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As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. "And there are all these stupid requirements. I need at least X screenshots, and they have to be t

As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. "And there are all these stupid requirements. I need at least X screenshots, and they have to be this exact resolution blah blah blah. On top of that, it took so long to get approved. My ADHD brain really suffered waiting for the gratification." I would hate to browse a store where the products didn't have at least X screenshots with at least X resolution, etc etc. The process for getting into the store shouldn't be easy and the quality bar should be high. I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary.

bredren 6y ago
The hurdles are high but if you’ve been doing mobile releases for a while, they aren’t that bad. There are more asset requirements now but I think dealing with iTunes Connect back in the day and all of its friction was harder.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  They really aren't that high. I had to create a listing for my test apps at work one day and I was able to create everything I needed in like 30 minutes, tops. And that was without actually knowing what I'd need ahead of time.
  - bredren 6y ago
    shrug some people struggle with it after also forking over the payments. App Store asset and meta wrangling is a skill in of itself.
serf 6y ago
> As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. Presumably you're speaking from the Apple side of things, because the Play Store is a fragmented wasteland of low-effort/sometimes-malicious shovelware that barely functions. To me that means that the hoops Google makes one jump through for app publishing are accomplishing next to nothing with regards to app quality.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  > the Play Store is a fragmented wasteland of low-effort shovelware Wait how does this differ from the appstore?
  - osrec 6y ago
    Agree - both app stores seem to have their fair share of junky apps.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    If you think that AppStore is a wasteland, don’t even look at Play Store unless you want a PTSD.
    - jfrunyon 6y ago
      Having used both, they're both pretty evenly awful.
    - seszett 6y ago
      They're both quite awful but one thing that really irks me is that on the Apple Store, every search for something first shows a result from a competitor product. Search for WhatsApp? First result is an ad for Twitter and WhatsApp is the second result, half hidden (on an iPhone SE). Search for my bank? First result is another bank. Firefox? First result is Chrome. Doctolib (the app for taking covid vaccination appointments in France, and the main doctors appointment service in general)? Another one that's probably more or less a scam. Google Maps? You get an ad for Coyote. It wouldn't be so bad if the ads didn't look almost exactly like real search results, and if the actual results were not hidden below the bottom of the screen. The general quality of apps on the Google Play Store might be worse, but this behaviour never happens there. When you look for an app name, you get that app and not one of their competitors that paid more.
    - fatnoah 6y ago
      The Windows App Store has entered the game...
flohofwoe 6y ago
Why would you care about applications that you wouldn't use or even know that they exist though? Do you also care about web pages you don't know about? The store just wouldn't put such "non-conforming" apps at the top of search results.
- vuciv1 6y ago
  This is how I feel. Regardless of whether or not my app has images or not, nobody is going to come across it. I don't think I've ever just gone "App Window Shopping" Maybe other people do, though. I don't know.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    I do app window shopping, but only on F-Droid. I rarely install any of the apps I see, but occasionally I stumble across an open-source tool I didn't know I wanted. E.g. recently I found Pocket Paint, a neat little drawing app. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/ https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/ I mostly use it for quickly annotating screenshots, which it's much better suited for than my previous solution of just using the stock image viewer's editing capabilities. Especially Pocket Paint's layer support is quite handy for quickly hiding/showing annotations.
  - jadavies 6y ago
    Oddly enough I was just thinking the same thing. From what I can remember every ( Android) app that I've ever installed has come from a recommendation from somewhere else. I can't see how you'd ever get any traction if you mainly relied on the app store search results.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    That happened in the very first few years of the app stores. People were paying ridiculous amounts of money for them, especially on the App Store. Then the stores were snowed under with apps, undiscoverability prevailed, lately complemented by the fear of installing badly vetted malicious apps. I didn't install any game on my last two phones. I install only mandated apps (banking, car sharing, etc) and open source apps after I checked that they actually have a repository and they are not abandoned. I'm rather using F-Droid than the Play Store now.
avereveard 6y ago
How do I unlock that mythical high quality app experience? 99% of the stuff is crap adware and copypasted apps, letting some indie in it is not going to significantly move the average.
- zikzak 6y ago
  Not sure if joking but I search for apps on /r/androidapps.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Step one is becoming an Apple shareholder. The next step is posting about how great they are on the internet.
gnicholas 6y ago
Also, the screenshots and such aren't required if you just want to use TestFlight to share with a few friends. Of course, each build only lasts 90 days, so that could get tedious in the long run.
- issamehh 6y ago
  I can't speak from a position of knowledge as I don't handle the Apple side of things at all but we've had our builds removed from testflight for petty reasons like that and it was up for significantly less than 90 days.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Tired of this take. Why would removing these rules suddenly cause all apps to goto shit? You can't stop shitty apps by imposing more and more rules anyway.
unethical_ban 6y ago
Informing the user vs. imposing upon the user. For the discerning app downloader such as yourself, Play Store could have a tier of approval levels for apps. Toy apps and ones for friends like this could be rated lowest tier, and buyer beware. Imagine if a website had to prove its value and CSS quality before getting a domain name.
darksaints 6y ago
You mean the arbitrary process that lets through absolute garbage clone apps everywhere, but blocks extremely high quality open source software because it can't control and monetize it? Yeah, no thanks.
throwaway894345 6y ago
It would be great if the stringent rules filtered out the garbage apps (the fraudulent apps, the ad-heavy apps, the apps with overtly fake reviews, etc) which feature prominently in app store search results. As such, these “stringent rules” feel like quality theater.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  > the apps with overtly fake reviews View the app reviews in another region. The amount of spam is significantly lower (~0%) and it's mostly people complaining.
