Android market for rooted and banned apps coming up.

Koushik Dutta has been known best by his alias, Koush in the Android development and modding scene, since a long time now. He’s been very much at the heart of Android ROM modding and especially for his ClockworkMod ROM Manager that’s used in installing custom ROMs on Android devices. Koushik has bigger plans now. In a Google+ post by him, he talks about plans of launching a separate app store designed for rooted apps. While Google’s Android app store exists, apps designed specifically for rooted and modded phones don’t exist. Google does some housekeeping and some of these apps present on the app store are removed from time to time. These apps are then hosted on forums and other sites for people to download. There’s no simple well organized app on Android that lets you access these apps.

In his blog post, Koushik states that CyanogenMod is close to crossing the 1 million active installs. There’s clearly a need for a single market that lets users access these apps without the danger of them being removed. Of course, Koushik was clear to mention that illegal content would not be allowed. For example, game console emulators were acceptable, but pirated ROMs weren’t. There are also a bunch of other things mentioned in his post. He approached Amazon about them bundling their newly launched app store into CyanogenMod, but they seemed to reluctant about it.

Koushik also said that other mods could use this third-party app store. He also hopes that any revenues earned would go into the development of CyanogenMod in the future. Koushik has been in touch with Steve Konik, who’s now an employee of Samsung. He was the original founder and developer for CyanogenMod. The plan is try and have an Android app store built into the heart of Cyanogen.

Koushik also has two other apps on his site - one Tether, which lets Android devices share Internet access with a notebook or PC over USB. The other app, DeskSMS allows users to send SMS’ through their phone, but over Gmail, Google Talk or any browser.