0:00:00Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing
0:00:04news of note, denial of development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith.
0:00:08I'm an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number
0:00:11176, and today is Thursday, March 6th. Developing Perspective was never longer than 15 minutes,
0:00:18so let's get started.
0:00:19All right, so this is going to be part two of my series about towards a better app store,
0:00:24practical things that I think we can do to make the app store a better place. But before
0:00:28Before I dive into that, I just want to do a quick aside to follow up about the request
0:00:33I had two episodes ago to asking people for reviews for the show, whether it made any
0:00:37difference in iTunes, everyone always says it does.
0:00:40Thank you to all the people who contributed.
0:00:42I think I had something like 150, 200 reviews over the last couple of weeks, which is awesome
0:00:47and amazing and thank you for that.
0:00:49It appears to have had no impact as far as I can measure or tell on my download numbers,
0:00:53the visibility in iTunes, being featured, ranked, anything like that.
0:00:57So thanks, I appreciate it, but just this is an interesting thing to find.
0:01:02It doesn't seem to be quite as important as people may otherwise think.
0:01:05Maybe it will help in terms of gradually growing listenership, in terms of people see it in
0:01:09iTunes and it has a nice review.
0:01:10Maybe it will help there, but certainly nothing dramatic, but I really appreciate you all
0:01:15contributing.
0:01:16All right, so I'm going to get into the main topic today, and today the aspect of the App
0:01:21Store I'm going to tackle today is its size.
0:01:24It seems a reasonable place to start, especially given that a lot of the other issues in the
0:01:27the other challenges and the other things that I'm going to be talking about derive
0:01:31directly from the challenges of scale, of size, of there being over a million applications
0:01:36listed on the App Store. That a lot of the things like search or categorization or those
0:01:41types of issues are driven by the size of it, why they become so hard, why it becomes
0:01:45so tricky to give a customer a good experience in those is because the App Store is so big,
0:01:50because it has a million items. If you imagine a store with that many items and you were
0:01:55are trying to find something in it,
0:01:57I don't know exactly what the equivalent is,
0:01:59but it seems like that's a very big store.
0:02:01I don't know if that's a Super Walmart, if that's
0:02:04going to Costco.
0:02:05I imagine it's even bigger than that,
0:02:07in terms of trying to imagine what a million items in a store
0:02:09would look like.
0:02:10It's pretty daunting.
0:02:12But it's an interesting thing, too,
0:02:14because the size of the App Store
0:02:16is something that is so often thrown around
0:02:18as this valuable or useful metric for judging
0:02:21the health and vitality of the ecosystem.
0:02:24I'll hear Tim Cook talking to the Wall Street Journal,
0:02:27and he'll brag on how many apps they have,
0:02:29how many apps they have, compared to so-and-so,
0:02:32compared to such-and-such.
0:02:33Like, that is something that they have loved getting.
0:02:35Every time you get a keynote, they're
0:02:36always up there throwing it around.
0:02:38Hey, man, we've got a million apps.
0:02:39We've got 800,000 apps.
0:02:40We've got 400,000 iPad apps.
0:02:44And I understand that there's a certain value
0:02:46in having a diverse and deep inventory in your store
0:02:50to a certain point.
0:02:51At a certain level, you need to have
0:02:53that diverse deep inventory in order
0:02:55that you can reasonably meet everybody's needs.
0:02:59And so having a certain amount of volume is important.
0:03:03It's an important thing as a customer to go into a store,
0:03:05knowing that there's a reasonable expectation
0:03:07that you're going to find what you're looking for.
0:03:10But at this point, I think we're well beyond that point.
0:03:14We're well beyond the point where the size getting larger
0:03:17is a good thing.
0:03:18Where the size getting larger is an important thing
0:03:20making the customer be able to find things that they want.
0:03:24The problem you have now is you have duplication.
0:03:26You have people spamming the App Store.
0:03:28You have decay of old apps.
0:03:30You have-- it makes things like search tricky.
0:03:33It makes editorial staff curating new arrivals more
0:03:37daunting, because there's just more things that they
0:03:39have to try and filter through.
