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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.
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.
I am a billionaire yet I only download free apps. how do you think I became a billionaire?
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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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
You do realise the fact you have to explain all these things to people means they're not as game-changing as you seem to think they are? It's like trying to explain why a joke is funny - if you have to, it's not funny.
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