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.
Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually a much better way of framing what I was coming here to say.
They're relying on the fact that big success stories are big to continue a narrative that encourages development targeting mobile platforms. It's every bit a bubble, where people see only the positive signs of the market in the news.
Now the reality is starting to set in(and it's not just App Store, Play Store has the same problems), and serious "investors"(developers investing time in money in app development), are pulling out. The next step of a bubble is the "pop" where everyone realizes there's not much of a market left, and flees.
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Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm too busy playing the kim kardashian game
Is that some kind of euphemism?
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Which confirms what I thought about this market all along, that it was foolish developers chasing nickels in place of dollars.
And I'm fine with that, as long as the market remains a competitive Darwinian pool.
The nature of any rapidly expanding ecosystem is that there will be a multiplicity of variously capable denizens that'll be culled to the fittest survivors, particularly as resources become scarcer. Apple's app store is transitioning from that explosive expansion phase and is now hitting the resource ($) limits as iOS loses ground against their competitors. Other app stores will follow suit as they also reach saturation po
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That money's been spent a long time ago. A lot of it on development of more apps that have not been profitable.
Assuming your figure of "$13billion" is correct, of course.
Anyway, this article is about the marketplace, not about the relative handful who have scored big on an app, then hired a staff, invested in their businesses, took venture capital and private equity and now are well and truly fucked.
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Let me see if I can follow the bouncing ball on this one.
1. Some guy writes an app that he had an idea for in his spare time, and it sells well.
2. He then quits his day job and hires a bunch of people, taking on VC and private funding based on a business plan of "I had one good idea, so clearly I'm going to have unlimited good ideas, and there will never be any competition in any idea that I have"
3. When his business plan proves to not be accurate or sustainable, he ends up in financial difficulty.
And th
Developers, developers, developers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, hate that $13 billion *developers* have made so far.
That's rather like judging the profitability of web development by how much money Facebook make. The total market value is vast, but extremely concentrated on the success stories and with massive variability.
This was entirely predictable as soon as Apple allowed user expectations to settle on buying any app, no matter how useful or entertaining, for almost no money. I'm actually a little surprised that it's taken so long for the exodus to really get going, but I guess as long as Apple's own fortunes were improving and thus the market for iOS apps was getting larger, a lot of developers held out hope that they hadn't really picked the wrong strategy.
Now that Apple's own iOS strategy is looking tired -- I can't remember any exciting new product since Jobs stood down, and iOS 7 seems to be competing with Windows Vista and Windows 8 for the "most unimpressed user base in recent computing history" award -- I suspect all but the bravest app developers or those who already won in the gold rush are checking where the exit is. And thus the vicious circle will strengthen, unless Apple can pull some sort of remarkable rabbit out of the hat to re-energise their once fanatically loyal customer base pretty soon.
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The entirely new MacPro? The Macbook retina. The iPhone 5S including a shift to an entirely new CPU architecture? An new iOS operating system. An entire web / mobile based office suite.
"entirely new CPU architecture" ? (Score:2)
"entirely new CPU architecture" ? The A7 uses a 64 bit variant of ARM. If you want a mobile OS that's been ported to completely different CPU architectures then look at Android; It supports ARM, MIPS and x86. They can even run the same apps.
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Re:Developers, developers, developers! (Score:4, Insightful)
The core of the iPhone (2007) was:
a) capacitive touchscreen as the primary or sole means of input
b) animation based interaction
c) high speed web rendering
All 3 existed separately in other phones. The only major innovation was Apple putting them together first and seeing how the package would work. The iPhone was an incremental, evolutionary development from the smartphones of 2006.
If you want a Tim Cook idea that creates new markets the manufacturing process for the iPhone 5. Getting that phone as thin and as light has required manufacturing techniques that have never been used on a mass consumer product. That means entirely new types of factories i.e. entirely new types of machining. Apple's model for that where they produce the machining, let others borrow money for the factory and earn it back creates a new financing model. So there you go.
I said the CPU architecture that's entirely new. The instruction handling on that CPU is unique brand new. The instruction classification system it uses is generally not even seen in desktop CPUs more likely server class. There is no reason that this process might far more complex chips to be designed and kept cool.
