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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?
It's not a marketplace, it's a lottery for developers.
Become the sole developer for Blackberry app!
Trolling is a art,
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?
A list of recently purchased/downloaded or even new additions would cycle a larger group of useful apps to the app store audience.
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).
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.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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.
With all these frameworks and "platforms", and more and more "drag and drop" app building for Mobile and Browser apps, Web Development is no longer a sustainable means of employment for freelancing. Within the next 5 years, any High Schooler CS student will be able to drag and drop their way to a Cloud Hosted Web and Mobile App with a REST-API. It's to the point that the median wage is less than I can make as a full-time employee -- which means contracting is becoming no longer viable a because clients willing to pay my rate of $110/hr (which I consider very reasonable considering my skillset) are farer and fewer between especially when there's a legion of scrubs out there willing to together something in Angular (today's a very popular MVC that holds your dick for you while taking away all that nasty OOP stuff like inheritance and abstraction) for as low as $35 or $40 an hour. Thank god I have a few in-demand specializations and some arcane knowledge. But it's hard to want to stay Contracting when lately I get job offers (just one today in fact) offering $150k to $200k a year + benes on a regular basis. So while Contract work seems less viable, Full-Time seems to be offering better wages than ever. Probably due to the strong demand for Developers capable of filling Leadership roles. However, I'm not giving up just yet, and working on creating something that doesn't exist yet, a self-generating API platform and hopefully will turn to the new fangled "begging" economy to raise a livable wage (or more) to develop the UI portion in the form of some Services or Apps over on Kickstarter once I have a demo and a fancy video. But if the Begging Economy stuff doesn't work, yes I will likely take a FTE position at a Company sometime in the next year or two.
The problem is that the mobile app market has become saturated and the price users are willing to pay for apps is so low. Getting rid of top lists may remove some perceived unfairness but it won't solve the fundamental problem (from the app developer perspective) of supply and demand.
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 products for free in exchange for this rating system.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Subject says it all:
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.
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), Holly Hobbie and Friends Party (seriously??? what the fuck!) and Fantastic Eleven (I only watch the World Cup and European Cup, and only if I have time).
Under "Recommended for You" I see "in the Mood for Romance" (HUH!), Muscle Meals (the fuck, I don't cook), and so on, and so forth. Golden prize goes to "Hairstyle Guide" e-book. No Scifi, which I love.
recommendations based on installed apps ratings is flaky at best. I gave an app 2 stars (because it's mostly bad and I am looking for another), Google Play says "no recommendations based on your score" but when I give an internet Radio app a score of 5 stars (because it's awesome) it recommends me... more Internet Radio apps. It somehow seems to think that bad ratings mean "I don't need apps with that functionality" and good ratings mean "I'm looking for more of the same type" while it's quite the other way around.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
We were all told we'd be billionaires. Oh well.
RMS had a girlfriend once. He named a kernel after her and she dumped him. So he dated the kernel instead. Then it dumped him.
On Steam there's the Greenlit section.
Only vote for what you want, don't vote for the rest.
However it's abused by developers and bundle makers in that the developers may for instance run a contest where you're supposed to vote it up to be part of it or the bundle makers promising Steam keys if the game is greenlit.
Hence you get votes for shit.
If it was more restrictive and shit wasn't let it that might had been a good thing.
Alternative is to put badges on all the titles where you put gold badges on actually good products played by many, silver on other good/decent products and nothing on the rest or something such.
Matt Asay says there is more certain money when you develop apps for enterprise. "[D]evelopers who target the enterprise are twice as likely to make $5,000 per app per month and 3 times as likely to earn over $25,000 per app per month."
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
click on a product, it loses all the history of how you got there, which is totally nuts. You have to start over from
the top again. (Or, even if there is a sensible back option, it may be painfully slow to get you there again.)
Of course, having a tabbed web browser makes things even easier, since I can drill down, set up filters, then
middle-click on several different products (opening up each in a new tab), and flick between them at will.
I can add products to a "watch" list, so I can look now and decide later if I want to get it.
