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Apple's App Store Needs a Radical Revamp; How Would You Go About It?
Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes Given the hundreds of thousands of apps currently on offer, it's hard for any one app (no matter how well designed) to stand out on Apple's App Store, much less stay atop the bestseller charts for very long. In an August 10 blog posting, former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée offered Apple CEO Tim Cook some advice: Let humans curate the App Store. 'Instead of using algorithms to sort and promote the apps that you permit on your shelves, why not assign a small group of adepts to create and shepherd an App Store Guide,' he wrote. 'A weekly newsletter will identify notable new titles, respond to counter-opinions, perhaps present a developer profile, footnote the occasional errata and mea culpa.' Whether or not such an idea would effectively surface all the good content now buried under layers of Flappy Bird rip-offs is an open question; what's certain is that, despite Apple's rosy picture, developers around the world face a lot of uncertainty and competition when it comes to making significant money off their apps. Sure, some developers are making a ton of cash, but the rising tide doesn't necessarily float all boats. If you had the opportunity, how would you revamp/revise/upgrade/adjust/destroy the App Store to better serve the developers who put apps in it?
Moderation and meta-moderation solve all problems. :/
I would aggressively punish apps that demand overly broad access to your data.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The rating system would be gamed even more than Googl's PageRank system. Too much money at stake.
John
My girlfriend has an iPad, and she uses alternative app stores. They just curate the apps in Apple's store and link to it for the actual install and download, but she says the one she uses (sorry, it's Chinese, I can't remember the name) makes it much easier to find stuff than Apple's because it has social integration, so she can see what her friends use and rate highly.
Google does the same thing with Play. If people you know on G+ rate apps highly or post about them they are more likely to appear in your suggested apps. It's kinda like what TFA suggests, human beings selecting apps, but doesn't cost Google anything and is tailored to the individual.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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1. Remove Apple from having it's name on the App Store (or just allow anybody to set up their own store)
2. Removing Apple's 100% control of what apps are listed (Or just allow anybody to set up their own store)
Neither suggestion solves any of the problems listed.
There are apps that were put up years ago, presumably were not much of a success, and remain, never updated. All they do is clutter the store up, and make it harder to find the good, up-to date stuff. They should be removed. It's not obvious how...
Perhaps when sales have faded to almost nothing. Perhaps remove any that are still using deprecated APIs.
Perhaps remove any that are not using iOS 7 design features.
Perhaps increase the yearly charge for being on the store... maybe decoupling it from the charge to be a developer. And make the charge per app, such that no hoper apps are voluntarily given up.
The reason the App store and perhaps even the iPhone itself was such a success is because there is only one place you need to go to find Apps. And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.
Is it perfect in that regard? No.
I'm not sure. What revenue stream does the App store have? I mean other than the $99 annual developer fee. Is that what you meant? The developer tools themselves are free. I used to spend hundreds on development tools and upgrades so I guess I'm not bothered much by the $99. I can play around with the tools and creating apps as much as I want without spending a dime. It's only when I want to put an app on actual device that I need to spend the money.
The biggest problem both the App Store and the Play Store have is searchability. There is no way to filter on anything other than high-level category and keyword, and whatever the result-based ranking algorithms on both stores uses, is horrible, always returning junk and crap instead of what you really want.
This makes finding the kinds of apps you want even when you KNOW what you are looking for EXTREMELY ANNOYING AND OVERLY DIFFICULT, way more so than it has to be.
It is very ironic that Google whose main business is search can not cobble together the resources to make a decent search for Android over the past 5 years.
None of which addresses the actual problems listed.
You're just sticking your own biases for how things should be run, probably as someone who doesn't even use the platform, with a bogus problem that doesn't exist - there is no lack of innovation in iOS apps.
If you think small-time developers are upset now, I can only imagine how furious they would be if Apple started doing "pay for play". BillyBobIndy would have even less of a chance to make it.
Really, Apple wouldn't make that much money from it, and the reputational costs would be too great. I could see a "sponsored" category being set up, but nothing beyond that.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical
( ) legislative
(x) market-based
( ) vigilante
approach to fixing the app store. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(x) Apple is doing quite well these days, thankyouverymuch, and doesn't really give a shit how you think they should be run. (You, in general, public at large, and probably you, in particular, JLG.)
(x) Scammy developers will pay people in 4th-world countries to say their app is great.
(x) Probably a bunch more reasons that I don't have the energy to think up this second.
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Taking 30% commission out of everything you sell via the app store and in-app?
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You already had the OSx running Apple device then?
It's OS X, not OSx, you might want to at least learn the name.
Apple takes a pretty big bite from the proceeds to process the credit cards and such and sending the rest on to you.
... 30% is standard in pretty much every retail industry, and the fact that you think its a lot shows you've not actually done anything like this yourself or you'd know that for a $1 app, 0.30 is cheap considering you'll probably be paying at least $0.25 in credit card fees alone.
So you've illustrated that all your concerns are that of someone who is ignorant of the way the process works.
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A couple of folks have said it, but it bears repeating: we need hundreds of categories and subcategories. Think Amazon, not Google.
I want to look at all the diabetes monitoring apps, or all the Talmud apps, or find the BA app. A search throws up way too much junk. A browse of a category is at way too high a level. And I want to look at all the apps in my subsubcategory, and know I've seen all of them. Search doesn't cut it. Categories and browsing is needed.
Step 1 remove ALL the freaking flashlight, mirror, and fart apps. All of them.
Step 2 no longer allow any app that replicates abilities in the stock phone.
Step 3 Free ad choked apps are not allowed to be called "free" but "advertising supported"
Step 4 eliminate in app purchases.
Step 5 only apps that have no ads can be called free, groups can release open source free apps for zero cost to them.
Step 6 all apps have a 30 minute 100% refund return policy. If I buy an app and find it is crap, I can get a 100% refund and it is removed from my phone.
THAT is how you fix not only the apple store but the android and all other "app" stores.
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Other than that users of the 12 percent platform spend more money than users of the 85 percent platform?
Why bother paying to develop for the #2 platform (12% sales) when you can develop for the #1 platform (85% sales) for free?
Because the users of the #2 platform have already demonstrated a predisposition toward paying more than they have to for things, and I've seen claims that Apple users will pay more for apps. The iOS platform is also less fragmented than the Android platform, so there are fewer device configurations that you have to account for.
Disclaimer: That's all word-of-mouth to me. I'm not a mobile app developer, but those are some of the arguments that I've seen others make.
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