What? iPhone has by far the best vertical applications so far of any phone no one else is close and with the pairing with Softlayer's component mobile system this is getting more advanced.
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Apple hasn't done any innovation if you ignore all the innovations they have done. The graphics model that made the animations possible on the iPhone came out in OSX 10.2 (October 3, 2003). There were not magic products during the Jobs era either. It was a slow process of building a foundation and then expanding from there. It takes years. Most certainly looking back from say 2024 things Apple is doing now will have had that kind of impact. But they haven't had the impact in 10 minutes.
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Apple claims developers have made $15B since 2008. That's 6 years. If you divided it out equally, that $2.5B per year. In contrast, Adobe alone takes in $4B a year in revenues. Even if you assume that the market has grown substantially and 2013 developer payouts were half, that's still $7.5 billion.
The iOS marketplace is still a lot smaller than the general software marketplace in terms of revenue thanks to the ridiculously low prices Apple has pushed on app developers.
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And Adobe gets there by maintaining an effective monopoly over the entire creative industry. See: their forced migration to their subscription versions of Creative Suite for all volume license customers in June.
Do you really think that enterprise businesses want "cloud" subscription versions ticking away at operational expense, rather than the perpetual license versions they used to be able to spend capital expense dollars on?
Adobe finally realized that they have the balls of the world's media and adverti
Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and for reference, Microsoft's revenue for the last quarter was about $20b. Which makes $13b spread between 1.2m apps seem very, very small. (I'm assuming that your $13b number is just for developers selling through the Apple App Store. If it also includes Android then it's an even more laughable number).
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There has never been much of a market to begin with.
Given that you can today get quite decent indie games for your computer for 5-10 bucks, flashgames-gone-iPad can't sell for more than pennies. There was a bit of money in timewaster games, games you can pick up and put down at the spur of the moment as you have to kill a little time, waiting in line, waiting for the bus or waiting for your girlfriend to stop talking.
The problem is that these games are rather easy to make and that only the first handful of
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Or, more correctly - you can't just develop an app. You must market your app too.
Too many of the big guys got there because they got in early. Then everyone assumes "if you build it, they will come", but no, you have to advertise it, market it, or like obscure FOSS projects, no one knows about it.
It's just like everything else - doesn't matter if it's Apple's App Store, Google Play, Steam, Xbox Live Market, Playstation Network, etc. Just putting it on there isn't enough - you have to get word out there.
Perh
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The next step of a bubble is the "pop" where everyone realizes there's not much of a market left, and flees.
Well, only the get rich quick hunters will flee. The ones that stay will be the ones that realise that providing something "boring" but essential are the ones that will make it big and stay on top, just so long as they aren't sleeping at the wheel and let someone else do it better.
That, and those who are dedicated to making good games / timewaster applications that people will actually want to play... not just the floods of "me too" copy apps.
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Your theory would be plausible except that investors are pouring in not out as they are getting terrific returns on investment.
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It's just reheating the American Dream: Anyone could win. Just not everyone.
So ... yes, it's a lottery. But then again, so is the Dream.
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I thought the American Dream was a house with a lawn, a wife, 2.5 kids, and a dog. When did it become hitting the lottery?
Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score:4, Informative)
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I thought the American Dream was a house with a lawn, a wife, 2.5 kids, and a dog. When did it become hitting the lottery?
When the middle class went extinct.
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When people learned that working won't get them a house that you want to live in and that one income just ain't enough to get by on, let alone when you have kids and a dog.
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Before music recordings, if you wanted to hear music, somebody had to play it. A more popular musician could make somewhat more than an average musician - maybe substantially more - but the top handful couldn't entertain the entire planet singlehandedly. Now they can. The economy of agrarian farmers - where a 20% more productive farmer makes 20% more money - is over. Now it's winner-takes-all.
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It's not a marketplace, it's a lottery for developers.
Quite true and one where you have to make something that likely already exists.
Besides games, I haven't downloaded a new app in a long time. Most of the ones I have and use are mature and do their function well. There was a wild time when many functions and app types weren't yet developed but now? Not everything has been invented, but most categories are fairly mature and there is less and less room for groundbreaking apps for the overall market (still plenty for niche markets).
Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or at least for our clients. I cottoned on *very* early that the SAFE money isn't in the app store, but in writing apps for others. Usually poor schmucks who believe their "Floppy duck clone will corner the market if only they had a coder". At first I was pretty OK with this, after all no one else in my hometown was doing it, and I could easily clock $4K a week ($12K for 3 weeks development with contracts back to back) and dude these where pretty good apps. But after a while it sort of started to feel like I was taking people for a ride by not explaining the market to these people. In the end I decided to stop doing social networking apps simply because they almost NEVER succeed , and I started insisting that they needed to start on a marketing plan with a professional *before* the contract starts (Since marketing considerations DO in fact drive it). This was all to protect my clients and ultimately my own reputation (Sometimes when an app fails in the market the client will blame the coder and thats BAD for reputation, even if its just total unfair nonsense).
And in the end I was lucky to get $500 a week because the work dried up as people moved to less ethical mass-production offshore developers who wouldnt say unpleasant things like "You need to spend some money on a marketing plan first" or "I dont feel comfortable spending your life savings on yet another facebook clone"
Yeah, I work for the government now. Somehow this feels more ethical.
Obvious solution. (Score:5, Funny)
Become the sole developer for Blackberry app!
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It is actually a bit late with Blackberry. It is has plenty of apps, but the "new" platforms (BB10 and WP8) were actually a good business when they come out and you couldget first mover advantage, by the time the platforms were big enough to make profits the the first moverswere on top of the top10 lists. Not sure though if I would bet on a 5th or 6th platform at this point though. The lottery odds might still be better on BB10 and WP8 than on Android and iOS, though the jackpot is also significantly smalle
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i told you, not all of them have touchscreens!
uh, get rid of the "top X" ranking? (Score:5, Insightful)
that thing gets in my way as a user all the time anyway. I do NOT want to see the stacks of pre-teen games, I am looking for a specific app almost all the time. just blow the sucker away, and if somebody wants to see downloads by counts, sell them an app to pull in the data.
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Recent purchases/downloads (Score:5, Interesting)
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A list of recently purchased/downloaded or even new additions would cycle a larger group of useful apps to the app store audience.
New apps should be featured, not most popular or most sold. Right now there are an extremely limited number of ways to filter apps when you browse and this more than anything is hurting the smaller, startup app developers. I know, I've been one!
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How about a date range option. Something like Monthly, Yearly, All Time.
It'd be great if there was an option to see best apps from year to year.
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This is already a solved problem:
www.crooklynclan.net
The first thing you see on the page is the most recent entries, no matter what they are. Genre pages are available, with each genre getting their own page of recent entries. Completely separate to that are 'charts', which show the top tracks from this month, past six months, and 'all time', with both site-wide and per-genre charts available.
The site's search feature needs work, but that's a different problem altogether. The point is that there is room for
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Then just some basic association or personalization lists -- people who rated this app high also rated these other apps, bought this/bought that, etc. -- would be huge.
they have this.
Too many apps, too much appcrap (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be far fewer "apps". Any "app" that just displays content should be a web site. Once you get rid of the appcrap, there probably is no need for more apps than there were boxed software products.
Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap (Score:5, Insightful)
Most apps perform way, way faster all the while using significantly less data than do web sites. This may be more a ding against most web sites, but is valid none the less. I use a number of apps that can fetch their data and display it before a mobile browser has even pulled down the main content, let alone the 20 JavaScript libraries, 12 crap affiliate site icons/links and the countless images that add nothing.
However, some apps are worse than their mobile web site versions, e.g. most news sites.
My own company's mobile app, which I developed, can typically refresh a page in under 25 ms via 3G. Plus, customers prefer the apps to the mobile web sites.
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?
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Well, I've done both of those, and the webpage option is far, far easier.
But people always want you to build an app, because apps are cool and websites are old hat.
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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:Too many apps, too much appcrap (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Mobile developer here who has done hybrid apps, Android apps, iOS apps, web apps, etc.
It's hard.
Web apps do not get the native scrolling mechanism, so scrolling feels very funky in web apps. Web app developers write their own inertial scrolling mechanisms to try to deal with it, but web apps always feel wrong as a result.
