Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:04 ◼   ► news of note, denial of development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith.

00:00:08 ◼   ► I'm an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number

00:00:11 ◼   ► 176, and today is Thursday, March 6th. Developing Perspective was never longer than 15 minutes,

00:00:18 ◼   ► so let's get started.

00:00:19 ◼   ► All right, so this is going to be part two of my series about towards a better app store,

00:00:24 ◼   ► practical things that I think we can do to make the app store a better place. But before

00:00:28 ◼   ► Before I dive into that, I just want to do a quick aside to follow up about the request

00:00:33 ◼   ► I had two episodes ago to asking people for reviews for the show, whether it made any

00:00:37 ◼   ► difference in iTunes, everyone always says it does.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Thank you to all the people who contributed.

00:00:42 ◼   ► I think I had something like 150, 200 reviews over the last couple of weeks, which is awesome

00:00:47 ◼   ► and amazing and thank you for that.

00:00:49 ◼   ► It appears to have had no impact as far as I can measure or tell on my download numbers,

00:00:53 ◼   ► the visibility in iTunes, being featured, ranked, anything like that.

00:00:57 ◼   ► So thanks, I appreciate it, but just this is an interesting thing to find.

00:01:02 ◼   ► It doesn't seem to be quite as important as people may otherwise think.

00:01:05 ◼   ► Maybe it will help in terms of gradually growing listenership, in terms of people see it in

00:01:09 ◼   ► iTunes and it has a nice review.

00:01:10 ◼   ► Maybe it will help there, but certainly nothing dramatic, but I really appreciate you all

00:01:15 ◼   ► contributing.

00:01:16 ◼   ► All right, so I'm going to get into the main topic today, and today the aspect of the App

00:01:21 ◼   ► Store I'm going to tackle today is its size.

00:01:24 ◼   ► It seems a reasonable place to start, especially given that a lot of the other issues in the

00:01:27 ◼   ► the other challenges and the other things that I'm going to be talking about derive

00:01:31 ◼   ► directly from the challenges of scale, of size, of there being over a million applications

00:01:36 ◼   ► listed on the App Store. That a lot of the things like search or categorization or those

00:01:41 ◼   ► types of issues are driven by the size of it, why they become so hard, why it becomes

00:01:45 ◼   ► so tricky to give a customer a good experience in those is because the App Store is so big,

00:01:50 ◼   ► because it has a million items. If you imagine a store with that many items and you were

00:01:55 ◼   ► are trying to find something in it,

00:01:57 ◼   ► I don't know exactly what the equivalent is,

00:01:59 ◼   ► but it seems like that's a very big store.

00:02:01 ◼   ► I don't know if that's a Super Walmart, if that's

00:02:04 ◼   ► going to Costco.

00:02:05 ◼   ► I imagine it's even bigger than that,

00:02:07 ◼   ► in terms of trying to imagine what a million items in a store

00:02:09 ◼   ► would look like.

00:02:10 ◼   ► It's pretty daunting.

00:02:12 ◼   ► But it's an interesting thing, too,

00:02:14 ◼   ► because the size of the App Store

00:02:16 ◼   ► is something that is so often thrown around

00:02:18 ◼   ► as this valuable or useful metric for judging

00:02:21 ◼   ► the health and vitality of the ecosystem.

00:02:24 ◼   ► I'll hear Tim Cook talking to the Wall Street Journal,

00:02:27 ◼   ► and he'll brag on how many apps they have,

00:02:29 ◼   ► how many apps they have, compared to so-and-so,

00:02:32 ◼   ► compared to such-and-such.

00:02:33 ◼   ► Like, that is something that they have loved getting.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Every time you get a keynote, they're

00:02:36 ◼   ► always up there throwing it around.

00:02:38 ◼   ► Hey, man, we've got a million apps.

00:02:39 ◼   ► We've got 800,000 apps.

00:02:40 ◼   ► We've got 400,000 iPad apps.

00:02:44 ◼   ► And I understand that there's a certain value

00:02:46 ◼   ► in having a diverse and deep inventory in your store

00:02:50 ◼   ► to a certain point.

00:02:51 ◼   ► At a certain level, you need to have

00:02:53 ◼   ► that diverse deep inventory in order

00:02:55 ◼   ► that you can reasonably meet everybody's needs.