ksec 6y ago
> I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. That is assuming those rules are fair to a degree, not Anti Competitive and they do impose it for the quality and security as they say they do. All of which I will strongly support. But they dont. ScreenShots isn't even the tip of the Iceberg.
ConfusedDog 6y ago
I keep hearing how App store is stringent on rules. There are plenty of terrible apps either don't do they advertise or totally trying to scam users. I have reported to Apple before, and they just say you can uninstall them and get a refund but they won't do anything about them.
croh 6y ago
> As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. I have seen this view lot from apple users. And I really feel sad that no body gives the enough credit to dev community because of whom you're getting these apps in first place, not from Apple directly (And I am sure, if they do, heck they will charge you like hell). Please understand it is mutual platform for apple/google, devs and consumers. Now days, Apple and consumers has not much to lose as they have enough apps but dev's life is becoming difficult day by day - apple/google account charges, huge margin-cut over in-app-payments, rejection without any proper reason, no immediate support, bad apis and documentation. I am happy I quit professional mobile app making for good. > I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary. I wish you could pay devs instead of Apple to held this bar high.
- f6v 6y ago
  > I wish you could pay devs instead of Apple to held this bar high. Let’s be honest, the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart. At the dawn of the app stores you could find a ton of free apps and games from hobbyists, but now it’s all about squeezing money. And the guy in the article didn’t have to publish the app in the first place, could have uploaded the app to the phone directly through the dev tools.
  - croh 6y ago
    > Let’s be honest, the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart. Apple/Google take 30 % of that fart, so you guess what they get at end. > At the dawn of the app stores you could find a ton of free apps and games from hobbyists, it’s all about squeezing money. Well apple charge you $100 per year to upload app, are you kidding ? Plus they don't let you have another store. Everything should must go thr' their wall, so no chance to avoid charge. > And the guy in the article didn’t have to publish the app in the first place, could have uploaded the app to the phone directly through the dev tools. How many phones he can upload it honestly ? Anyway, the point I am tring to say is, Apple/Google are not valuing dev community as they used to and devs are taken granted for. They should care devs as they care for consumers PR as it is mutual platform
jariel 6y ago
"I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary. " I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high! I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used. This logic is not working. Apple, and ABC corp, and any other companies can have app stores. If you want to shop at the 'absurdly high standards store' that's totally fine, but otherwise it's anti-competitive. There's no reason 'Person A' can't send an app to 'Person B' if they want. It works on Mac, Windows, Android, Linux and everywhere else.
- oriolid 6y ago
  > I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high! > I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used. I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I live there is a tax-funded Safety and Chemicals Agency whose job is to keep dangerous and malicious physical products out of the market. There is no equivalent for software.
  - onikolas7 6y ago
    Sure there is, its called a package repository. See Debian or Arch for some good examples.
    - oriolid 6y ago
      They're specific to Linux distribution families, so they don't really apply to those who are running Android or iOS. Also, getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store (see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#How_do_I_get_a_sponsor_for_my_package.3F https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#How_do_I_get_a_spon...) and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app.
      - hoophoop 6y ago
        > getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store ... and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app. Good. That's why the quality is so high.
Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
Can we not have random inappropriate and uninformed comments about ADHD, please? Whether intended or not, this comment plays into old, tired stereotyped thinking that really, all ADHD people need is to have more self-control. Thinking that ADHD is about self-control and not wanting to delay gratification shows a complete lack of understanding of what the disorder actually entails (in particular, ADHD qualifies as neurodiversity, and shares many genetic indicators and symptoms with autism spectrum conditions). On top of that, it's completely unnecessary for the point you are trying to make.
- hibbelig 6y ago
  The ADHD bit was in the OP. Don’t scold your parent poster
- askafriend 6y ago
  I was directly quoting the article...
bluecalm 6y ago
Great, I am with you. The app store should have strict standards so you know what you're getting if you purchase from there. Fantastic service for people who want that. Now, please just let me publish an app not using the store. Me and other people like me prefer lower burden and lower quality. We won't mess up your perfect store, you don't even need to know we exist. Just let us enjoy our little world.
yarcob 6y ago
I think you misunderstood what the poster wrote. The complaint was: > and they have to be this exact resolution And your comment was: > screenshots with at least X resolution The problem isn't that Apple forces you to have a high quality screenshot, they require a handful of very specific pixel dimensions, don't tell you what device that corresponds to, so you have to spend way to much time trying to make screen shots on different devices with the simulator and it's annoying, especially if you don't do it often. Also, they don't actually check if the screenshot is a real screenshot or of good quality. One time I just gave up and resized the screenshots to the required pixel dimensions and they accepted it.
lenkite 6y ago
I really wish Apple and Google had a Beta/Alpha Store. Folks like you can use the Primary Privileged Store. The less expensive, cheap/free and not ship-shape-to-AppGoog standards can be in the Alpha-Beta Cheapskate Store. I won't be surprised if this store actually became more popular than the Primary one.
zo1 6y ago
The app-stores are filled with millions of garbage apps despite the ridiculous restrictions.
- zepto 6y ago
  At least you can see screenshots of what those ‘garbage apps’ are.
swiley 6y ago
The affect here is that everyone writing apps for fun or passion (or just to share a quick solution to a personal problem) gets filtered out while the scammers who pay freelancers some fraction of minimum wage fill the store with garbage.