The only way that I use the App stores on iOS or Android are to already know the app I want (from having
looked at the wider internet), click on "search", and find that specific app. Anything else is just a hopeless
potshot. I think that Apple/Google know that this is the only method that needs to work, and thus they
don't try to improve things.
... 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.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
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".
in the glory over capitalism.
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 filter out. Especially with games. I'll pay $10 for a good game, happily, if it is feature-complete without buying add-ons.
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.
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 this year's year in the search results), then go download/buy that one and hope it stays updated.
I used to wonder why people use brand names when product names are so important. This is why. Complete chaos. In 10-15 years there will probably be an umbrella of 20-30 companies that offer suites of good programs that all work together well. Right now I'm going to avoid a new program by a new developer unless it does proper magic like Word Lens (which is now owned by Google), and just stick with curated lists on %RandomAndroidApprRviewSite%.
moox. for a new generation.
I think the problem here is that people expect that App Store will do marketing for them. Well, it does, in form of the top lists, but they shouldn't really rely on it. What App Store is for is sales: a venue for people to buy your app, when they already know they want it. It is poor for marketing (making people aware of your app and wanting to buy it); you should handle that externally. It's not just an App Store issue either, although it's probably most prominent example - seller marketplaces like Etsy etc. are also exhibiting the problem, but they too can only be considered to be solutions to a sales problem, not a marketing problem.
I am a billionaire yet I only download free apps. how do you think I became a billionaire?
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?
You just conclusively explained Windows and WoW.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We are the 99.98%!
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?
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 someone has an interesting idea you can guarantee that about 15 minutes later Zynga will have cloned it, and then thrown money at marketing it and probably sued the original developer for good measure. The App Store only rewards Zynga for this behaviour.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
One of the main problems I've always seen with top lists is that the ones who make it in there stay there, because people don't see anything else. One solution I would propose is that the requirements for listing in a top list change the longer you are there. Sure, you made 10,000 downloads in your first day. great. You'd better make 12,000 the next day. And 14,000 the day after that.... and so on. With that method, even the most popular apps will eventually drop off to make room for the newer apps which are just getting started.
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 said: If your "marketing plan" consists of "upload and wait for the money to roll in" it's no wonder you can't make any money. You have to figure out a means of getting the word out beyond sticking the thing on the proverbial shelf.
"candy crush clone"
http://m.tickld.com/x/i-cant-b...
http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
The problem is separating the clones from the originals.
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?
The USA App store appears to be the only one which is bug free and maintained.
Take for example the UK App store where I used to rank #1 on a keyword pair.
Great but there are only 2 other Apps with that keyword combo in the UK.
Then I recently changed my keywords and to my utter disbelief I've dropped off the search results for that keyword combo in the UK.
In the USA I'm #1 out of 37 for that keyword combo. Same for New Zealand, only 2 App's listed, but not mine, for that combo.
This would indicate that Apple just doesn't give a sh*t right now, they've no focus on the App store short of keeping the USA one running smoothly.
Otherwise I'm happy, I'm ranking really well on all the other keywords and combo's and I've seen an 10x increase in installs this month.
A fair system would rotate the top 10-15 App's dependant on a combination of factors like the average session length, un-install rate, feedback rating, total app revenue, etc
Don't let's get start on the broken rating system either....
I hope they don't do a Google and start favouring those who make them the most money.
The whole Google search is commercially "broken" with it's focus on delivering search results weighted in the interests of Google's "share holders".
Website's which Google's software deems as "able to pay to display" got chopped off the top keywords a while back.
A website of mine suffered that fate and in the same month Google bombarded me with emails about getting started on AdWords.
That move didn't favour the users of Google search, it favoured Google's bottom line.
If Apple's philosophy of "doing the right thing" still holds post-Jobs then they will (hopefully) come up with an algorithm which favours the best Apps being presented to the users in search results.
... on every device. Swap in lower ranked stuff, so the top 100 covers the top 100k.