00:02:59 ◼   ► And so having a certain amount of volume is important.

00:03:03 ◼   ► It's an important thing as a customer to go into a store,

00:03:05 ◼   ► knowing that there's a reasonable expectation

00:03:07 ◼   ► that you're going to find what you're looking for.

00:03:10 ◼   ► But at this point, I think we're well beyond that point.

00:03:14 ◼   ► We're well beyond the point where the size getting larger

00:03:17 ◼   ► is a good thing.

00:03:18 ◼   ► Where the size getting larger is an important thing

00:03:20 ◼   ► making the customer be able to find things that they want.

00:03:24 ◼   ► The problem you have now is you have duplication.

00:03:26 ◼   ► You have people spamming the App Store.

00:03:28 ◼   ► You have decay of old apps.

00:03:30 ◼   ► You have-- it makes things like search tricky.

00:03:33 ◼   ► It makes editorial staff curating new arrivals more

00:03:37 ◼   ► daunting, because there's just more things that they

00:03:39 ◼   ► have to try and filter through.

00:03:42 ◼   ► So as size as it is now, what I would argue

00:03:44 ◼   ► is that the App Store's size is hurting it,

00:03:48 ◼   ► rather than helping it.

00:03:49 ◼   ► And I don't exactly know when that transition point happened,

00:03:53 ◼   ► but it seems like it's probably about a year ago,

00:03:56 ◼   ► if I had to just sort of generally put my finger on it,

00:03:58 ◼   ► that about a year ago, it kind of hit that point where

00:04:01 ◼   ► it wasn't so much about developers branching out

00:04:05 ◼   ► and finding all the little niches that needed to be filled

00:04:07 ◼   ► so much as having done all that reasonably.

00:04:11 ◼   ► And now it's kind of just being piled on top and on top

00:04:14 ◼   ► and on top in a way that isn't constructive.

00:04:17 ◼   ► At the same time, it's not an easy problem to solve.

00:04:20 ◼   ► I mean, how do you determine what apps should be allowed

00:04:23 ◼   ► and which ones shouldn't?

00:04:24 ◼   ► How many Flappy Bird clones should

00:04:26 ◼   ► be allowed to exist on the store?

00:04:28 ◼   ► Five, 10, 1,000?

00:04:30 ◼   ► At what point do we have enough of those to that we don't

00:04:33 ◼   ► really need to add more?

00:04:35 ◼   ► And I don't know if you can easily say that.

00:04:39 ◼   ► It's kind of completely arbitrary to say.

00:04:40 ◼   ► I remember they were saying about a third of games

00:04:43 ◼   ► in the couple weeks after Flappy Bird was pulled

00:04:46 ◼   ► were clones of it.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Like, is that a good thing?

00:04:48 ◼   ► Is that a sign of vibrance and vitality?

00:04:50 ◼   ► Or is that just clogging up the works with junk?

00:04:55 ◼   ► And another thing, too, is it becomes incredibly hard,

00:04:58 ◼   ► I think, on the app review side.

00:05:01 ◼   ► I have a lot of sympathy, honestly, for app review

00:05:04 ◼   ► when I think about the size and the scope of the problem

00:05:07 ◼   ► that they're dealing with.

00:05:09 ◼   ► There's a great chart.

00:05:10 ◼   ► If you chart the number of new apps approved each day,

00:05:14 ◼   ► which is a number I'm getting from 148apps.biz, who

00:05:17 ◼   ► has a great resource on App Store metrics.

00:05:20 ◼   ► If you look at the chart of that, which I'll

00:05:22 ◼   ► have in the show notes, and I also

00:05:23 ◼   ► recommend just looking at the source data for it.

00:05:26 ◼   ► But at this point, App Review is at a pretty consistent basis,

00:05:31 ◼   ► dealing with at least 1,000 new apps each approved every day.

00:05:37 ◼   ► And that's not updates.

00:05:38 ◼   ► That's not the number of updates that they're

00:05:40 ◼   ► having to look at as well.

00:05:41 ◼   ► Just new apps that are being approved each day, it's about 1,000, and has been around

00:05:47 ◼   ► a very steady trajectory growing basically since the App Store was launched five years

00:05:52 ◼   ► ago.