0:03:42So as size as it is now, what I would argue
0:03:44is that the App Store's size is hurting it,
0:03:48rather than helping it.
0:03:49And I don't exactly know when that transition point happened,
0:03:53but it seems like it's probably about a year ago,
0:03:56if I had to just sort of generally put my finger on it,
0:03:58that about a year ago, it kind of hit that point where
0:04:01it wasn't so much about developers branching out
0:04:05and finding all the little niches that needed to be filled
0:04:07so much as having done all that reasonably.
0:04:11And now it's kind of just being piled on top and on top
0:04:14and on top in a way that isn't constructive.
0:04:17At the same time, it's not an easy problem to solve.
0:04:20I mean, how do you determine what apps should be allowed
0:04:23and which ones shouldn't?
0:04:24How many Flappy Bird clones should
0:04:26be allowed to exist on the store?
0:04:28Five, 10, 1,000?
0:04:30At what point do we have enough of those to that we don't
0:04:33really need to add more?
0:04:35And I don't know if you can easily say that.
0:04:39It's kind of completely arbitrary to say.
0:04:40I remember they were saying about a third of games
0:04:43in the couple weeks after Flappy Bird was pulled
0:04:46were clones of it.
0:04:47Like, is that a good thing?
0:04:48Is that a sign of vibrance and vitality?
0:04:50Or is that just clogging up the works with junk?
0:04:55And another thing, too, is it becomes incredibly hard,
0:04:58I think, on the app review side.
0:05:01I have a lot of sympathy, honestly, for app review
0:05:04when I think about the size and the scope of the problem
0:05:07that they're dealing with.
0:05:09There's a great chart.
0:05:10If you chart the number of new apps approved each day,
0:05:14which is a number I'm getting from 148apps.biz, who
0:05:17has a great resource on App Store metrics.
0:05:20If you look at the chart of that, which I'll
0:05:22have in the show notes, and I also
0:05:23recommend just looking at the source data for it.
0:05:26But at this point, App Review is at a pretty consistent basis,
0:05:31dealing with at least 1,000 new apps each approved every day.
0:05:37And that's not updates.
0:05:38That's not the number of updates that they're
0:05:40having to look at as well.
0:05:41Just new apps that are being approved each day, it's about 1,000, and has been around
0:05:47a very steady trajectory growing basically since the App Store was launched five years
0:05:52ago.
0:05:53And that has got to be an incredibly daunting problem in terms of managing that.
0:05:59But at the same time, if they don't, if they don't continue to be very strenuous and tight
0:06:07on that, then the quality will fall.
0:06:10And that's also not good.
0:06:13So what does that mean?
0:06:15What is that-- where does that kind of leave us?
0:06:17And that will kind of get into my recommendations.
0:06:20But before that, I have a quick aside about this.
0:06:23It was a couple of assumptions that I'm just going to make
0:06:26about recommendations that I have that I'm not going to gate
0:06:29them against this or otherwise.
0:06:30I'm just going to say that I want
0:06:33to assume that Apple is constrained by neither budget
0:06:36nor desire in making the App Store better.
0:06:40That somewhere in their massive profit and loss,
0:06:43they have the money to afford the people they would need
0:06:45in order to manage any whatever policies they
0:06:47wanted to implement.
0:06:49And then two, they have the desire and the motivation
0:06:52to do that, to make the App Store an amazing place
0:06:55to find software.
0:06:56That they-- creating an experience
0:06:58where any app a customer downloads
0:07:00is going to lead to some amount of satisfaction,
0:07:03lead to that customer wanting to buy more and more apps,
0:07:06in the hopes that ultimately then they're
0:07:08going to be buying more and more phones, which
0:07:09is great for Apple and great for app developers.
0:07:12So I want to get into my actual recommendations, though.
0:07:15So what can we do about volume?
0:07:18And dealing with volume is actually a really hard problem.
0:07:20It's something that, honestly, I've
0:07:22been struggling with for the last couple of weeks
0:07:24as I've been preparing for this series,
0:07:26because originally I kind of started
0:07:29from that place of saying, well, which are the good apps?