You also don't get access to a lot of native functions. No barcode scanning. No access to the user's preloaded Facebook account (with authorization, of course.)
There is another problem in that, especially on Android, web technologies are just badly supported. It's getting better in more recent versions of Android where Chrome is actually the engine used end to end by everyone, but earlier versions still on Google's old ass version of WebKit blew chunks.
Loading can be a problem as well. Real apps by definition cache a certain amount of code and resources on the device. A web page has to fetch all resources from start to finish. So while a real app has it's loading UI cached on device, and can display it right away when the user taps a link, a web page has to go fetch a UI over the network to display a loading UI for the operation the web app is about to do over the network. Gross.
The other really messy thing is a real app is pretty easily able to figure out what kind of device it's on and render content accordingly. Web apps can kind of guess what type of display/device they are running on, but again, it can be messy. Especially with new things coming like Adaptive UI/multi windowing coming on iOS where your window or screen size may have no real connection to what kind of device you're running on. Web pages at this point basically assuming they're always rendering full screen on mobile, and do their layout computations based on that, but that looks like it will change on future iOS and Android devices.
You also have a problem with native widgets. If I code a real iOS app, if I run it on iOS 6, it looks like iOS 6. If I run it on iOS 7, it looks like iOS 7. I don't have to create new assets, the app automatically ingests the correct look from the widget set built into the OS. With a web page, I get the "joy" of building my widget set from scratch, and trying to make it at least resemble the system UI widgets the user has been trained to use. And better yet, if I make my web app look like an iOS app, I suddenly have a bunch of Android users unhappy my web app looks like an Android app.
Finally, web apps don't offer any way to be embedded as extensions on iOS, or activities on Android. You can kind of fake it with some really really ugly URL handling handshaking, but this is really problem prone.
TL; DR: Mobile web frameworks/browsers are still immature, and don't offer basically mobile specific functionality that's needed to do apps well. It's not a problem of it being hard to do a web app just as good as a native app, it's a problem of it being impossible because the feature sets just aren't there.
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All I see is a natural settling of the app bubble. This is a good thing. It just means the market is maturing. The alternative is a hard crash, like when the dot-com bubble popped, and no one wants that.
The author all but admits that app development was seen as a get-rich-quick scheme, and acknowledges the market is maturing, but falters when it comes time to face reality. Removing "top sales" lists or curtailing frivolous app development would be a bandaid. It would inconvenience users in a ham-handed
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The problem is when you have no access to data, then your website solution's useless to me.
For example, the Ultra Street Fighter 4 Framedata app for tablets would be useless to me if I had to have data to access it. the data's rarely going to get updated, and the structure of the data doesn't fit nicely into ebook format either.
This also isn't the biggest problem either. The biggest problem is the amount of apps. For example, there's a ton of twitter apps in the store, which one do you use? Also what reason
Welcome to application development (Score:5, Insightful)
People expecting their marketing for free (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The App Store serves one purpose - not to promote your apps, but to make money for Apple.
If you want to go into business selling an app for iOS then you need to have some plan in place to market it. That doesn't mean sticking it on the App Store and hoping for the best.
If you can't afford to market your app (either by paying for advertising somewhere or just physically spending your own time promoting it) then you really shouldn't waste money or time to develop it either.
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I think most developers would be happy if the App Store just had competent search and good personalization/recommendations, like other sites have had for over a decade. As it is, the store is the equivalent of putting something at the end of the aisle for couple of weeks and then immediately putting it in a back room where people have to ask for it by name and an employee brings out a box of crap you have to sift through that might not even contain what you asked for. I would guess that one factor in the fa
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Oh yeah, what the world needs is more advertising. If that takes off, I'll create an adblocker for the appstore and get rich, for there will be ONE app that EVERYBODY wants!
Re:People expecting their marketing for free (Score:4, Informative)
Advertising is marketing. But not all marketing is advertising.
For example, how did you learn about adblock?
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By typing "how the fuck can I get rid of the damn ads" into google.
In other words, I went looking for it. Nobody ever bothered to shove their crap in my face to convince me it's a good idea. They had plenty of others who did that convinced me without even trying.
