Is the App Store Broken? 258
A recent post by Instapaper's Marco Arment suggests that design flaws in Apple's App Store are harming the app ecosystem, and users are suffering because of it. "The dominance and prominence of 'top lists' stratifies the top 0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that, by definition, won’t happen to 99.98% of them." Arment notes that many good app developers are finding continued development to be unsustainable, while scammy apps are encouraged to flood the market.
"As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces. Many will give up and leave for stable, better-paying jobs. (Many already have.)" Brent Simmons points out the indie developers have largely given up the dream of being able to support themselves through iOS development. Yoni Heisler argues that their plight is simply a consequence of ever-increasing competition within the industry, though he acknowledges that more app curation would be a good thing. What strategies could Apple (and the operators of other mobile application stories) do to keep app quality high?
"As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces. Many will give up and leave for stable, better-paying jobs. (Many already have.)" Brent Simmons points out the indie developers have largely given up the dream of being able to support themselves through iOS development. Yoni Heisler argues that their plight is simply a consequence of ever-increasing competition within the industry, though he acknowledges that more app curation would be a good thing. What strategies could Apple (and the operators of other mobile application stories) do to keep app quality high?
It's not a marketplace.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a marketplace, it's a lottery for developers.
Recent purchases/downloads (Score:5, Interesting)
Decaying ratings (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't allow a once-five-star app to rest on its laurels forever. After six months if you haven't inspired anyone new to rate you, your rating should decay to zero. Not only would this tend to favor new apps over old ones, but it would also effectively punish those developers who "fire and forget" app after app after app with zero support or updates for old apps.
Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap (Score:5, Interesting)
Question for you, as someone who has developed a mobile app:
How much harder is it to optimize a mobile version of the webpage vs writing an app from scratch and getting it approved for App Store release?
Easy for Marco Arment to say... (Score:1, Interesting)
Marco Arment is as close as you get to an "Apple Insider" outside of Apple. He's in a chosen clique of developers whose work always gets featured in curated lists in the App Store.
"Top lists" are not the problem, curated lists into which developers such as him get a backdoor entry by sucking up to Apple regularly are.
Getting rid of top lists is not the answer, getting rid of curated lists is. Doing so would level the playing field for everyone. If the apps that are currently promoted by Apple truly provide value, people would use them, talk about them, and they would climb up the charts. It's not surprising that a lot of curated apps are also in the top lists.
After all, why wouldn't you let users decide what they want? And if swamping people with high quality content is the goal, then why not let users decide the metrics of quality?
Re:Decaying ratings (Score:5, Interesting)
And what exactly is the advantage for an app to be new? Or what is the disadvantage for an app to be old? ... that does not mean new apps are immature by definition.
Last time I checked software did not age.
I rather have an old working app than a new immature one
And why do users demand updates for old apps if the app is just working fine? I hate this update mania.
40 Apps on my iPad and many more on my iPhone demand that I update. I don't ... as long there os nothing broken I keep the old one.
If I easy could fallback to the previous one, then I would try new updates. But more interesting would be too have the old _and_ the new one.
Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap (Score:2, Interesting)
My question for him was a bit more simplistic. I'm a cell infrastructure developer, and most 3G ping times are north of 100ms, so how the hell is he getting a 25ms update?
Re:People expecting their marketing for free (Score:5, Interesting)
Too many people want to get rich by selling apps and expect Apple to pay for the marketing of their apps for free on the App Store.
I don't think this is quite what people are expecting. Rather, the problem is Apple directly prohibits most ways that an app can be promoted. Want to do a demo? No great way to do it in the app store. A trial? Forbidden. Want to offer a download directly from the developer? Nope.
So really what developers are requesting is simple: If Apple wants to directly hand hold the distribution and retail channel of an application, they either need to improve visibility for applications within that retail channel, or give developers more flexibility in how they can market applications. Apple isn't entirely responsible, but because they want developers to be so reliant on their store front, the argument is that Apple needs to actually provide a good store front to make that trade off worth it.
It would be like if you struck a deal with Target where they had full control over how your product was sold and exclusive rights to sell it, and then they stuck it in a dark corner of their store and never sold a single unit.