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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 t

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.
    - binaryapparatus 11y ago
      True but they effect list of all the new apps in each category they appear. That makes any new app much less discover-able, because new app slides down too quickly. Plus having noise there (where it counts) makes any new app much less interesting for the potential customers. Waiting to get featured by Apple is not really what most of the developers can count on, making high quality apps or not. I spent months developing each of my apps so I assume they are not 'at the same level' as crappy two liners. But they are as discoverable as those apps...

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.
  - binaryapparatus 11y ago
    True but they effect list of all the new apps in each category they appear. That makes any new app much less discover-able, because new app slides down too quickly. Plus having noise there (where it counts) makes any new app much less interesting for the potential customers. Waiting to get featured by Apple is not really what most of the developers can count on, making high quality apps or not. I spent months developing each of my apps so I assume they are not 'at the same level' as crappy two liners. But they are as discoverable as those apps...