If there's a market for a product, there's no need to slap someone in his face with it.
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.
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Huh? There are tons of apps with a free version and a paid version and/or paid upgrade. That's a demo / trial.
Apple doesn't control marketing they control the point of sale. I get marketed all the time where various sites I'm on tell me if they an associated mobile application that does XYZ.
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Huh? There are tons of apps with a free version and a paid version and/or paid upgrade. That's a demo / trial.
Not exactly. Apple doesn't allow actual demos, they're pretty explicit about this. "Lite" apps are the workaround and they tend to offer reduced functionality but are free- this can serve as a demo if it's easy to divide your app into "the intro stuff" and "the longer term stuff", for example by giving away the first few levels of a game- but cannot serve as a demo if your app doesn't have this distinction.
For example, I'm pretty sure that Apple will not permit a 30-day free trial, nor do they permit you to
The iTMS App store is a strange beast (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine you have a store the size of you typical WalMart Supercenter, packed with aisle upon aisle of app boxes. There are 5-6 generalized sections, and absolutely no organization within the sections - apps just set in rows on the shelf. Except it's not even that convenient, because when you walk into the store you are in a small space with what are effectively endcaps for each section. To get through to the rest of the store, you have to go around the side of this front display area through a small, unmarked door. So you usually just pick what's on the endcap and checkout because even for people who have wandered into the main body of the store, they find it's just stocked with thousands upon thousands of seemingly identical products for a single task - most of which mirror an app that's on the end cap with a 4+ star review from a million users.
It's dysfunctional, but in a very Apple way.
Curation: Apple does high profile reviews... (Score:3)
One possible imperfect solution:
For $x ($200? $500? $1,000?), Apple will do a real review of the application and attach the results to the app store listing. Then allow sorting by rating.
This is imperfect, in that it's still one person's opinion and subjective as any review is, but:
- It allows good applications to have an possible (no guarantees) avenue to stand-out apart from sales.
- By charging enough to cover the cost, it allows Apple to hire enough people to do timely reviews.
- Keeps out the chaff (who's willing to pay $500 for a guaranteed 'F' rating)
Nothing will guarantee successful curation. The question is what methods might *improve* discovery. Remember that any method that can be done by anyone, will be done by everyone, making it useless.
Re:Curation: Apple does high profile reviews... (Score:4, Insightful)
Adding more category tags and features filtering to the search engine would let you find precisely what you are looking for.
But despite the absence of a very good search engine, even my two dinky Apps have managed to gather thousands of download.
What's really missing IMO is an in-app rating SDK. Users just cant be bothered to rate Apps because it takes them out of their task and into a different app where they must navigate the comments & ratings links in your App listing on the App Store.
Something akin to Netflix. Right in the app where you can star it and add a comment.
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Indeed, I am not certain why Apple hasn't done this. Can they not ensure the external call to rate the app isn't hacked to always give 5 stars?
I'd love to hear the technical justification (and I'm sure there is one, but I'm curious).
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You know, the iOS8 extensions API lets you securely launch code from inside another app; perhaps they could include an App Store extension that does this?
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There already were several "app discovery" apps; things like AppShopper and Toucharcade that let you see news and reviews, friends' preferred apps, and so on. However Apple got kind of ban-happy with them a while back for replicating App Store functionality and the ones that are still around are on thin ice. They should be cultivating that category instead. The whole point of Apps is to fill functionality niches that the host company overlooks.
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First, if Apple puts a measure to sort by review score, then absolutely it will be taken seriously. Most people would not be informed enough to even care where the review came from - it's simply a metric.
For the informed, I would expect it to have as much credence as magazine reviews, which get taken fairly seriously by most.
Remember, *nothing* is going to work perfectly. What I want to see is ideas that allow more (not all, more) decent apps without $100K budget to get some more discoverability.
The Entire Web Dev "Ecosystem" is Broken (Score:3)
Not Broken (Score:2)
It doesn't mean the whole Web Dev "Ecosystem" is broken. It's working fine. People just have unreasonable expectations of it.
It has changed, and may no longer support the way you want to engage it... if you don't adapt, it's you that's broken.
