What the App Store Needs
As you may know the app store hit 85,000 apps recently and 2 Billion downloads. App aproval times keep getting longer and longer due to the influx of people trying to jump onto the gravy train. And who could blame them with success stories about developers making millions off of relatively simple apps. The truth is only a few developers end up profiting due to the way the application lists work.
Visibility
The biggest problem is visibility. Most people find apps directly on the iPhone. Which means they find things by clicking through lists in categories. Each category shows the top paid, top free and recently released. Each of these lists only shows 100 items, with no ability to view subsequent pages. With 85,000 apps, you can imagine that a lot of apps are unfindable using this method. The recently released list shows new apps and app updates - to take advantage of the situation, developers will just update their apps as often as they can (often with meaningless updates) in order to 'juice' their sales and rankings a bit. This ends up putting more strain on the approval process and just makes it harder for all developers to get necessary bug fixes and updates to users in a timely manner. Apple will just lengthen the approval process as long as they need to in order to discourage this behavior (it's unlikely that they will hire more 'app approvers'.. they would need thousands of them in order to get approvals done in a timely manner). I have an update that's been awaiting approval for 3 weeks now.
There is search for finding apps, but how do you know what to search for if you are 'just browsing'?
Basically what ends up happening is you have a limited amount of time when your app is released to get into the top 100. If you can get in there, you have a great chance of staying there, atleast for a bit. If not, your app falls off the charts into oblivion. You can still get a few sales from search or if you can generate some buzz for your application outside of the app store. But since most people find apps in the app store itself, the app store is still your best chance for getting a conversion.
The current system favors giving a few apps the majority of the sales, whether they deserve it or not. It has nothing to do with the quality of the apps. Review scores do not appear to be a factor, only raw sales or downloads (correct me if I'm wrong). My prediction is that developers will start to leave in droves (or atleast complain loudly) once they start realizing that they've spent months working on an application only to have it drop out of sight as soon as it's released.
The app store needs to change to accommodate the volume of apps. Here's what I think needs to be done.
There needs to be more ways to find apps, other than just a top 100. I suggest:
- Random List - 100 or so random apps in a category. This would go a long way to making things more fair.
- Top Rated or the ability to sort by rating. Bring ratings into the mix. Don't just go by downloads. A lot of good apps get lost this way.
- More granular categories. If users can only see 100 apps, then we need more sub-categories. Or:
- Ability to browse more than 100 apps. Why not let people view as many as they want?
- Wish-lists or user generated lists of apps, like Amazon has.
- Stop making app updates so important to sales. Only show new releases, not updates.
- Paid advertising spots. Another revenue stream for apple, but could help break the dependence on downloads.
- Recommendations. Users who bought this app, also bought... Once again, Amazon gets this right.
Imagine if Amazon.com only let you view 100 items in each category? They'd be missing out on a lot of sales. The App store's Top 100 lists might have been fine when there was only a handful of iPhone Apps, but now that the device has become a huge platform, Apple needs to expand the functionality to match the inventory.