This is an interesting development, where better search/discovery technology gets acquired and (hopefully) integrated into the main platform. Apple was able to

This is an interesting development, where better search/discovery technology gets acquired and (hopefully) integrated into the main platform. Apple was able to acquire a company with proven technology, because Apple provides plenty of hooks for third party services to allow them to innovate much faster on search/discovery technologies than iTunes itself can. Unfortunately for Android Apple is way ahead of Google here, with the iTunes store having an affiliate model for all paid apps, and ways to get the actual appstore listings programmatically. AppBrain and other services that want to provide Android app discovery services have to go through a painful process of getting information about Android apps, and even then it's nearly impossible to know whether a particular app will be available to a certain phone model X running in country Y. In addition, there is no direct way to monetize the leads that can be generated through good discovery algorithms. It's ironic how the more iTunes store in this sense is more open than the Android market.