This is applicable to other app stores as well. There must be a policy which states that any app, cannot be a clone or closely resemble a clone of another application created within the last n months. Developers and users must be given a facility where they can report violations of this policy to the app store. Thus, if I made the next '2048', and if another of the thousands of copy cat app developers decides to clone my application, I can report this violation culminating in the clone being taken down. I think this is the single most important innovation that can help app developers who are really putting thousands of man hours of creative effort in producing an original and compelling application. Abuse of this provision can also be checked by giving app developers a 3 strike policy when it comes to reporting this violation. If a developer consecutively flags three applications as copying his app while in fact they were not, then the developer is barred from reporting any further such violations. A good app-store is a result of good curation.
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
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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 titles from other platforms to minimise development costs. The vast majority of iPhone gaming lies under that line, and is dominated by F2P and a few 99-cent apps that win the popularity lottery.
Apple seems to be actively cultivating that price-driven market, in particular through its ruthless promotion of F2P games as its "free app of the week". It's in Apple's favour because they make money selling hardware, and an iPhone is more attractive if it has lots of apps that do whatever the customer needs for free or next to free. Heck, they've all but killed off several app niches themselves by giving away iWork and iLife. It's not something that can go on indefinitely unless they plan on being the only quality iPhone app developer though.
If they want to solve this problem, they have to put discoverability of apps back to the fore, so people bother to find good things and not just the first cheap or free option.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"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.
I don't think the term 'broken' is correct when it comes to describing the App Store. Technically it works absolutely fine. If I want an app, and know roughly what it's called, I can always find it. The process of buying the app or freely downloading it works flawlessly. There's nothing 'broken' about that. However, I would call the design and layout of it 'completely shit' or 'goddamn terrible'. But not 'broken'.
For decades, computer games manufacturers have put out limited demos to encourage people to buy the full thing. Some even experimented with DRM to give time-limited access to the full thing. The App Store and iOS give 99.9% security (most iOS users don't jailbreak) so why haven't Apple given the developers a toolkit for time-limited demos? Why are free and paid-for versions listed as separate apps? As an iPad user, I want a proper try-before-you-buy that lets me see exactly what I'm going to get, and if I had that, I'd certainly spend more money. (I could even say the same about Steam, actually...)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
So the complaint is essentially the same as one would have for a brick and mortar store. There is limited capacity to store or showcase content so only the most popular items get to the top/on the shelves.
I really don't think there is any way around this, unless you have a team of people going through and creating personal lists. Even if you allowed people to create their own 'playlists' of apps it would be full of angry birds or whatever the kids are into. Any 'related' suggestions will still be based around general popularity of an app so it still doesn't help.
Really, it comes down to you not liking what the majority of the app store customers like.
Also, for the OCD control freaks like myself, having a more locked down, yet polished, system is a plus. Otherwise, I'd be customizing, tweaking, and optimizing (and breaking, and fixing) all day.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nice to see that paid shills are now downvoting factual statements about the market of their paycheck issuers competitors.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The most profitable apps are web browsers? What are you smoking?
Well, some of the "non-existing" web browsers on iOS cost money, so he may be right in his drug-addled delusions.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Maybe I'll get flamed by somebody for thinking this, but the idea of rotating the top 10's by average session length, un-install rate, and other similar metrics would at the same time be literally asking for Apple to gather usage data about individual users.
Personally, I don't see that happening. I can't say I'm fond of the idea of invading my privacy by monitoring what I do remotely and spending my battery life simply to augment a store. I'm not even sure which one I find harder to give up: battery life or privacy.
Given Apple's stance on privacy, I can't see them taking the time to implement such a monitoring system, even if it's reasonably anonymous.
For Google, on the other hand, this is right up their alley. Power management sucks as it is on Android, so it wouldn't be hard to sneak that by anyways.
No, that's not it, because Macs don't "just work", Apple marketing notwithstanding.
Trollish nonsense nonwithstanding, I've worked with DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, OpenBSD and some ancient VMS whose exact name I've forgotten. None of them worked as well and went out of my way as nicely as OS X does.
YMMV, but my experience is my experience, like it or not.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org