How to prevent the App Store from becoming the Crap Store

http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/how-to-prevent-the-app-store-from-becoming-the-crap-store/

by EtienneJohnred • 18 years ago

25 23 18 years ago

taptaptap.com

LPTS7• 18 years ago

Ship. Meet Sailed. Sailed, Ship.

briansmith• 18 years ago

I think Apple wants apps to be $0.99 or free. Otherwise they would have been ranking by revenue from the beginning.

LPTS7• 18 years ago

Apple wants apps to do everything that can be offloaded to a handheld. This thing is in it's infancy. Apple gets to create this part of the 21st century because no one else is up for it. You think the iPhone is a mature product? Not even close.

Tichy5• 18 years ago

Apple did not create this part of the 21st century. There have been applications for mobile phones for years now (and before the phones, there was the palm pilot). I am sure there are way more applications available for other mobile platforms than for the iPhone. #nitpicking

vulpes• 18 years ago

All this would do is force the prices the other way. People would be trying to sell crap for more using WOM or some other way to inflate 'box office revenue' and once they are on the list, instead of lowering the price to stay on it, they'd be increasing it. While that will get rid of crapware for .99, it will drive the prices of the same soft up, ultimately hurting the consumer. Best solution to this is app genius that recommends apps based on what you want to do.

Until that happens, use word of mouth to your advantage. Use Google Mobile App as an example of online campaign. Once techies get your app on their phone, they will be the platform for homing in their less tech friends to your apps.

ObieJazz• 18 years ago

It seems to me that ranking apps by net sales would reinforce the incentive to make as much money as possible. Profit would provide the resources for the producer to create a quality product, and competition would keep prices low and encourage innovation. </capitalism>

Timothee• 18 years ago

In a way, one issue with the App Store, is that it exists. Since people know it's there, they'll check it out to see what's available. As opposed to probably not looking for apps at all. (or less)

And finding a good way to rank the apps is not easy. By number of downloads doesn't work well, by revenue wouldn't work I think, by rating might work a little bit but then what? So, the App Store is in fact not a great place to find good apps, just the most popular.

So, people go to the App Store but otherwise don't know where to go to find apps or information about apps. But the presence of the store makes the word-of-mouth a little bit more difficult because the store is supposed to be the place, so I suppose in general, people don't look anywhere else. (I know I don't) And people don't feel like sharing their discoveries as much.

Of course, I don't deny the huge benefit of the App Store. I would have never installed that many applications otherwise. But it's "louder" and covers some of the more traditional marketing and word-of-mouth.

mcormier• 18 years ago

The author doesn't paint the complete picture.

The iPhone application they wrote, "Classics" was released after "Stanza" (http://www.lexcycle.com/). Stanza is free, I believe they plan on charging for their desktop software in the future. The main difference between stanza and classics is that classics has fancier animations.

iigs• 18 years ago

This thought occurred to me as well. I think it's of merit but Apple actually has a really hard problem on their hands, namely that the app store UI is terribly simple and at the moment doesn't appear to have a good way to prioritize suggestions.

Given the metadata that they must have, it would be trivial to switch to gross revenue, or rev * review score, or any number of other things, including time. (Reddit/HN method of scoring articles)

For that matter there's no reason why they can't compare app store purchases you've scored to the scores of other people who've purchased the same application to suggest things. (Amazon "people who purchased..." or Netflix way of doing things)

Hey Apple, give me the ability to affiliate your store. You can have 95% control of the UI (I want a banner at the top) but I get to pick the sequence things are offered for a given search. Give me 5%, I will make you rich. (Netflix challenge way of doing things)

pistoriusp• 18 years ago

At the moment they have a "Customers also bought" section, bottom right in itunes.

And you can become an affiliate for the itunes store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/

unalone• 18 years ago

Is that blog using Fertigo Pro for a font? That's incredible.

I don't know much about economics and the App Store, but I'd be inclined to trust this article. TapTapTap makes some excellent apps. Classics is a favorite.

DenisM• 18 years ago

There is no busness like the show business.

If you have a hit you make it big, otherwise you get next to nothing.

stcredzero• 18 years ago

Mobile apps do not have to be driven by impulse. I was dating a med student when ePocrates was all the rage for doctors and med students on Palm devices. She had hers on a Sony Clie. ePocrates was great because you had searchable pharmaceutical information that was also updated every time you synced. The fact that it replaced a few big honking volumes was great. There was no App Store back then. My impression was that advertising was largely word of mouth.

I intend to develop applications for specific niches, so I won't be depending on being in the "What's Hot" lists. Instead, I will be providing something that spreads by word of mouth because it has real value. (I'll also be hitting up blogs and other media.)

lacker• 18 years ago

The author misses that the different parties have different goals. TapTapTap wants to maximize app revenue. To do that, you do want to sort by revenue. (Actually, probably something like revenue per last n impressions, so that apps that have a traffic spike won't stay up there when the spike is over.)

But Apple makes most their money off the sale of iPhones. So they want people to be happy when they use the app store, even if it doesn't make them as much money directly. When someone downloads and enjoys a free app, that's meaningless to TapTapTap, but it's great for Apple. You can't exactly measure user enjoyment, but it's not unreasonable to suppose that "number of downloads" is a better proxy for user happiness than "net revenue".

How to prevent the App Store from becoming the Crap Store

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