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?

Comments

It's not a marketplace..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a marketplace, it's a lottery for developers.

Re:It's not a marketplace..

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:It's not a marketplace..

[Noah Haders]

I don't have time to reply to this post. I'm too busy playing the kim kardashian game.

Re:It's not a marketplace..

[timeOday]

There are various "dreams" of course, but the Gold Rush mentality has always been strong in US culture. Our current top marginal tax rates certainly support that assertion - average people pay dearly in real money to protect their fantasy future-self.

Re:It's not a marketplace..

[sg_oneill]

It's not a marketplace, it's a lottery for developers.

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.

Re:It's not a marketplace..

[EnsilZah]

I'm too busy playing the kim kardashian game

Is that some kind of euphemism?

Re:It's not a marketplace..

[TheRaven64]

$13b is a big-sounding number. But it's not that big in comparison to some other numbers. For example, there were 75b downloads from the Apple App Store last month, so even if that $13b were just for the last month, not for the lifetime of the App Store, it would amount to less than 20 for each download. There are 1.2m apps available, so $13b means just over $10K per app. That's quite a lot for a week's work, but it's a pittance compared to the cost of developing a typical program, especially when you consider the earnings per year.

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).

Obvious solution.

[grub]

Become the sole developer for Blackberry app!

uh, get rid of the "top X" ranking?

[swschrad]

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.

Recent purchases/downloads

[Travis Mansbridge]

A list of recently purchased/downloaded or even new additions would cycle a larger group of useful apps to the app store audience.

Too many apps, too much appcrap

[Animats]

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

[nwf]

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

[jxander]

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?

Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap

[maccodemonkey]

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.

Welcome to application development

[blueshift_1]

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).

People expecting their marketing for free

[jolyonr]

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.

Re:People expecting their marketing for free

[jolyonr]

Advertising is marketing. But not all marketing is advertising.

For example, how did you learn about adblock?

Re:People expecting their marketing for free

[maccodemonkey]

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.

Re:Curation: Apple does high profile reviews...

[MouseR]

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.

Re:Decaying ratings

[angel'o'sphere]

And what exactly is the advantage for an app to be new? Or what is the disadvantage for an app to be old?
Last time I checked software did not age.
I rather have an old working app than a new immature one ... that does not mean new apps are immature by definition.

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.

Developers, developers, developers!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Developers, developers, developers!

[jbolden]

They are just incremental, evolutionary developments, not radical ideas that will move or create entire markets and lifestyles the way the original iPhone or iPad did.

  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.

The iPhone 5S including a shift to an entirely new CPU architecture... is a smart phone that can run some apps.

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.

but the App Store has... awkward ports of puzzle games with crazy expensive in-app purchases

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.

____

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.

The iTMS App store is a strange beast

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:Decaying ratings

[timeOday]

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.

Re:economy bullshit argument

[Tom]

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.