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I don't really fear that you'll be going extinct anytime soon. Web designers were in that bind before. "Nephew art" anyone? Where webdesigners got fired 'cause "my nephew can do it, he's good with computers".
Development doesn't stop, especially not in a technical field so closely tied with marketing and PR as web design. What "anyone" can do will flood the market, to the point where webpages that offer it will be met with "been there, done that" yawns. What people want is something new. New ways of presenti
Top lists aren't the problem (Score:2)
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Prices have been going up. I'm seeing applications all the time with prices around $65 / user / mo for licensing. You didn't see that 3 years ago. Now if you mean generic mass popular crap for which there are hundreds of alternatives there the price may very well be going to 0.
The fundamental problem for app developers is they are still going after mass market rather than verticals or niches.
A random freebie with comparison program (Score:2)
If you agree to rate and compare both of them, then at the end of one week, you can if you desire, trade in app A for app B for free if A costs more than B (or the price differential if B costs more than A.)
When buying apps, these ratings would be shown next to the regular ones, and be sortable.
The app creators (and the app store) would have to agree to this program, giving up their produ
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: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:Decaying ratings (Score:4, Insightful)
MOAR STATS!!! (Score:2)
No, seriously.
I would like to sort by app age (time elapsed since it was first published) then average # of updates/month. Then take that output and breakdown by category. Or breakdown by free, freemium, shareware, paid, paid for by ads, etc.
As an Android user, I loathe using Google Play to look for software. I have 5 games on my phone, all casual, the sort of things that you play while waiting for the bus or on the loo, and still I get shitty recommendations like Batman Arkham Origins (I hate Batman), Holl
Re:MORE STATS!!! (Score:2)
Yes, this is idea. The google play store is completely useless for finding top notch apps. As with the PC market, there's usually 2-3 applications that have all the features and aren't buggy and don't have a terrible user interface, and then 1-2 open source options that are very similar, and then 10,000 one-off single feature applets which are mostly useless and ancient.
I don't even use the google play store search function. I just google for lists of top versions of the type of app I need (with thi
Develop Business Apps (Score:2)
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You mean you can make more money developing software to do things that people need than churning out the same old crap games and hoping to make money from advertising or in-app purchases?
I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you!
Most online stores are "broken" (Score:2)
I'm consistently amazed how everyone continues to make bad online stores when there are good examples to follow.
Ebay and Newegg are fairly good examples. They have extensive hierarchies of categorization, a healthy supply of
sensible filters, and, most importantly, they work in a sensible manner.
Case in point: you navigate down various categories, set up some filters, click on a product, then hit the "back"
button, and, lo and behold, you're taken back to where you expected to be. With some stores, once you
Just one data point here... (Score:2)
... but I stopped looking for new apps (well, i was getting mostly games) for iOS because there's simply too much free to play shit.
This whole principle is the flaw (Score:2)
in the glory over capitalism.
Search and categorization are hopelessly broken (Score:2)
I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for games and occasionally other categories and gotten fed up and not bought anything. The categories are mostly unhelpful, the search is completely useless, there's no good filtering, it's awful.
That being said, I still have dozens of apps, some with obscure features that I don't know how I found them, so it's not impossible to find apps, it's just hard to fine tune a search.
One filter I would like to see is "Has In-App Purchases" being something I can fi
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This, Just 'categories'?? really? How about a level or two of additional sub-categories, so when people are looking for say a graphics program they could go to productivity->graphics->cad..
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Categories is plural. I'd like multiple categories, possibly including some kind of tagging so you could find things that overlapped.
It's not just one-level of category hierarchies.
Come my fellow picketers. (Score:2)
We are the 99.98%!
This isn't Apple's fault or their problem (Score:2)
Apple's job is to sell devices, and to a lesser extent, sell some apps to skim off the top. Apple doesn't owe developers a living.
A torrent of Shovelware seems to be a phase each new platform goes through (I remember when CD-ROMs became popular, you could literally buy Shovelware from K-Mart that was sold by the foot), and this phase eventually pass here too. Those that suck at it will figure out that app development isn't an easy goldmine, and they'll be less me-too-ware.
