With 10 billion app downloads under its belt, the Android Market has passed an important milestone, helping to quantify the fantastic growth Google’s mobile platform has been experiencing over the last couple years. As you check out some of the great ten-cent app deals being offered as part of Google’s celebratory promotion, you might notice a few small changes that have been made to the Market, making user-submitted reviews a more valuable tool than ever before.

Read through your share of app reviews, and you’re bound to see more than a few reports of really bad experiences, where prominent bugs kept a user from being able to enjoy the app at all. That could be a big problem, but how do you know whether or not that review was talking about an older version of the app, possibly with the offending bug corrected in more recent releases? What if that compatibility problem was due to an issue that only impacts certain Android models? Now the web-based Android Market will display alongside reviews both what handset each poster used, as well as what version of the app is being discussed. With all that information now at your fingertips, it should be that much easier to recognize relevant reviews.

Additionally, if you want to share the contents of a review with someone else, there’s now a permalink present for each comment, giving you a URL that goes straight to that post. Sure, these both seem like pretty minor changes, but they don’t have to be impressive technical feats in order to add a lot of usability to the Android Market; hopefully we’ll see more features like these as Google starts sending out its next 10 billion downloads.

Source: Android Guys