0:07:31Which are the ones that deserve to be in the store?
0:07:33Which are these apps that if I was sitting--
0:07:36If you showed me a random cross-section of the App Store,
0:07:39I could point to it with my apps and say, get rid of that,
0:07:41get rid of that, get rid of that.
0:07:43That one should stay.
0:07:43That one should stay.
0:07:44And honestly, I think I could apply my own tastes
0:07:47in that way.
0:07:49And that would work for the App Store that's best for Dave.
0:07:53But that really doesn't generalize,
0:07:56because the things that I like and the tastes that I have
0:07:59aren't necessarily things that are appropriate to apply
0:08:01as gates to the App Store.
0:08:03Because I know there are apps that I don't like
0:08:05that I think other people do like.
0:08:07And it gets a very slippery slope, kind of tricky thing,
0:08:10to try and impose that kind of strongly opinionated taste
0:08:16onto what apps go into the store.
0:08:18Now, there's some degree of this that you can always--
0:08:21that it's going to have to be applied.
0:08:22There is some amount of things that Apple says,
0:08:25this is allowed, this isn't.
0:08:26This is allowed, and this isn't.
0:08:28And there's a certain degree of taste going into that.
0:08:30But it's not quite as personal or as qualitative
0:08:35as it would have to be for me to be able to say only the good apps should be in the store.
0:08:41If that was my recommendation, it would be kind of hollow because, well, what does that
0:08:45mean? How do you define quality? It's a very hard problem. And so I had to kind of back
0:08:51off from that. I kind of had to think that's not going to work. I can't invent this set
0:08:59of criteria that would allow the Apple to say, "These apps out. These apps good." Because
0:09:05the result is that the App Store would likely suffer from that. It would be more boring.
0:09:09It would have less diversity. It wouldn't be quite as fun of a place to work. But they
0:09:15still need to do something. I think they still need to do something to contract the size
0:09:19of the store, to raise the average quality of apps up while at the same time doing it
0:09:24in a reasonable way. And I ended up coming at something that's derived from an old parenting
0:09:31adage that you should have few rules but enforce them strictly. And I think that's something
0:09:37that I think the App Store should do to apply to this situation. And specifically, if I
0:09:43was going to put that into a more specific recommendation, is that apps should be required
0:09:48to pass approval on an ongoing basis. That the app review guidelines, which generally
0:09:56I would say are very good, they've evolved, they've adapted. I think Apple has done some
0:10:00pretty smart and clever things in terms of the way that they've adjusted them, the way
0:10:04that they still were things, that they're a little bit of gray area but not too much.
0:10:08By and large, the actual rules themselves, if you read through them, I think are a pretty
0:10:13a good set of saying this is a great baseline for what an app and the App Store should be.
0:10:20But except in exceptional situations where it turns out that an app was hiding something
0:10:25from App Review or it turns out it's malware or something like that, once an app's approved
0:10:29right now, it is always available. The issue isn't so much that the rules are wrong, the
0:10:36issue is when those rules are applied. Right now, once an app's approved, it'll just sit
0:10:42in the App Store forever, even if it wouldn't necessarily
0:10:46pass muster now.
0:10:48I think of all these apps that-- for example,
0:10:51the App Store doesn't allow emoji unlocking apps anymore.
0:10:55I think that was one of these things that they no longer
0:10:57allow.
0:10:58But there's a whole bunch of them
0:10:59that are still sitting in the App Store that are still
0:11:02getting downloaded that are kind of pointless.
0:11:06But they're in the store because Apple has this tendency
0:11:08to not go back and reapply the rules to existing things.
0:11:14Now obviously that's a little bit dangerous, or scary maybe,
0:11:18as a developer, that I could have something approved
0:11:21and then it comes down a couple years later,
0:11:23a couple months later, I come back
0:11:24and Apple says, hey, that's actually not cool anymore.
0:11:27But that situation isn't really practically different
0:11:29than where we are now.