00:05:53 ◼   ► And that has got to be an incredibly daunting problem in terms of managing that.

00:05:59 ◼   ► But at the same time, if they don't, if they don't continue to be very strenuous and tight

00:06:07 ◼   ► on that, then the quality will fall.

00:06:10 ◼   ► And that's also not good.

00:06:13 ◼   ► So what does that mean?

00:06:15 ◼   ► What is that-- where does that kind of leave us?

00:06:17 ◼   ► And that will kind of get into my recommendations.

00:06:20 ◼   ► But before that, I have a quick aside about this.

00:06:23 ◼   ► It was a couple of assumptions that I'm just going to make

00:06:26 ◼   ► about recommendations that I have that I'm not going to gate

00:06:29 ◼   ► them against this or otherwise.

00:06:30 ◼   ► I'm just going to say that I want

00:06:33 ◼   ► to assume that Apple is constrained by neither budget

00:06:36 ◼   ► nor desire in making the App Store better.

00:06:40 ◼   ► That somewhere in their massive profit and loss,

00:06:43 ◼   ► they have the money to afford the people they would need

00:06:45 ◼   ► in order to manage any whatever policies they

00:06:47 ◼   ► wanted to implement.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And then two, they have the desire and the motivation

00:06:52 ◼   ► to do that, to make the App Store an amazing place

00:06:55 ◼   ► to find software.

00:06:56 ◼   ► That they-- creating an experience

00:06:58 ◼   ► where any app a customer downloads

00:07:00 ◼   ► is going to lead to some amount of satisfaction,

00:07:03 ◼   ► lead to that customer wanting to buy more and more apps,

00:07:06 ◼   ► in the hopes that ultimately then they're

00:07:08 ◼   ► going to be buying more and more phones, which

00:07:09 ◼   ► is great for Apple and great for app developers.

00:07:12 ◼   ► So I want to get into my actual recommendations, though.

00:07:15 ◼   ► So what can we do about volume?

00:07:18 ◼   ► And dealing with volume is actually a really hard problem.

00:07:20 ◼   ► It's something that, honestly, I've

00:07:22 ◼   ► been struggling with for the last couple of weeks

00:07:24 ◼   ► as I've been preparing for this series,

00:07:26 ◼   ► because originally I kind of started

00:07:29 ◼   ► from that place of saying, well, which are the good apps?

00:07:31 ◼   ► Which are the ones that deserve to be in the store?

00:07:33 ◼   ► Which are these apps that if I was sitting--

00:07:36 ◼   ► If you showed me a random cross-section of the App Store,

00:07:39 ◼   ► I could point to it with my apps and say, get rid of that,

00:07:41 ◼   ► get rid of that, get rid of that.

00:07:43 ◼   ► That one should stay.

00:07:43 ◼   ► That one should stay.

00:07:44 ◼   ► And honestly, I think I could apply my own tastes

00:07:47 ◼   ► in that way.

00:07:49 ◼   ► And that would work for the App Store that's best for Dave.

00:07:53 ◼   ► But that really doesn't generalize,

00:07:56 ◼   ► because the things that I like and the tastes that I have

00:07:59 ◼   ► aren't necessarily things that are appropriate to apply

00:08:01 ◼   ► as gates to the App Store.

00:08:03 ◼   ► Because I know there are apps that I don't like

00:08:05 ◼   ► that I think other people do like.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And it gets a very slippery slope, kind of tricky thing,

00:08:10 ◼   ► to try and impose that kind of strongly opinionated taste

00:08:16 ◼   ► onto what apps go into the store.

00:08:18 ◼   ► Now, there's some degree of this that you can always--

00:08:21 ◼   ► that it's going to have to be applied.

00:08:22 ◼   ► There is some amount of things that Apple says,

00:08:25 ◼   ► this is allowed, this isn't.

00:08:26 ◼   ► This is allowed, and this isn't.

00:08:28 ◼   ► And there's a certain degree of taste going into that.

00:08:30 ◼   ► But it's not quite as personal or as qualitative

00:08:35 ◼   ► as it would have to be for me to be able to say only the good apps should be in the store.

