Two related stories.
Microsoft’s Windows Store is a mess. It’s full of apps that exist only to scam people and take their money. Why doesn’t Microsoft care that their flagship app store is such a cesspool?
It’s now been more than two years since Windows 8 was released, and this has been a problem the entire time, and it is getting worse. If Microsoft was trying to offer a safe app store to Windows users, they’ve failed.
And:
Flappy Bird wasn’t the first game to spawn an entire ecosystem of me-too clones, nor will it be the last. And now that the developer of the insanely difficult but addicting game has released the even more insanely difficult and even more addicting (is that even possible?) Swing Copters, well, we’re seeing it again.
This applies to all application stores. They are filled to the brim with crapware nobody wants, making the experience of using them pretty unappealing. Since Apple, Google, and Microsoft care about quantity instead of quality, I don’t think this will change any time soon.
Screw the App stores, I just want a phone that I can browse on and check my emails and keep in touch with people, it annoys me when people gauge if a phone is good by the quantity of Apps that are available for it…
Thats why I love my N900 and Z30.
App availability on Android and iOS has been a non-issue for at least the last 2 years, and a topic users basically do not care about (unlike raw performance, battery life, OS updates, …)
For platforms that failed to succeed, e.g. WP or BB10, that’s another story.
I don’t know about iOS, but I feel the amount of really crappy apps (“crapps”?) on Android has been going down lately.
You no longer get 10 fake apps pretending to be the real thing for every popular app.
Of course, Google Play is still filled with 99.9% of totally pointless stuff, but hey, so is Real Lifeâ„¢.
You obviously haven’t been looking that hard:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=piano+tiles&c=apps
To be honest, even though I think the name of this game is called ‘Piano Tiles’ (at least, that’s what they called it during Google I/O), it isn’t the first one in the search order. So I don’t know which one is the genuine one, or if any of the fake ones are actually better.
Also, if you search for NES.emu (awesome NES emulator):
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=nes.emu&c=apps
The first one in the search order is not the genuine one. The second one (from Robert Broglia) is.
Edited 2014-08-22 01:00 UTC
That’s like saying:
I just want a computer that I can browse on and check my emails and keep in touch with people, it annoys me when people gauge a desktop OS by the quantity of Apps that are available for
In other words, everybody isn’t you, and some of us like having lots of quality apps to choose from. (Of course, we could do without the thousands of crappy apps too, but that’s besides the point.)
Its a huge problem in my opinion. The Windows Phone and Windows Store have a lot of crap in them.
I tend to really only download what surfaces to me from a few places:
– Featured sections on the Store Front
– Articles at WPCentral or the Microsoft Tribe at The Verge, they have a few threads which list the nicest Windows Phone apps.
– Twitter
So I get a pretty decent stream of useful apps that I at least try out for a while.
So the problem isn’t really with the quality of apps, because there are many of them (maybe less so for the Windows Store, which should change quick now that they’re unified).
I think the problem is with discoverability. That needs to be improved. If you’re not going to remove the blatant trademark infringement going on, at the very least do something to highlight the official app.
I think the problem with the trademark stuff is that it must be initiated by the trademark owner. And at this point, not enough of them care. Especially about the Windows Store. On the phone this is less of a problem, its insanely bad on the Windows Store.
We need to think about smarter ways to surface apps to consumers, because beyond the Featured sections you’re pretty much on your own to slog through an infinite list of apps. Nobody has time to try to sort out the good from the bad ones.
By forcing everything through a single point of entry they have created a situation where the crapware downloads that you know how to avoid on a desktop OS are indistinguishable to legitimate software on mobile.
At least on Android you can install from other sources but that’s only a consolation.
Now vendors get a cut from anything sold on their platform we’re never going to see the end of it. The money is just too easy.
That’s not a consolation, it’s why I chose Android over everything else. While I have purchased a few apps from Google Play, I get most of my apps from F-Droid.Org. Hey, if it’s free, open source, and works well on my phone, why should I pick some ad riddled app off the Play Store instead?
Which reminds me. Doesn’t anyone look at the stats available on the Google Play Store? If it has just a handful of DLs and is ranked at 3.5 or below, I figure it’s not even worth looking at.
That’s something I don’t really get with iOS and Android. They’re long past the stage where they need to one-up each other with the whole “more than X00,000 apps” thing. Both stores could really do with some spring cleaning.
Edited 2014-08-22 01:18 UTC
Huge difference between outright scams and a bunch of games that are derivative of the current fad of the week.
The App store and Play stores are much higher quality than the Windows phone store. Not even in the same league.
When I got my iPad 1, I was checking for new apps/games regularly. Now that they’re all free to play crap I only check out an app if i hear about it from a trustworthy source. That does NOT include the app store or review sites specialized in mobile apps/games.
At a guess, I buy 10x fewer apps/games than when the app store was pretty empty. Might be a bit of saturation here, but there’s also a strong ‘99.95% is crap’ feeling.
From the old days of buddled tapes on magazines, cds sold on kiosks, or at the post office, we had to search hard to find anything valuable.
This was even what lead to the crash of the game industry in the 80’s and the rise of closed development model as a way to control quality, proposed by Nintendo.
App stores are just the new medium for the same old stuff.
It is easy to blame the gate holders, but no one can control quality when you get hundreds submissions per day.
I do not have this experience with the Debian/Ubuntu repositories for instance. I guess they all cloned a good idea in a bad way.