bredren 6y ago

The hurdles are high but if you’ve been doing mobile releases for a while, they aren’t that bad. There are more asset requirements now but I think dealing with iTunes Connect back in the day and all of its friction was harder.

wccrawford 6y ago
They really aren't that high. I had to create a listing for my test apps at work one day and I was able to create everything I needed in like 30 minutes, tops. And that was without actually knowing what I'd need ahead of time.
- bredren 6y ago
  shrug some people struggle with it after also forking over the payments. App Store asset and meta wrangling is a skill in of itself.

serf 6y ago

> As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. Presumably you're speaking from the Apple side of things, because the Play Store is a fragmented wasteland of low-effort/sometimes-malicious shovelware that barely functions. To me that means that the hoops Google makes one jump through for app publishing are accomplishing next to nothing with regards to app quality.

Hammershaft 6y ago
> the Play Store is a fragmented wasteland of low-effort shovelware Wait how does this differ from the appstore?
- osrec 6y ago
  Agree - both app stores seem to have their fair share of junky apps.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  If you think that AppStore is a wasteland, don’t even look at Play Store unless you want a PTSD.
  - jfrunyon 6y ago
    Having used both, they're both pretty evenly awful.
  - seszett 6y ago
    They're both quite awful but one thing that really irks me is that on the Apple Store, every search for something first shows a result from a competitor product. Search for WhatsApp? First result is an ad for Twitter and WhatsApp is the second result, half hidden (on an iPhone SE). Search for my bank? First result is another bank. Firefox? First result is Chrome. Doctolib (the app for taking covid vaccination appointments in France, and the main doctors appointment service in general)? Another one that's probably more or less a scam. Google Maps? You get an ad for Coyote. It wouldn't be so bad if the ads didn't look almost exactly like real search results, and if the actual results were not hidden below the bottom of the screen. The general quality of apps on the Google Play Store might be worse, but this behaviour never happens there. When you look for an app name, you get that app and not one of their competitors that paid more.
  - fatnoah 6y ago
    The Windows App Store has entered the game...

