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Is the App Store Broken?

Posted by Soulskill on from the honeymoon-is-over dept.

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?

11 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. It's not a marketplace.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:It's not a marketplace.. by Noah+Haders · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Obvious solution. by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    Become the sole developer for Blackberry app!

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  3. Recent purchases/downloads by Travis+Mansbridge · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  4. Too many apps, too much appcrap by Animats · · 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.

    1. Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap by nwf · · 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.

      --
      I don't know, but it works for me.
    2. Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap by jxander · · 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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    3. Re:Too many apps, too much appcrap by maccodemonkey · · 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.

  5. Welcome to application development by blueshift_1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  6. People expecting their marketing for free by jolyonr · · 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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    1. Re:People expecting their marketing for free by maccodemonkey · · 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.