We’ve touched on this topic several times already – most recently only a few days ago: the application store model is facing some serious issues at the moment, to the heavy detriment of users and developers alike. If you don’t want to take my word for it – and really, you shouldn’t, as you should make up your own mind – Marco Arment has written a great summary of all the problems the application store model is facing, with a lot of quotes from other sources to come to a good overview.
Apple’s App Store design is a big part of the problem. 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. Top lists reward apps that get people to download them, regardless of quality or long-term use, so that’s what most developers optimize for. Profits at the top are so massive that the promise alone attracts vast floods of spam, sleaziness, clones, and ripoffs.
Quality, sustainability, and updates are almost irrelevant to App Store success and usually aren’t rewarded as much as we think they should be, and that’s mostly the fault of Apple’s lazy reliance on top lists instead of more editorial selections and better search.
And:
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.
The application store model is under serious pressure.
I’ve been feeling like this for a couple of years now, but couldn’t summarize my thoughts as cohesively as this. Well done.
I think we should attempt to pressure Apple and the others to add more important search and ranking mechanism to their store — letting people browse concepts and criteria more interesting than the basic popularity lists they use now.
Edited 2014-07-29 16:16 UTC
It’s selection bias in action. And i don’t think that new ways to search the store will solve, since this is partially dependent on factors outside the virtual environment. (these is a list of apps that you use sorely because someone use, like a social network or messenger, right?)
This is a very old problem that Linux and BSD users know since at least 1998 when they had to browse their software repositories with aptitude, or even before that with Perl developers facing CPAN for the first time: people naturally goes for the most popular software/modules due a variety of reasons.
The result? It subject younger open source projects to a brain drain and eventually plain neglect due lack of a stable user base, since new promising developers was statistically more inclined to work with the most popular of the projects, and people was more inclined to use software that they can more easily find information and can ask for help. It is a positive feedback loop that benefits the most “powerful” in the fiercely competitive software jungle.
And this problem was never satisfactorily solved, despite repository browsers allowing to queue packages in almost every conceivable way. So i really doubt that either Google or Apple will ever be able to solve this.
The sole way that i see to easy (not solve) this problem is by popularizing sites that specialize in app review so to create a initial push to decent applications in need of a user base.
Eventually, both Apple and Google will need to devise ways to clean up abandonware.
Edited 2014-07-29 20:23 UTC
It sucks in a way, but it’s also a high quality problem that you have soooo many apps to choose from, and not a good way to organize them. As opposed to Windows Phone, where there’s like 5 decent apps to choose from
But it does not occur because the good MS app store, but because the poor Windows Phone marketshare yet.
Edited 2014-07-29 17:14 UTC
one for each user
LMAO, that’s terrible. TERRIBLE
Ok, okay. We’ll admit he was being generous.
It’s really 3 for one user and 2 for the other user.
If only there were a company that were trying to unify the development environments and code base for mobile and desktop applications instead of the user interfaces… Oh wait, Ubuntu, Mozilla, and now even Apple are ALL trying to do that. Just not Android and Windows phone. And as far as rankings go, advertisement is pay to play, get used to it. If appstores kill side-loading apps, well that’s a loss for indie developers and a plus for phone security. I bet you can guess which one the average phone user cares more about.
Edited 2014-07-29 17:32 UTC
Well, KDE was working to do that before any of those you listed. Plasma2 will make far greater strides than Plasma did in that respect. KDE4/Plasma already hits a wide foray of devices with just the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook targets; and Plasma2 adds more (tablet, phone, etc.)
Well, there’s not really any good resolution.
Google does Top Apps, Top Paid, Top Free; both by downloads and by user-ranking.
If appstores kill side-loading apps, well that’s a loss for indie developers and a plus for phone security. I bet you can guess which one the average phone user cares more about. [/q]
Well, you are incorrect about Windows Phone not trying to converge the desktop with Mobile.
Guess that leaves Google in your argument?
No, that was a bad report. They thought he was talking about converging to one operating system, but he wasn’t.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/136376-Microsoft-Will-Uni…
Evidently the One Windows news articles passed you by.
Windows Phone development happens in the same Visual Studio used for desktop development, using many of the same technologies, and always has.
The App Stores are a great example of a free market. Anyone can develop and App and can submit it. If accepted and popular, the developer ‘wins’. Producers (developers) are incentivized to make their product stand out, and offer perceived value to the consumer. This is why we have so many Freemium Games and other content available. I freely admit to downloading games and other Apps and using them once or twice, and then throwing them away if they turn out to be terrible. I rank them poorly if they are not of sufficient quality, which provides feedback to other consumers which they are free to consider or ignore. However, the majority of Apps I selectively download are of sufficient or great quality to keep around.
