marketplace, Xbox Live, and Google services

The idea of switching from Android to Windows Phone may not be one that many people would consider, but it’s an idea that we thought would be good to explore. We’ve already covered our initial impressions of Windows Phone from the perspective of a long time Android user, and the features that may be missing. Then we also covered the stock apps and Bing experience that you’ll come across in a switch to Windows Phone, and now it’s time to get into what many advanced users see as the make or break part of a mobile ecosystem: the 3rd party apps and app store. And, in keeping with the spirit of users possibly switching from Android, we’ll also get into how you can transfer or access certain Google services that you may not want to leave behind. 

As has been the standard caveat when talking about Windows Phone, the platform was a complete reboot for Microsoft, so the OS is really just about a year and a half old, and only on its second major version, despite the fact that it’s called Windows Phone 7.5. So, with that in mind, it’s actually pretty impressive that the Marketplace has already cruised past 90,000 apps (according to certain statistics). 

Of course, compared to iOS and Android, 90k apps isn’t all that impressive, but it’s enough to cover most of the options you’ll be looking for. And, for most users, that’s all that’s necessary. Most people don’t buy technology on potential, they buy on sufficiency. The Windows Phone Marketplace may not have as many apps as the competition, but it’s growing and it has a sufficient supply as is. 

There are a couple interesting things about the Marketplace that we want to touch on before we dive in. First, you’ll notice that apps in the Marketplace tend to be a bit more costly than their analogues on iOS or Android. There’s a chance that this is simply because the Windows Phone ecosystem isn’t as large and developers can’t make up the difference in volume like they can on other platforms, but in general things do seem a bit more pricey. However, every paid app and game comes with a “try” option, which is pretty great. For apps, there will usually be some disabled features in the trial version, but you’re free to use the trial as long as you’d like, and it cuts down on clutter in the Marketplace because you don’t have two versions of each app. 

There is a website for the Marketplace where you can find apps, and push the installation to your device. This is a bit odd at first though because there’s no notification on the device to let you know that the process has worked, which can be annoying. Another annoyance is that links to the Marketplace while browsing in mobile IE don’t launch the Marketplace, but rather just open the Marketplace webpage, which is not optimized for mobile use. 

The Marketplace itself is your one-stop shop for content on Windows Phone. The notable omissions are that there is no video store, nor is there a book store. It does have apps, games (obviously,) as well as music and podcasts. The music section of the Marketplace has a solid selection of tunes at around $8.99 to $12.99, but the inclusion of podcasts in the Marketplace is big, because Google has notoriously not given much time to podcasts. The Google Listen app, which is Google’s official podcast app, has no curated podcast market, no support for video, and notoriously went without an update for over a year. Sure, there are good podcasting apps available for Android, but Google has certainly not been podcast friendly. 

On the other hand, Microsoft has a podcast section in the Marketplace and you can find and subscribe to podcasts quickly and easily. Podcasts will be automatically downloaded to your device as per your settings, but unfortunately this only works on WiFi, not on mobile data, regardless of how big a file it is (NBA Today is 7MB, but even that can’t be downloaded on mobile via the Marketplace!) If your favorite podcasts happen to come out while you’re away from WiFi, you’ll have to rely on a 3rd party app like BringCast to download via mobile, although because of system limitations, this can’t always be done in the background and may have to be your foreground process, forcing you to watch as the download happens. 

As we’ve said, there is a growing number of official apps for popular software in the Marketplace, like Skype, Spotify, Netflix, etc. But, sometimes you’ll have to test out unofficial apps for the apps you want. For example, there’s no official Pocket app, but we’ve found that MetroPaper is a solid alternative. Sometimes there will be an official app, like the NBA GameTime app, but it will be pretty bad, so you’ll need to find a better alternative, like NBA Scores. However, all sections of the Marketplace have various panels like: featured, new, top, and categories, as well as a pretty solid search function, so finding things you need and discovering new content is pretty easy. 

The shining star of the Marketplace is the games section and Xbox Live app. We left this out of our last piece talking about the stock apps because it is so tightly integrated with the Marketplace, it seemed more at home here. 

If you have an Xbox console, you likely have an Xbox Live account, and when you sign in, all of your info, contacts, achievements, and even your avatar come with you to your mobile phone, and your avatar will always be poking its head out on the Live Tile for the Xbox Live app. It’s a very nice touch. Of course, if you don’t have an account, you can create one, but be careful because the gamertag you pick will be permanent. Xbox Live allows one free change of your gamertag, but the only way to change it is via the Xbox console. It’s not possible to change it on your phone or on the website. 

The Xbox Live app is pretty nice. It allows for messaging your contacts, although adding contacts can be difficult because you have to know the gamertags you’re looking for, it can’t just scan your contacts for e-mail addresses. Once you have some contacts, you can also send and receive game requests for multiplayer games. 

The app is also essentially your gaming hub on Windows Phone. The games you download won’t be listed in the app list next to your start screen. Instead, games are all listed in the Xbox Live app, and split into Xbox Live games and other games. And, you’ll notice pretty quickly that there is a pretty big gap between Xbox Live games and other games, both in quality and price. 

There are some good “other” games available in the Marketplace, but the best games are almost always Xbox Live titles, and they do come at a premium. Most of the paid Xbox Live games will run you between $3-$5. There is the “try” option of course, so you can see what you like before buying. Trials usually just give access to a short portion of the game and achievements can’t be earned unless you purchase. While the price may be high, as we said the quality is as well, and there are some impressive names in the Marketplace, like Sid Meier’s Pirates, Splinter Cell Conviction, Let’s Golf 2, and Kinectimals (for those of you with kids, of course.) Of course, not all of the quality games will cost a lot. Favorites like Angry Birds or Burn the Rope are just $1, and our favorite, Max & The Magic Marker is also just $1. 

