We love a bargain application and we should love spending money on quality applications to reward developers, whilst simultaneously picking up a bargain and helping charities. That seems like the natural order of things! And that’s how the Humble Bumble collections work, but for good measure we’ll throw in DRM-free, cross platform applications, too. Humble Bumbles was first established in 2010 and support given to Android in 2012. The buyer sets the price that he or she wants to pay and usually if one pays above the average, there are additional applications or game to pick up. This is a great way to encourage people to pay more for great applications! Whilst many Humble Bumbles have included independent titles, a number have included mainstream games.
Humble Bumble have announced that they are to remove the application from the Google Play Store soon, writing:
“We intend to add an array of features to our app, helping us improve on our plans for Android in the future. However, in order to carry out many of these improvements the app must first be unpublished from Google Play.”
What does this mean, then? First things first and I’ll write about the mechanics of this: Humble Bumble are not going anywhere, nor will the application once the change happens. It will no longer update using the Google Play Store but instead, it’ll direct users to the website in order to download the new APK installed. It will still function is installed but the entry will be removed from the Play Store: it won’t disappear from your device. The Humble Bumble team also remind users that whilst the application is handy, we may always download and install applications from their website, which could read that the application is something of a “nice to have” rather than an essential. However, it does raise the question in my mind as to what the developments will do to the application that would cause it to fall foul of Google’s rules. It is great to see Humble Bumble take preventative action rather than waiting until the application is either removed from the Play Store by Google, or an update is blocked.
But my question remains: what changes are happening within the application? Humble Bumble have said that we don’t need it and if installing it means that we need to “do geek stuff to ma ‘phone an’ ‘at” (in the words of a very dear Scottish pal of mine), perhaps the application will have a smaller following going forward? But let’s not make any such thoughts ruin what a great concept and success the Humble Bumble has been, even if this change may hinder their growth going forwards.