The question is, what would you replace the market with, and the mechanisms by which consumers can see what is quality? Would you hamper the free market by appointing someone who dictates what is quality and what is not? Would you create a scoring system that measures the length of time an App is installed on a device, or the number of times it is used? That could negatively impact the free market, as it cannot convey usage patterns accurately without gathering so much more data and perhaps threatening privacy.
At the end of the day, it is caveat emptor. There needs to be some basic consumer protection mechanisms in place, but there is no need to tamper with rankings and ratings as things stand. Over time, quality Apps will bubble to the top, and they will always be contesting for top spot with junk that is flavor of the day.
No, it’s not a free market. It’s a constrained market because it offers only a single channel from the developers to the consumers (notably with Apple, since the there are other venues for other devices). Your revenue model, content, and public perception are limited by what the App Store supports. You can use other channels for marketing your product, but the App Store dominates the search engines. And even with these alternate marketing channels, you haven’t the control over pricing and revenue.
As mentioned elsewhere, the App Store model offers easy fulfillment, since you as a developer do not have to deal with payment and downloads. The vetting model is useful for customers in terms of security, but it would be better if, like a “e-privacy” badge, you could have your apps vetted by a trusted 3rd party, and then signed. It would be nice if I could send my app to Apple, have them say “Yea, we’d put this on our app store”, send it back with a signature, and let me sell it however I want.
But that’s not what we have. We have a market with a somewhat low barrier to entry, but an actually rather high cost of doing business (30%). That does not make it a free market.
The primary criteria that the App Stores vet against is security. Sure, they do some content auditing and such, but the “promise” is safety, not capability or merchantability.
Just like the certificate brokers, there could potentially be any number of 3rd parties that could set up vetting services to “guarantee” an app. A “Good Housekeeping” or “UL Listed” seal if you will.
By the same notion, the devices could be configured to mount any number of “App Stores”. They can be actual App Stores, that do certification and delivery and DLC. Or just parts, say just delivery or just certification. You can have uncertified App Stores for those who want to live in the Wild West.
Simply, they can open up the platform so others can play. At the same time, they can make available mechanisms to help ensure folks are able to distinguish “certified” applications.
You are right, this is not a problem at all. The good ones will stay at the top for as long as their user base wishes, and that’s it.
I think that the real problem is how good apps will stand out in the sea of junk that lies around them, creating line noise. And do that before bankrupting their developers.
Except that only the iTunes App Store criteria, ranking, classification, rules, etc. apply.
If Apple would allow another app store, and apps with in-app purchasing where they didn’t cut out 30% (a free market would have this negotiable), then you would be right, but there would be an actual marketplace, you can either go to the one big department store, or the craft bazaar.
Palm had the app store concept right with webos, starting with the touchpad they had a magazine like concept where it would highlight quality apps. This was one of the best stores I can remember.
I’ve been an iTunes/app store, Play, and windows marketplace user due to my job… none of these have come close to the palm model.
Though you could say palm didn’t have many apps to chose from, the ones in the magazine selections worked perfectly. now if only they put that kind of money into optimizing the kernel for the hardware
I thought the author was going to go into detail about the more technical aspects of App Store hell. I had a bad experience with my iPhone 3G in which the latest version of iOS at the time made the phone so slow it was unusable, but all of the apps available in the App Store no longer supported the prior version of iOS that I was stuck with. This meant that if I wanted to download any new apps, my only options were to use an OS that was impossibly slow or buy a new phone. This was bogus since Apple could have kept the prior versions of apps available for people who couldn’t upgrade the OS for performance reasons, but Apple chose not to do this. I ended up buying a new phone, but it certainly wasn’t another iPhone. In all fairness to Apple, that was obviously quite a while ago and they may have gotten their act together since then.
If you want the world to know your app, I guess it would do no harm to advertise it in magazines and web sites. If you want to make money, you have to sell it at a price where you recover your costs.
You cannot expect to live in obscurity and wait for the masses to come knocking at your door. Everybody selling software for the PC and console world does publicity; why not for smartphones? Oh, yeah, it is expensive. So you might need to be selling something worth the money, not the umpteenth clone of the simplest utility or the dumbest tiredest game.
It is clear that the market for applications at 3€ a pop that Apple invented and Google followed is very limited: You simply cannot pay for much development with the tiny potential revenue. I suppose that in such a stingy ecosystem, you can only sell unadvertised crap and expect it to magically bubble to the top.
It is sad that people cry wolf when the price is any higher, no matter how good the product (so many complaints in the comments section when the cost is any higher than zero!), while they can pay 20 times more for a console game. It is even sadder, no, aggravating, that the only current model to extract money from customers is pay per usage and market the program as free when it is very, very far from being so.
Then say goodbye to $1 software, not that it made sense in a lot of cases anyway.