Just about all of us who write here are iPhone app junkies, and many of you who visit regularly have shown that you are as well.  So it ‘s a good bet that many of you, like us, have a sort of love/hate relationship with the App Store.  You have to love it for all […]
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New Year’s Resolutions, for the App Store

Dec 15th 2009 by

App Store Note

Just about all of us who write here are iPhone app junkies, and many of you who visit regularly have shown that you are as well.  So it ‘s a good bet that many of you, like us, have a sort of love/hate relationship with the App Store.  You have to love it for all that it has done for mobile apps distribution as a whole, how it revolutionized that whole area, and for just serving up lots of great apps we love.

Then again, it is also the source of enormous frustration for many of us “ and especially for many of the great developers who are the ones putting in the hard work and brain power behind all those apps we love.

With all that mind, a few of us on the JAiB team set out to come up with a little New Year ‘s Resolutions list for the App Store.

We ‘re hoping that the App Store will kick off 2010 with a big desire for self-improvement, and that it will have at least some of these points as goals to achieve:

— Overhaul the Approvals Process – knock it all the way down to where only soundness of code and security are reviewed (only exception to above should be knocking back porn apps, and ensuring adult rating applied where appropriate)

— Allow free trials – via free app and then in-app purchase, or whatever works

— Communicate better with developers during app submission process – much better.

— Communicate better with developers. In all areas. Get their input on how to improve the store.

— Allow some form of upgrade pricing

— Find more and better ways to aid users in the apps discovery process

— Provide a 2-way forum, where the devs can respond to their app’s reviews

— Create some sort of ‘Priority Queue’ for urgent bug fixes from trusted developers

— Give us better ways to arrange our apps and home screens – MUCH, much better ways

— Allow some launcher apps and folders / organizing apps to help with the above

— Give us some new UI options – either substantial evolutions of springboard, or replacements for it

— Hire more reviewers “ reduce the ratio of new apps submitted per week vs number of reviewers to something less than 250-1

–Cut down on spam apps

— Tell customers when they already ****ing own the app.

— When an app is running a sale, include the local time that a sale will end

— Allow a 10-30 second video preview of gameplay

— Update apps correctly, for the love of god!

— Handle multiple iTunes accounts better

— Provide a "demo-mode" as an option for devs, say 14-days then the user can use in-app purchase to upgrade to full version

— Allow bug fix updates to go live without a multi-week approval process, or allow an app to update itself over-the-air.

— Provide push notification alert when updates are available for any app you own. Have an option to turn on push alerts on selected apps

— Make the URLs/links in the app store descriptions clickable, or at least allow me to select/copy the text.

— Find more and better ways to aid users in the apps discovery
process -> Add more lists and filtering options: Best of today/this week/
month/year; Sort by: Review Score/Downloads/Downloads this week etc.
The same concept that youtube and other flash video sites do so well.

— Better community integration -> Let us rate other reviewers/commenters, like on blogs. Therefore, reviews from "trusted reviewers" are more valuable, and we
can filter out the idiots. Basically, what the cutting edge comment
systems are doing.

— Require devs to add compatibility information, since the platform is
getting fragmented. Especially for games and augmented reality apps
-> e.g. 3GS 100% functionality, 3G reduced draw distance, 2G
reduced framerate -> or in form of a list: Uses GPS, Camera, Magnetometer, etc. Maybe
Apple could even integrate automagically checking that against the
devices registered to the account, so users are warned when they buy
an app that won’t work.

— Instead of creating a ‘Premium’ apps area which has often been rumored to help with discovery, create a ‘Novelty Apps’ area (so as not to say crap apps) and hive off tens of thousands of flatulence and other pure novelty apps over to there, to aid in discovery. When browsing apps, filter out the apps that haven’t been updated for a long time 6-12mos+.

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Please note, I realize a few of the above points sound like duplicates.  Since five of us shared ideas on this post “ myself, Thomas, Josh, Brad, and Felix “ I chose to leave in a few that overlapped but were expressed slightly differently by different writers.

Anyway, that ‘s our list “ fair amount of work there for the good old App Store.  What do you think?  Agree with some / most / none of those?  What would you suggest to improve the App Store next year?

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