flohofwoe 6y ago

Why would you care about applications that you wouldn't use or even know that they exist though? Do you also care about web pages you don't know about? The store just wouldn't put such "non-conforming" apps at the top of search results.

vuciv1 6y ago
This is how I feel. Regardless of whether or not my app has images or not, nobody is going to come across it. I don't think I've ever just gone "App Window Shopping" Maybe other people do, though. I don't know.
- yorwba 6y ago
  I do app window shopping, but only on F-Droid. I rarely install any of the apps I see, but occasionally I stumble across an open-source tool I didn't know I wanted. E.g. recently I found Pocket Paint, a neat little drawing app. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/ https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/ I mostly use it for quickly annotating screenshots, which it's much better suited for than my previous solution of just using the stock image viewer's editing capabilities. Especially Pocket Paint's layer support is quite handy for quickly hiding/showing annotations.
- jadavies 6y ago
  Oddly enough I was just thinking the same thing. From what I can remember every ( Android) app that I've ever installed has come from a recommendation from somewhere else. I can't see how you'd ever get any traction if you mainly relied on the app store search results.
- pmontra 6y ago
  That happened in the very first few years of the app stores. People were paying ridiculous amounts of money for them, especially on the App Store. Then the stores were snowed under with apps, undiscoverability prevailed, lately complemented by the fear of installing badly vetted malicious apps. I didn't install any game on my last two phones. I install only mandated apps (banking, car sharing, etc) and open source apps after I checked that they actually have a repository and they are not abandoned. I'm rather using F-Droid than the Play Store now.

avereveard 6y ago

How do I unlock that mythical high quality app experience? 99% of the stuff is crap adware and copypasted apps, letting some indie in it is not going to significantly move the average.

zikzak 6y ago
Not sure if joking but I search for apps on /r/androidapps.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Step one is becoming an Apple shareholder. The next step is posting about how great they are on the internet.

gnicholas 6y ago

Also, the screenshots and such aren't required if you just want to use TestFlight to share with a few friends. Of course, each build only lasts 90 days, so that could get tedious in the long run.

issamehh 6y ago
I can't speak from a position of knowledge as I don't handle the Apple side of things at all but we've had our builds removed from testflight for petty reasons like that and it was up for significantly less than 90 days.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

Tired of this take. Why would removing these rules suddenly cause all apps to goto shit? You can't stop shitty apps by imposing more and more rules anyway.

unethical_ban 6y ago

Informing the user vs. imposing upon the user. For the discerning app downloader such as yourself, Play Store could have a tier of approval levels for apps. Toy apps and ones for friends like this could be rated lowest tier, and buyer beware. Imagine if a website had to prove its value and CSS quality before getting a domain name.

darksaints 6y ago

You mean the arbitrary process that lets through absolute garbage clone apps everywhere, but blocks extremely high quality open source software because it can't control and monetize it? Yeah, no thanks.

throwaway894345 6y ago

It would be great if the stringent rules filtered out the garbage apps (the fraudulent apps, the ad-heavy apps, the apps with overtly fake reviews, etc) which feature prominently in app store search results. As such, these “stringent rules” feel like quality theater.

withinboredom 6y ago
> the apps with overtly fake reviews View the app reviews in another region. The amount of spam is significantly lower (~0%) and it's mostly people complaining.

ksec 6y ago

> I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. That is assuming those rules are fair to a degree, not Anti Competitive and they do impose it for the quality and security as they say they do. All of which I will strongly support. But they dont. ScreenShots isn't even the tip of the Iceberg.

ConfusedDog 6y ago

I keep hearing how App store is stringent on rules. There are plenty of terrible apps either don't do they advertise or totally trying to scam users. I have reported to Apple before, and they just say you can uninstall them and get a refund but they won't do anything about them.

croh 6y ago

> As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules. I have seen this view lot from apple users. And I really feel sad that no body gives the enough credit to dev community because of whom you're getting these apps in first place, not from Apple directly (And I am sure, if they do, heck they will charge you like hell). Please understand it is mutual platform for apple/google, devs and consumers. Now days, Apple and consumers has not much to lose as they have enough apps but dev's life is becoming difficult day by day - apple/google account charges, huge margin-cut over in-app-payments, rejection without any proper reason, no immediate support, bad apis and documentation. I am happy I quit professional mobile app making for good. > I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary. I wish you could pay devs instead of Apple to held this bar high.

