App Store Economics, Part 1
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the end of the world. At least, of the one some of us kept affection for. At the very least, of the one we’ve got used to. Anyway. The big bad crisis of good old capitalism is here and now. It’s time to reassess our work and our pay, time to move the goalposts around a bit while panic keeps others so busy that they won’t notice.
What about App Store? Is it a market vulnerable enough to drive coders out of business? Is it even a kind of market we fully understand?
I can’t speak for everybody, but I know that App Store is a sheer mystery to me. The way it operates is beyond me. Wheels within wheels or we’ll-fix-it-after-I-resign, it shows almost every symptom of a badly designed product. Like QuarkXPress 6. It was so fantastically bad that I don’t care if there have been other versions since. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t care either.
Perhaps, that’s because I’ve never been a fan of show business. Perhaps, if I were Paris Hilton, I would love App Store. But then I wouldn’t be writing iPhone software and its defects wouldn’t make me want to bang my head against the wall. And I don’t regret that I’m not Paris, strange as it may sound.
I assert that whoever decided that selling software is just the same as selling music was — erm, what’s the right word — irresponsibly wrong. I watched the presentation called “Publishing on the App Store” (available through ADC) by Max Müller, the Director of iTunes Store Content Engineering group, as carefully as I could, looking for any convincing argument for using iTunes Store as a template for App Store, and I did not find any. I’m not talking about visual design here, what I mean is user interaction. With a nearly identical style and layout App Store fails miserably where iTunes [Music/Movie] Store excels.
I assert that App Store in its current form does not even attempt to sell software, which is very bad for everybody involved, including Apple, iPhone owners and third parties.
Finding Applications
When you go to an unfamiliar supermarket with tens of thousands of different items on the shelves, you usually find exactly what you want in a matter of minutes. Try that with App Store.
On the surface, its front page is organized like all other online shops: categories, new items, specially advertised items and a search button, so tiny that you can’t hit it with the mouse. The problem is that the design promises you an easy way to look for things, but fails to do so, implying that the thing you are searching for does not exist.
Categories
There is a well-established system for categorizing music and movies by genres. Even though this system has flaws of its own in the post-modern world where all the lines are blurred and every second genre is a mixture of others, it still works for most of popular music. iTunes Music Store numbers 42 genres as I’m writing this post. Compare this with App Store which has 19 categories, one of which, games, has 19 subcategories. The choice of those categories is unclear, to say the least, of which simple distribution statistics are a proof: 25% games, 11% entertainment apps, 0.5% weather apps.
Utilities. The first thing that comes to my mind (am I a pervert?) is system utilities, hacks, interface mods and other stuff strictly prohibited by the iPhone SDK Agreement. Lifestyle? What the heck is it? Finance and Business categories are somehow separate and while I can understand what App Store creators meant, the difference seems too subtle for some developers.
Given the proliferation of tic-tac-toes, flashlights, virtual lighters, dictaphones and calculators, they all deserve their own categories. At the very least, a category titled “Apple Sample Code” is absolutely necessary.
It would be much better if Apple reused some categories from their own Downloads page, such as Networking, Internet Utilities, Math & Science, Business & Finance (see above), expanding it as needed in an unambiguous way.
The real problem is with a few original applications which don’t quite fit anywhere. Hard as their developers try, the hierarchy is just not good enough. How do you find such software?
According to Apptism, there are about 9000 applications in App Store right now, new ones coming every day. At this rate, in a few months App Store will choke and become a software graveyard. Any categorizing system is doomed to fail unless it’s constantly being monitored, scaled and revised. Just have a look at Utilities. There is no way in hell anybody is going to flip through 43 pages in iTunes.
When browsing by categories fails, you resort to search.
Search
Obviously, searching for anything is all about metadata. All iTunes can offer is a search by title/description. Who actually needs the Developer Name field besides developers? Where are keywords? Oh, yes, they don’t make sense for the music store. The Developer Name is, in fact, Artist Name, which explains it all. iTunes Store guys simply renamed a couple of fields and called it a day. If you are a registered iPhone developer, you certainly scratched your head when you first saw the header of your financial reports. You know what I mean.
This problem is catastrophic in countries where English is not the official language. I saw people typing words in Russian into the Power Search [sic] form only to see this:
Your search had no results in Mobile Software Applications. Use Power Search to refine your search…
This must be an act of sabotage. I’m sure Steve Ballmer bribed some intern at Apple to do this after the last commit to the version control system.
Joking aside, App Store itself is not yet translated for all the countries it officially supports, and there are applications in App Store with their description only in German, Spanish or Japanese. You may think that’s the developers’ problem, not Apple’s. But the store is Apple’s venue dedicated to third parties. It just cannot function without actually working with the third parties. Saying ‘It’s your problems’ doesn’t solve them. Or does it?
New Items
There are tens of new applications in the store every day, but the group called New on the front page lists 16 (32 if you click See All) and, as far as I can see, most of them are not exactly new. The group seems to be updated by hand in somebody’s spare time. Am I supposed to think that the store has no new additions because the list of new apps is not changing for a week? Hello?
Seriously, is it so hard to pick a number of recently released applications by random? Like, every time you click, you get random 32 applications released within the last 3 days, or something like that. That would give more exposure to all software. More exposure == more sales. More sales == more fees. And don’t even try to tell us, developers, that this cannot be done.
Staff Favorites
What’s this? Are you telling me Apple’s staff regularly use virtual lighters? OK. But who cares? I would understand if the group listed Apple award winners. Otherwise it should not exist.
What’s Hot
I guess this is just a subset of Top 100 for the superlazy. Very efficient use of the front page space.
So?
The front page should be as dynamic as the nature of the store itself is. Those blocks of new items should be generated on the fly. Also, why not make an auto-rotated list of featured applications, regardless of their popularity? Just write the stupid script which pulls random apps from the store and shoves them into the eye of a customer. You have the most rapidly growing online store in the world. Now try to actually sell the software. With a minimum technical effort you can boost sales by an order of magnitude.
Remember, App Store is exclusive. We don’t have any choice. The fate of our applications is almost entirely in Apple’s hands. With this comes a great deal of responsibility for little ones.
Remember, most of iPhone developers are one-man shops which cannot afford million-dollar advertising campaigns for their one-dollar products. We are not Warner Bros. We cannot survive without your help. But we pay for the iPhone Developer Program. And we write applications to make the iPhone more useful and more fun. If we all starve to death and other coders learn about it, they will stay away from the platform, and the iPhone will not be getting any more software and in the end it will be just another phone.
I’m going to publish some hard cold numbers in the second part of the post to show you the real state of things. Stay tuned.
