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Is the App Store Broken?
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?
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.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
I feel like this is basically the same story as Desktop application development. A few started, as time went on and it was profitable many people entered the market, and eventually the main market is controlled by a few key players. There will be a handful of smaller companies making modest profits on really useful tools, but a lot of it will go unnoticed by the masses. People download what they need. Period. If your app doesn't apply to the masses, then the masses aren't going to buy it. But if it is useful enough and polished enough, there is a good chance it will flourish (though like anything viral - some ridiculous things will get through).
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.
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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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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What you are missing is that ratings are assigned relative to the competition that existed when the rating was assigned. Go over to gamespot and check out the graphics of a game that got the top rating for graphics 8 years ago. Are those graphics still 10/10? Not even close. Go over to Amazon.com and search SD Cards by "Average Customer Review." Many of the top-ranked cards are little 8 and 16 GB cards that were rated up years ago.
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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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 SEO their way to the top, where as it is much harder to do on Play.
Essentially Play has a better spam filter.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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