If you don’t mind investing a bit of cash, the games available for Windows Phone are as good as you’ll find on any mobile platform, and Microsoft is continuing to invest heavily. 

Of course, if you’re coming over from Android, there’s a fair chance that you’ve been living a pretty Googley lifestyle. Your Gmail account won’t be an issue, as WP will pull your contacts, calendar, etc, so there is no reason to need a separate Google Calendar app. The mail app also works well enough for Gmail, although one annoyance is that it only syncs your inbox, so if you have filters set up that skip messages past your inbox, the WP mail app won’t get those. And, messages with extra labels (like bulk or notifications) will be removed from your inbox when deleted, but may still be left unread in those folders in your Gmail. Still, it’s not a big enough issue that you should have to consider changing your e-mail address, which many people dread doing. 

As far as other Google products, it’s a bit hit or miss as you go, because the only official Google app is Search. You can use the mobile websites for various products, but because IE is so terrible, that isn’t always a good option. There are a number of 3rd party options for apps, but the trouble there is that you have to put your trust in the developer to not steal your Google credentials, because all will ask you to put in your login without options for oauth. It may have just been a bad coincidence, but our Google account was compromised for the first time ever while doing this Windows Phone experiment. 

As we said, the only official Google app is Search, and it’s not a great app, but it’s also not terrible. The Bing Search app can be annoying at times because it returns so few results, and results may not be all that relevant to what you want, so the Google Search app is pretty handy to have regardless. 

The mobile YouTube site works pretty well, but the best option there is probably the app SuperTube, which is actually pretty great. You can search for, stream, or download HQ or HD videos. There is a very well designed featured panel for discovering new videos. And, best of all you can sign in to your YouTube account, and get access to your playlists, video history, uploaded videos, subscriptions, and has some pretty cool extras. You can record a video and upload it to YouTube, and there is a pretty sweet feature called “Map Tube”, which will find videos recorded near your location. Overall, it’s probably the best Google product app available for WP, and YouTube is the product you’d want to have. 

If you’re big into Google Docs/Drive though, Windows Phone may be trouble for you. There are a couple Google Docs apps available, but neither allows for editing docs, only viewing. However, as we mentioned last time, the Office suite for Windows Phone is one of the shining stars of the platform, and migrating your files from Google Docs/Drive to Microsoft’s SkyDrive is probably one of the easiest transfers you could make, especially now with the new Google Drive apps for Mac and Windows. 

For Google Reader addicts, there are a number of apps which will get you your feeds, but the best we’ve found is NextGen Reader. It has all of the standard options you’d want like two-way syncing, starring, options to view articles in IE or mobilize it to read in app, and you can save articles to Pocket (formerly Read It Later), Readability, or Instapaper, and share to Twitter or Facebook. There is even a Live Tile and auto-syncing to let you know when new items are available. It will cost you a couple dollars, but it is definitely worth it. 

One big trouble is with Google Talk. There are a number of instant messaging apps that will allow you to use Google Talk, like Palringo or IM+, but because of the limitations on background processes you may find it difficult to have the clients stay logged in when in the background, so you won’t have that constant connection. As we mentioned before, Facebook chat and Windows Live chat are integrated into the Messaging app, so it may be best to just switch services, because Google Talk can be a bit annoying. 

There is absolutely no way to access Google Music on Windows Phone. No apps and the website is far too advanced for IE’s HTML5 deficiencies. So, if you’re deep into Google Music, you’ll be in the terrible position of having to either download your entire collection (which can be done without limit, but may not be feasible), downloading on the albums you want (which has a 2 download limit via Google Music), re-purchase your music (a terrible option), or giving up your collection and just using Spotify (not a bad way to go.) 

There is no Google+ app, but the website works well enough. There is also no option for Google Books, but the Amazon Kindle app is pretty nice. The Google Books website is at least functional in IE, but by no means ideal. 

If Bing Maps doesn’t do it for you, there is actually a pretty solid Google Maps app, simply called gMaps. It includes all of the goodies that Bing doesn’t have like public transit directions, a weather, or public transport layer, and partial Latitude integration. Partial in that you can update your location, and check friends’ locations, but you can’t check in at places. And, really, Latitude and public transport directions are really the only reasons to use gMaps over Bing Maps, because as good as gMaps is, there is a lot missing. Places have to be searched, and you can’t just tap a place you see, and there’s no Street View. 

Lastly, and maybe the biggest is Google Voice. Google Voice is a great service, and one of the killer apps for Android. You certainly won’t get the same integration on Windows Phone, and using your Google Voice number as your primary for making calls is possible, but not ideal. The best app we’ve found is GoVoice, which will allow you to make calls, and send and receive texts. Making calls is easy enough, although there’s no call history, so it can become cumbersome to have to go into your contacts constantly to make calls. The best option may be to only use your Voice number for international calls. Unfortunately, setting up push notifications for texts is also pretty annoying, so it may be best to set up SMS forwarding in Google Voice. This way, your SMS messages will be sent to your phone in the stock Messaging app, and you can reply right from there and it will be routed through Google Voice. 

Overall, there are plenty of apps in in the Windows Phone Marketplace to keep you going, and the games can be exceptional, especially considering the hardware limitations of Windows Phone devices. Most of the major apps that you might want exist or have an unofficial options that will get you what you need. And, of course, the Marketplace is growing quickly. 

Remaining a Google user when switching to Windows Phone is certainly possible, and if the platform continues to grow, it’s likely that we’ll see more and more Google products make it to the Marketplace, but right now it can be a struggle. Gmail and calendar are easy enough to integrate; YouTube, Maps, and Reader have quality alternatives, but other products like Voice, Talk, Music or Docs don’t have great alternatives, and may be best to leave behind in favor of other services.