0:11:30Because if I ever want to do an update to that app, which
0:11:32hopefully I would want to, I'm going
0:11:34to have that same criteria applied to me.
0:11:36It would only really apply to these cases
0:11:38where apps are being abandoned or shelved but are still sitting around in the store.
0:11:44And it seemed like something too where once I kind of hit on that as a concept that every
0:11:50app in the store should be able to pass review today, that's a perfectly reasonable thing.
0:11:57At least on the surface it seems. That if you have a set of criteria that any new app
0:12:03it has to meet to be in the store,
0:12:06that same criteria should be applied
0:12:07to apps on an ongoing basis.
0:12:11Now, exactly how you do that doesn't matter quite so much
0:12:14to me.
0:12:14You could imagine a variety of things
0:12:16where on a monthly basis every app is reviewed,
0:12:19or on a quarterly basis, or honestly, it
0:12:21would be an improvement even if it was just on an annual basis.
0:12:23That on the anniversary of an app, if it hasn't been updated,
0:12:27it gets evaluated, or something like that.
0:12:30And you then get a rejection.
0:12:33and likely it would be some kind of time bound thing.
0:12:35Like you don't necessarily immediately pull it
0:12:36from the store.
0:12:37You say you have 30 days to submit
0:12:39an update that passes review or your app will be delisted.
0:12:42Something like that.
0:12:43And this simple rule, I think, would apply more generally
0:12:47to a lot of other problems.
0:12:49I think of the issue of abandonware in the App Store,
0:12:54which I think is actually kind of a big problem,
0:12:56that I think a huge proportion of the apps in the store
0:12:59are kind of abandoned, that aren't updated for iOS 7,
0:13:02for example, that aren't taking advantage of new technologies
0:13:05that may be broken in a variety of ways,
0:13:08that wouldn't mean that they wouldn't pass review now.
0:13:11But the developer has no incentive
0:13:12to take them from the store, and so they just sit there.
0:13:16It's like since February 1, all new submissions to the App
0:13:19Store have to be built against the latest SDK,
0:13:21and to quote Apple, "be optimized for iOS 7."
0:13:24And if that's going to apply to new apps,
0:13:26it should apply to old apps as well,
0:13:28with some reasonable boundaries to it.
0:13:31But this is the thing that I think
0:13:32would be the most rational approach for contracting
0:13:36the App Store, to say, we have these rules.
0:13:39We have these guidelines.
0:13:40We've put a lot of time and energy and effort
0:13:42into making these guidelines what they should be.
0:13:44Let's apply it to every app.
0:13:46Let's make sure that any app in the store that a customer buys
0:13:49is going to meet those guidelines.
0:13:51Because right now, the honest answer
0:13:52is, unless it was very recently approved, it probably doesn't.
0:13:56And that's not good for customers.
0:13:58That's not good for developers.
0:14:00That's putting in a situation where people
0:14:02are going to be disappointed.
0:14:03And that's the thing that worries me.
0:14:06It's like the stated goal of the guidelines--
0:14:08this is from Apple's website-- is
0:14:09to ensure that all apps are reliable, perform as expected,
0:14:13and are free of offensive material.
0:14:16And I think every app should meet those criteria.
0:14:18And I think as you created a system where
0:14:20you had to re-evaluate apps on an ongoing basis,
0:14:23I think that would be an actual true statement.
0:14:25And that would be much better.
0:14:27All right, that's it for today's show.
0:14:29Like I said, this is part of probably going to be a seven or eight part series.
0:14:32I've got all kinds of other topics and things I'm going to be addressing for kind of trying
0:14:35to think of these similar kind of things.
0:14:37Like what are practical things that you could change the policy to that would make the App
0:14:41Store better?
0:14:42I'd really, really appreciate your feedback.
0:14:45If you have any thoughts or comments, please let me know.
0:14:47This is an ongoing thing and I really want some discussion to hopefully come out of it.
0:14:52If you want to get a hold of me, I'm @_davidsmith on Twitter.
0:14:55You can email me, david@developmentprospectives.com.
0:14:57Otherwise, have a great week.
0:14:58Happy coding.