f6v 6y ago
> I wish you could pay devs instead of Apple to held this bar high. Let’s be honest, the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart. At the dawn of the app stores you could find a ton of free apps and games from hobbyists, but now it’s all about squeezing money. And the guy in the article didn’t have to publish the app in the first place, could have uploaded the app to the phone directly through the dev tools.
- croh 6y ago
  > Let’s be honest, the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart. Apple/Google take 30 % of that fart, so you guess what they get at end. > At the dawn of the app stores you could find a ton of free apps and games from hobbyists, it’s all about squeezing money. Well apple charge you $100 per year to upload app, are you kidding ? Plus they don't let you have another store. Everything should must go thr' their wall, so no chance to avoid charge. > And the guy in the article didn’t have to publish the app in the first place, could have uploaded the app to the phone directly through the dev tools. How many phones he can upload it honestly ? Anyway, the point I am tring to say is, Apple/Google are not valuing dev community as they used to and devs are taken granted for. They should care devs as they care for consumers PR as it is mutual platform

jariel 6y ago

"I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary. " I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high! I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used. This logic is not working. Apple, and ABC corp, and any other companies can have app stores. If you want to shop at the 'absurdly high standards store' that's totally fine, but otherwise it's anti-competitive. There's no reason 'Person A' can't send an app to 'Person B' if they want. It works on Mac, Windows, Android, Linux and everywhere else.

oriolid 6y ago
> I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high! > I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used. I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I live there is a tax-funded Safety and Chemicals Agency whose job is to keep dangerous and malicious physical products out of the market. There is no equivalent for software.
- onikolas7 6y ago
  Sure there is, its called a package repository. See Debian or Arch for some good examples.
  - oriolid 6y ago
    They're specific to Linux distribution families, so they don't really apply to those who are running Android or iOS. Also, getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store (see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#How_do_I_get_a_sponsor_for_my_package.3F https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#How_do_I_get_a_spon...) and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app.
    - hoophoop 6y ago
      > getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store ... and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app. Good. That's why the quality is so high.

Gene_Parmesan 6y ago

Can we not have random inappropriate and uninformed comments about ADHD, please? Whether intended or not, this comment plays into old, tired stereotyped thinking that really, all ADHD people need is to have more self-control. Thinking that ADHD is about self-control and not wanting to delay gratification shows a complete lack of understanding of what the disorder actually entails (in particular, ADHD qualifies as neurodiversity, and shares many genetic indicators and symptoms with autism spectrum conditions). On top of that, it's completely unnecessary for the point you are trying to make.

hibbelig 6y ago
The ADHD bit was in the OP. Don’t scold your parent poster
askafriend 6y ago
I was directly quoting the article...

bluecalm 6y ago

Great, I am with you. The app store should have strict standards so you know what you're getting if you purchase from there. Fantastic service for people who want that. Now, please just let me publish an app not using the store. Me and other people like me prefer lower burden and lower quality. We won't mess up your perfect store, you don't even need to know we exist. Just let us enjoy our little world.

yarcob 6y ago

I think you misunderstood what the poster wrote. The complaint was: > and they have to be this exact resolution And your comment was: > screenshots with at least X resolution The problem isn't that Apple forces you to have a high quality screenshot, they require a handful of very specific pixel dimensions, don't tell you what device that corresponds to, so you have to spend way to much time trying to make screen shots on different devices with the simulator and it's annoying, especially if you don't do it often. Also, they don't actually check if the screenshot is a real screenshot or of good quality. One time I just gave up and resized the screenshots to the required pixel dimensions and they accepted it.

lenkite 6y ago

I really wish Apple and Google had a Beta/Alpha Store. Folks like you can use the Primary Privileged Store. The less expensive, cheap/free and not ship-shape-to-AppGoog standards can be in the Alpha-Beta Cheapskate Store. I won't be surprised if this store actually became more popular than the Primary one.

zo1 6y ago

The app-stores are filled with millions of garbage apps despite the ridiculous restrictions.

zepto 6y ago
At least you can see screenshots of what those ‘garbage apps’ are.

swiley 6y ago

The affect here is that everyone writing apps for fun or passion (or just to share a quick solution to a personal problem) gets filtered out while the scammers who pay freelancers some fraction of minimum wage fill the store with garbage.