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.

contact@bleepboxapp.com
www.bleepboxapp.com

White Noise Audio Software Releases iPhone App bleepBOX!, an Analogue Synthesizer / Drum Machine Combo that Fits in Your Pocket

KENNETT SQUARE, PA – August 17, 2009 – The beat box just got pocket sized. bleep!BOX, an analog syth/drum machine debuted in Apple’s iPhone App Store on Saturday, August 15, 2009. bleep!BOX allows users to arrange synthesizer melodies, program drum beats and edit dozens of parameters in real time. Unlike other music apps, bleep!BOX does not limit users with fixed sample sets or pre-made loops. It does not use any samples, only tweakable, analog-style sounds.

Developer Dave Wallin, owner of White Noise Audio Software created bleep!BOX after becoming frustrated with music apps available for the iPhone. “Only two types of music apps were available: simple music toys and music makers. The simple music toys become boring fast and had limited usefulness and the music makers didn’t offer enough options to make a song interesting. bleepBOX! strikes that balance between simplicity and creative potential.”

Similar to the controls on a vintage analog synthesizer, bleep!BOX gives users creative license over waveforms, filters, effects and modulation. It features 50+ parameters and can play up to 10 instruments simultaneously.

“There are a lot of musicians who don’t like using already-made loops,” said Wallin. With bleep!BOX you can program all of your own sounds and make the melodies you want instead of using canned loops or samples. Now users can produce real music on their iPhones.”

bleepBOX!, sold solely in Apple’s app store, costs $9.99 USD and requires iTunes. Click here for the iTunes store link for bleep!BOX.

White Noise Audio Software produces innovative computer based instrument plugins. Founded in 2003, the company is best known for 3 products: Additive, an additive synthesizer, Doppelmangler, a spectral resynthesizer and Zero Vector, a virtual analog synthesizer. bleep!BOX is the company’s first iPhone app. Dave Wallin is the founder and sole proprietor of White Noise Audio Software. www.whitenoiseaudio.com

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Zero Vector also presents some challenges. I would love to port all my plugins to the Mac, now that I’ve gotten comfortable with XCode. However, Zero Vector contains massive amounts of SSE assembly code and I’m not sure how well that will port (maybe it will be fine.).

In general, I’ve developed my own audio framework for writing portable modules. This is used in Genome Studio and also in bleep!BOX. I’d like to port both those plugins into the new framework.

Finally, I do want to get back to working on Genome Studio. I’ve put way too much work into it to not finish it (plus I’m getting fairly close to being able to beta test it). Genome will need some more instruments built into it, and I always intended to include some variant of Zero Vector and Doppelmangler. So, maybe now is the time to update those plugins, rebuild them in my new audio framework so they are ready to include in Genome. At the same time I can produce up-to-date plugins for them.

Doppelmangler is the most interesting problem to solve, so I think I’m gonna tackle it first. ZV will be a more straightforward port (though not trivial..). The direction I want to take Doppelmangler is to focus on high quality sample manipulation rather than all the crazy spectral stuff. Warping and modulating sounds is still the focus too (just that DM2 won’t use spectral resynthesis per se). It may be something that is more like specialized granular resynthesis synthesis (not wacky artsy fartsy granular ;). As always the motto is to be able get greater control over your samples and to use them in new and creative ways. More soon - need to do some experiments.

Oh, and I nearly forgot. I have a few updates planned for bleep!BOX. Those will happen first and they will mainly be centered around performance features, patch sharing, and synchronization (read: DSMI - wifi midi).

The above link describes a method for converting Java source code into Objective C using xmlVM. xmlVM sounds pretty interesting, though the site is down at the moment..

Today I started working on an RSS reader to learn some more of the specifics about working with the UITableView component, which is probably the most used component of all.

Some more good resources I came across this morning:

• Objective C for those switching languages (from C/C++ or Java)
• Objective C cheat sheet (helps to conceptualize the different syntax in Objective C with equivalents in C++ / Java)
• iPhone app goldrush
• The answer to my NSAutoreleasePool question.