00:08:41 ◼   ► If that was my recommendation, it would be kind of hollow because, well, what does that

00:08:45 ◼   ► mean? How do you define quality? It's a very hard problem. And so I had to kind of back

00:08:51 ◼   ► off from that. I kind of had to think that's not going to work. I can't invent this set

00:08:59 ◼   ► of criteria that would allow the Apple to say, "These apps out. These apps good." Because

00:09:05 ◼   ► the result is that the App Store would likely suffer from that. It would be more boring.

00:09:09 ◼   ► It would have less diversity. It wouldn't be quite as fun of a place to work. But they

00:09:15 ◼   ► still need to do something. I think they still need to do something to contract the size

00:09:19 ◼   ► of the store, to raise the average quality of apps up while at the same time doing it

00:09:24 ◼   ► in a reasonable way. And I ended up coming at something that's derived from an old parenting

00:09:31 ◼   ► adage that you should have few rules but enforce them strictly. And I think that's something

00:09:37 ◼   ► that I think the App Store should do to apply to this situation. And specifically, if I

00:09:43 ◼   ► was going to put that into a more specific recommendation, is that apps should be required

00:09:48 ◼   ► to pass approval on an ongoing basis. That the app review guidelines, which generally

00:09:56 ◼   ► I would say are very good, they've evolved, they've adapted. I think Apple has done some

00:10:00 ◼   ► pretty smart and clever things in terms of the way that they've adjusted them, the way

00:10:04 ◼   ► that they still were things, that they're a little bit of gray area but not too much.

00:10:08 ◼   ► By and large, the actual rules themselves, if you read through them, I think are a pretty

00:10:13 ◼   ► a good set of saying this is a great baseline for what an app and the App Store should be.

00:10:20 ◼   ► But except in exceptional situations where it turns out that an app was hiding something

00:10:25 ◼   ► from App Review or it turns out it's malware or something like that, once an app's approved

00:10:29 ◼   ► right now, it is always available. The issue isn't so much that the rules are wrong, the

00:10:36 ◼   ► issue is when those rules are applied. Right now, once an app's approved, it'll just sit

00:10:42 ◼   ► in the App Store forever, even if it wouldn't necessarily

00:10:46 ◼   ► pass muster now.

00:10:48 ◼   ► I think of all these apps that-- for example,

00:10:51 ◼   ► the App Store doesn't allow emoji unlocking apps anymore.

00:10:55 ◼   ► I think that was one of these things that they no longer

00:10:57 ◼   ► allow.

00:10:58 ◼   ► But there's a whole bunch of them

00:10:59 ◼   ► that are still sitting in the App Store that are still

00:11:02 ◼   ► getting downloaded that are kind of pointless.

00:11:06 ◼   ► But they're in the store because Apple has this tendency

00:11:08 ◼   ► to not go back and reapply the rules to existing things.

00:11:14 ◼   ► Now obviously that's a little bit dangerous, or scary maybe,

00:11:18 ◼   ► as a developer, that I could have something approved

00:11:21 ◼   ► and then it comes down a couple years later,

00:11:23 ◼   ► a couple months later, I come back

00:11:24 ◼   ► and Apple says, hey, that's actually not cool anymore.

00:11:27 ◼   ► But that situation isn't really practically different

00:11:29 ◼   ► than where we are now.

00:11:30 ◼   ► Because if I ever want to do an update to that app, which

00:11:32 ◼   ► hopefully I would want to, I'm going

00:11:34 ◼   ► to have that same criteria applied to me.

00:11:36 ◼   ► It would only really apply to these cases

00:11:38 ◼   ► where apps are being abandoned or shelved but are still sitting around in the store.

00:11:44 ◼   ► And it seemed like something too where once I kind of hit on that as a concept that every

00:11:50 ◼   ► app in the store should be able to pass review today, that's a perfectly reasonable thing.

00:11:57 ◼   ► At least on the surface it seems. That if you have a set of criteria that any new app

00:12:03 ◼   ► it has to meet to be in the store,

00:12:06 ◼   ► that same criteria should be applied

00:12:07 ◼   ► to apps on an ongoing basis.

00:12:11 ◼   ► Now, exactly how you do that doesn't matter quite so much

00:12:14 ◼   ► to me.

00:12:14 ◼   ► You could imagine a variety of things

00:12:16 ◼   ► where on a monthly basis every app is reviewed,

00:12:19 ◼   ► or on a quarterly basis, or honestly, it

00:12:21 ◼   ► would be an improvement even if it was just on an annual basis.