And I'll echo what somebody else
They should present a different ranking list.... (Score:2)
... on every device. Swap in lower ranked stuff, so the top 100 covers the top 100k.
Race to the bottom (Score:2)
The big issue is that there is a "race to the bottom" in apps. There's always someone with deep pockets who can create an app that does what yours does, a little worse, and a little cheaper or for free, and because you've got a market with low discoverability, it's the cheapest app that wins. You only have to look at the startling decline in iPhone gaming over the past few years; after a lot of promising experiments in new titles around 2010-2012, games over $1 now almost exclusively ports of successful tit
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Don't see what the hell #4 is supposed to do, to be honest.
But the rest is easier solved with "don't allow in-app purchases".
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5) in-app purchase total spend limit. Sure if someone wants to spend $1,000 playing candy crush, who are we to stop them? They're probably mentally ill though, so perhaps we should?
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You just conclusively explained Windows and WoW.
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Part of the problem for developers is that Apple has banned some of the most profitable types of app, i.e. anything that competes with the functionality of Apple apps. For example alternative web browsers that are more than just a skin like Firefox. I'm amazed they bowed to pressure and allowed 3rd party keyboards, which are always top sellers on other platforms.
The other part of the problem is that Apple does little to prevent developers being screwed, and to be fair most app stores are guilty of this. If
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that Apple has banned some of the most profitable types of app, [...] For example alternative web browsers
Uh... because web browsers are certainly the most profitable software outside the app store. It's a real shame that all those multi-billion dollar browser makers cannot port their cash cows to iOS. Why does Apple not realize that thousands of jobs depend on the sales of web browsers?
The App Store only rewards Zynga for this behaviour.
The App Store doesn't give a fuck. Users reward Zynga by flocking to their copycat games while at the same time complaining that all games have become the same and there's no innovation anymore.
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Uh... because web browsers are certainly the most profitable software outside the app store.
Yes they are. They regularly appear in the top selling apps on Android.
The App Store doesn't give a fuck.
Exactly. The best search engines tend to rank pages by reputation, so if software is just a copy of something else and lots of people point that out it usually becomes apparent to anyone searching. The Play store uses a similar system where apps that are recommended on web sites often get promoted in the store, where as the App Store isn't quite that sophisticated. The result is that people like Zynga can steal other people's ideas and S
Re:economy bullshit argument (Score:4, Informative)
Nice rant, but like all hyperboles, it left reality far behind in the second sentence.
I've used DOS originally, then some Windows and hated it pretty much from the start, so I switched to Linux as soon as I heard about it, I think it was 1997 or so. Do you know why I've been a Mac users for about 10 years now? Because it simply works. I don't have to spend half of my time on just maintaining the system and searching for obscure failure cases. I love my iMac and my iPhone because they allow me to focus almost all of my time on actually doing the work that I want to do.
To most people in this world, computers are a tool. Just like cars. Most people who own a car use it to get from A to B. Some people own cars so they can tinker with them on the weekend and replace parts just because they can - but they are a tiny minority.
I love that I could get a system running from scratch, compile my own kernel and base tools and so on. I've done it and it was a great experience. At the same time, I'm very happy that I don't actually have to do it. I'm tired of tinkering with the machine, I have actual work I want to get done. I have places A and B that I want to get to.
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"candy crush clone"
http://m.tickld.com/x/i-cant-b... [tickld.com]
http://www.gamespot.com/articl... [gamespot.com]
The problem is separating the clones from the originals.
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Sometimes cloning is the only hope I (and other users) have of getting a critical but niche feature implemented if the original developer isn't interested in implementing it because it's too much effort, or clutters up their app.
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So, suppose there is an app in the store. I generally need this app, but it misses a feature, I need. Or I am not too happy with the overall user experience and improve parts of it so it better fits my needs. I add a feature, even if a small one, I adjust the user interface the way I like it. For me this app is definitely better than the original, perhaps for others, too. Does this count as copying? Who has to decide this? How different has an app to be to count as work of its own. Or are we all cursed with
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I'm not sure why removing the Curated lists would help. If a developer is on neither the charts nor the curated lists, what good is it going to do them?