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As a iOS/Mac developer for the last five years, I have seen steady decline in sales, developer quality and customer quality. Turn towards low level consumer mar

As a iOS/Mac developer for the last five years, I have seen steady decline in sales, developer quality and customer quality. Turn towards low level consumer markets that took place few years ago can't be mitigated with any amount of trickery to boost sales. Trials are needed but they won't fix the problem. Problem is that we all inflated the market way beyond its capacity and such bubble can't stay inflated for long. I have some six Mac apps in MAS and I consider that number too high -- some of them will have to go. On the other hand any other Asian based developer has 70+ apps, all at $0.99 and not worth the cost of the web page they are on. Apple loves to brag about number of apps in any of the stores but in order to do so they let any crappy app in as long as it does not break terribly. That drives normal customers away, then sales drive normal developers away. I don't see any solution, it is downwards spiral, unless Apple enforces 'quality police' to leave low quality apps away from App Store. And that won't happen.

IBM 11y ago
You're basically just arguing that there's too much competition. Unless you have a truly differentiated product you should expect prices to tend to zero.
- binaryapparatus 11y ago
  Not really. Competition is good and I don't mind competing with any company that has not-crappy-app to sell. I am arguing about general quality of the apps in the store: if 95% of them are bad there is no motive for normal paying users to even visit the store. That's something enforced (or not) by app store owner, Apple in this case.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Agreed, this is also degenerating on Amazon with some consumer products, low-cost clones and paid reviews. The cost of searching/discovery becomes too high and an entire category becomes unusable for purchase.
  - IBM 11y ago
    "Crappy apps" is your characterization but I suspect is a red herring. In fact most of the developers I follow who complain about the App Stores seem to point to everything except the real reason, that there's more competition than there ever was before the App Stores existed.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Volume != competition, if users cannot even tell the difference between apples and oranges without a prohibitive investment of time in off-appstore research.
    - binaryapparatus 11y ago
      I suspect you are not looking at the app store. I just opened Mac App Store and found random 'developer' with 80+ apps. One app is 'add border around image'. Other app is 'crop image'. Third app is 'convert image (to jpg/png)'. And so on, 80+ of them. They are not apps by any definition. They are two lines of code each, doing simplest possible job at $0.99 cost. They don't add anything to the App Store apart from making all the other apps less visible. It is not competition by any definition. Their only real effect is that potential customer can safely assume all the other apps in the App Store are same unusable crap. I would never confuse competition with noise. This 95% of apps are pure noise, making App Store less usable, driving customers then developers away. Their only value from Apple point of view is 'keynote value' that 'we have zillion apps in the app store'.
      - IBM 11y ago
        Those apps would never be featured by Apple so they would only be seen if they were searched for. They also wouldn't get the downloads to dominate the top charts. So unless your apps are at the same level, you're not going to be impacted by it. And "driving customers away" is hogwash. Customers actually see the high quality apps featured by Apple before anything, so even if seeing a poorly designed app actually drove customers away that wouldn't even be an issue. It's also not borne out by the data, app store sales and downloads have only grown over the years.
- threatofrain 11y ago
  Maybe the argument that you people are looking for is that the app store has a search interface that isn't good at finding what the customer wants / sieving out noise. At least that's how I felt when I recently acquired got a phone and looked to get new apps. I'm okay with spending, but I had a lot of difficulty finding or searching in a way I felt was fruitful. And with apps I plan to use often, notwithstanding quality, I unfortunately don't want some app that smells like it might die as soon as the developer changes their mind in a fiercely competitive app store.
tonyedgecombe 11y ago
It is interesting how Apple sells a premium product with high margins but is willing to allow any old cheap shit into the store as long as it uses the right API's.
frik 11y ago
What do these people call the huge problem of Blackberry/WinMobile/Tizen/etc stores and there real lack of meaningful applications? Those have become niche devices and got pretty irrelevant. Beside that even on iOS and especially Android (due to the bad inbuilt privacy control in <=5.1) many remove native apps like Facebook/Dropbox/Twitter/etc and rely on their web apps. Those run just as good and don't record the GPS, voice, upload photos and SMS, etc.

IBM 11y ago

You're basically just arguing that there's too much competition. Unless you have a truly differentiated product you should expect prices to tend to zero.

binaryapparatus 11y ago
Not really. Competition is good and I don't mind competing with any company that has not-crappy-app to sell. I am arguing about general quality of the apps in the store: if 95% of them are bad there is no motive for normal paying users to even visit the store. That's something enforced (or not) by app store owner, Apple in this case.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Agreed, this is also degenerating on Amazon with some consumer products, low-cost clones and paid reviews. The cost of searching/discovery becomes too high and an entire category becomes unusable for purchase.
- IBM 11y ago
  "Crappy apps" is your characterization but I suspect is a red herring. In fact most of the developers I follow who complain about the App Stores seem to point to everything except the real reason, that there's more competition than there ever was before the App Stores existed.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Volume != competition, if users cannot even tell the difference between apples and oranges without a prohibitive investment of time in off-appstore research.
  - binaryapparatus 11y ago
    I suspect you are not looking at the app store. I just opened Mac App Store and found random 'developer' with 80+ apps. One app is 'add border around image'. Other app is 'crop image'. Third app is 'convert image (to jpg/png)'. And so on, 80+ of them. They are not apps by any definition. They are two lines of code each, doing simplest possible job at $0.99 cost. They don't add anything to the App Store apart from making all the other apps less visible. It is not competition by any definition. Their only real effect is that potential customer can safely assume all the other apps in the App Store are same unusable crap. I would never confuse competition with noise. This 95% of apps are pure noise, making App Store less usable, driving customers then developers away. Their only value from Apple point of view is 'keynote value' that 'we have zillion apps in the app store'.
    - IBM 11y ago
      Those apps would never be featured by Apple so they would only be seen if they were searched for. They also wouldn't get the downloads to dominate the top charts. So unless your apps are at the same level, you're not going to be impacted by it. And "driving customers away" is hogwash. Customers actually see the high quality apps featured by Apple before anything, so even if seeing a poorly designed app actually drove customers away that wouldn't even be an issue. It's also not borne out by the data, app store sales and downloads have only grown over the years.
threatofrain 11y ago
Maybe the argument that you people are looking for is that the app store has a search interface that isn't good at finding what the customer wants / sieving out noise. At least that's how I felt when I recently acquired got a phone and looked to get new apps. I'm okay with spending, but I had a lot of difficulty finding or searching in a way I felt was fruitful. And with apps I plan to use often, notwithstanding quality, I unfortunately don't want some app that smells like it might die as soon as the developer changes their mind in a fiercely competitive app store.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago

It is interesting how Apple sells a premium product with high margins but is willing to allow any old cheap shit into the store as long as it uses the right API's.

frik 11y ago

What do these people call the huge problem of Blackberry/WinMobile/Tizen/etc stores and there real lack of meaningful applications? Those have become niche devices and got pretty irrelevant. Beside that even on iOS and especially Android (due to the bad inbuilt privacy control in <=5.1) many remove native apps like Facebook/Dropbox/Twitter/etc and rely on their web apps. Those run just as good and don't record the GPS, voice, upload photos and SMS, etc.