00:12:23 ◼   ► That on the anniversary of an app, if it hasn't been updated,

00:12:27 ◼   ► it gets evaluated, or something like that.

00:12:30 ◼   ► And you then get a rejection.

00:12:33 ◼   ► and likely it would be some kind of time bound thing.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Like you don't necessarily immediately pull it

00:12:36 ◼   ► from the store.

00:12:37 ◼   ► You say you have 30 days to submit

00:12:39 ◼   ► an update that passes review or your app will be delisted.

00:12:42 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And this simple rule, I think, would apply more generally

00:12:47 ◼   ► to a lot of other problems.

00:12:49 ◼   ► I think of the issue of abandonware in the App Store,

00:12:54 ◼   ► which I think is actually kind of a big problem,

00:12:56 ◼   ► that I think a huge proportion of the apps in the store

00:12:59 ◼   ► are kind of abandoned, that aren't updated for iOS 7,

00:13:02 ◼   ► for example, that aren't taking advantage of new technologies

00:13:05 ◼   ► that may be broken in a variety of ways,

00:13:08 ◼   ► that wouldn't mean that they wouldn't pass review now.

00:13:11 ◼   ► But the developer has no incentive

00:13:12 ◼   ► to take them from the store, and so they just sit there.

00:13:16 ◼   ► It's like since February 1, all new submissions to the App

00:13:19 ◼   ► Store have to be built against the latest SDK,

00:13:21 ◼   ► and to quote Apple, "be optimized for iOS 7."

00:13:24 ◼   ► And if that's going to apply to new apps,

00:13:26 ◼   ► it should apply to old apps as well,

00:13:28 ◼   ► with some reasonable boundaries to it.

00:13:31 ◼   ► But this is the thing that I think

00:13:32 ◼   ► would be the most rational approach for contracting

00:13:36 ◼   ► the App Store, to say, we have these rules.

00:13:39 ◼   ► We have these guidelines.

00:13:40 ◼   ► We've put a lot of time and energy and effort

00:13:42 ◼   ► into making these guidelines what they should be.

00:13:44 ◼   ► Let's apply it to every app.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Let's make sure that any app in the store that a customer buys

00:13:49 ◼   ► is going to meet those guidelines.

00:13:51 ◼   ► Because right now, the honest answer

00:13:52 ◼   ► is, unless it was very recently approved, it probably doesn't.

00:13:56 ◼   ► And that's not good for customers.

00:13:58 ◼   ► That's not good for developers.

00:14:00 ◼   ► That's putting in a situation where people

00:14:02 ◼   ► are going to be disappointed.

00:14:03 ◼   ► And that's the thing that worries me.

00:14:06 ◼   ► It's like the stated goal of the guidelines--

00:14:08 ◼   ► this is from Apple's website-- is

00:14:09 ◼   ► to ensure that all apps are reliable, perform as expected,

00:14:13 ◼   ► and are free of offensive material.

00:14:16 ◼   ► And I think every app should meet those criteria.

00:14:18 ◼   ► And I think as you created a system where

00:14:20 ◼   ► you had to re-evaluate apps on an ongoing basis,

00:14:23 ◼   ► I think that would be an actual true statement.

00:14:25 ◼   ► And that would be much better.

00:14:27 ◼   ► All right, that's it for today's show.

00:14:29 ◼   ► Like I said, this is part of probably going to be a seven or eight part series.

00:14:32 ◼   ► I've got all kinds of other topics and things I'm going to be addressing for kind of trying

00:14:35 ◼   ► to think of these similar kind of things.

00:14:37 ◼   ► Like what are practical things that you could change the policy to that would make the App

00:14:41 ◼   ► Store better?

00:14:42 ◼   ► I'd really, really appreciate your feedback.

00:14:45 ◼   ► If you have any thoughts or comments, please let me know.

00:14:47 ◼   ► This is an ongoing thing and I really want some discussion to hopefully come out of it.

00:14:52 ◼   ► If you want to get a hold of me, I'm @_davidsmith on Twitter.

00:14:55 ◼   ► You can email me, david@developmentprospectives.com.

00:14:57 ◼   ► Otherwise, have a great week.

00:14:58 ◼   ► Happy coding.