I think apple will walk a very careful line in terms of app discoverability. The changes made to the new ios 8 sound pretty interesting. But apple will have to be careful not to shoot themselves in the foot as well. What I mean is that at the moment the app store has the kind of fads that come through it. Like "Don't step on the white tile" or "Flappy bird" etc. These may seem annoying to developers because they create lots of clones and make it hard for the apps we spent years making and which we know are the most amazing apps ever, to get found. But for apple these fads are what the teenage market loves. And currently it is the iPhone where these tend to start, which is great for apple because it makes their device the one to have if you want the latest app fad first. So if apple try to take too much control they might loose this appeal, and risk going the path of facebook, and all the teenagers moving to android because that is where the new crazes start. The iPhone has to remain cool in the eyes of teenagers, it needs to stay at the front. This is balanced on the other side with the need to stay attractive to developers, because after all they will be the ones that make the next craze, and you don't want them making apps for android first, and only for the iPhone once its proven to be a success. So they have to keep developers happy as well, which means less rules and more money. Android has the freedom, but not the money yet. If the money on Android changes to be more than iPhone, I think apple is going to find it very hard to remain as the first platform stuff comes out on. The android and apple have very different cultures. Apple is all about control, and android is all about freedom. Steve Jobs had an amazing ability really to control things yet always seem fun and cool. He would have made the most brilliant dictator. The Android/Apple battle has many similarities to the Microsoft/Apple battle in the past, which Apple didn't come out of too well at all. So I am very interested to see what Apple will try this time.
Apple doesn't have to worry much about developers. So long as they have the users the developers won't leave.
Of course you could. How do you explain the rodiculous long titles including successful keywords like "Monument", "Valley", etc? Do you really think Apple allowed that during review process? Those titles were modified after they were approved, without further review.
Great post. I'm not a fan of Flappy bird at all and i think the clones are even worse BUT they're good for iOS in a way as it does help get more and more people involved in gaming or wanting an iphone etc as that craze back earlier this year was ridiculous, people selling iphones on ebay with the game installed at a silly price etc ?! (Still unsure how that works!) I had an Android phone for a few weeks in January, at first i loved it, Quake II, Jedi Knight all working and playing well. Emulators etc but i missed iOS as i had SO many games on it and i would want the same ones on Android. Android has good/bad points, like you say as its about freedom its good in one way but on the other hand theres so many crappy apps i thought on Android i got bored with it. iOS has all the better games and exclusives etc. Its still a great time for gaming though, its popular as anything, games are SOOO cheap and theres so many good ones. I must admit i'm a 'app horder' as i buy so many and have so many deleted which i need to play, just dont have the space. But boy do i wish Apple would make 128 gig phones common place !
Now you can't edit the app name for approved app versions. That text field is not editable anymore once your app version is out. The new iTunes Connect has fixed that issue. In the old iTunes Connect the app name was editable at any time, so you could release a game titled "My Super Game" and, once approved, change it to "Super Mario Bros: A Link To The Past". Of course, Apple don't care about products quality, but quantity. They only need working products that don't crash. The app quality is irrelevant (and hard to measure). Apple want any kind of developer, even if such developer is uploading crap that makes $0. At least, Apple ensure themselves $99 from any developer account. And then, they feature what they consider is worth, but I really think there are more quality apps than "feature slots".
Personally I think the developer fee limits the amount of silly releases compared to google play because people have to be willing to say their game is worth at least $100. I am actually happy they have it (although I would rather it just be an advance to apple on their 30% and you get 100% that year until you pass amount of revenue needed for apple to cover the advance)
The developer fee should be $1000 that would all but eliminate the tyre kickers from the store. And keep it for serious developers, making quality products. Apple would still make their money, and instead of 1,000,000 apps of which 900,000 are garbage, they'd have 100,000 good quality professionally developed apps. So its a win / win for users, developers and apple. OK this argument is a bit skewed as # of apps != # of developers. But you get my point (I hope). Unfortunately there is a pissing contest as too who has the most apps on their app store, unfortunately, the number of apps does not equal quality.
But does every developer who made a good quality app have $1000 upfront with no guarantee of return of investment? We may have never seen some nice little games if it cost that much. Not sure that is the answer.
Thats sort of the point, if it's so expensive to be on the store, there will be far fewer apps to compete with, so the chances of success for a nice little app will be far greater, based on the better visibility alone. Make a good app in a good ecosystem and you make money. I do see your point however as well, if you don't have a grand, and you have a good product. What about $70 ($XX) a month subscription, This way you can provision your devices and get the thing tested, relatively cheaply, and put it on the store, and see how it goes. I think the spammy apps will soon disappear if its costing them money to sit there and just fill the shelves. Dunno.
It is a lot of money for an app that is 100% free with no advertising. I have one like that which is never going to make a cent. I wouldn't mind a cost per release model like $25 an app or something rather than a yearly fee (updates free). This would stop the people who release 100's of apps to try and gather enough funds to live off while flooding the store with reskins.
Disagree with that. One thing i love about iOS is that it reminds me of the 80s and 'bedroom coders', coders who didnt need a huge company, they created and released quality games themselves. If there was a large developer fee then the likes of Gameloft and others will rule the roost as the smaller devs couldnt risk paying money like that in case their one man band game fails. I would like to know who says yes to some of these apps though, one minute you hear that Apple dont like clones yet they're quite happy earlier this year allowing flappy bird clone after clone to appear on the app store. Theres no consistency. I mean i played an app the other week which was abysmal, i cant believe it even made it to the app store. If Apples 'QA checkers' do a better job then they should be able to deny some of this crap hitting the app store. A larger dev fee will just stop some of the quality games getting through, eg look at Dodo Adventures by a one man band
This sort of supports my case, Search Dodo Adventures, and no less than 6 apps come up with these words in the title, I don't know which one you're referring too. If there was a $1000 dev fee would any of these be there crowding the store? If one of them is quality I'm never going to find it now. In other words, if you believe in your product, you need to have faith in it enough to commit some cash to it. Then maybe there would only be the good one there with the commitment behind it and people would have a better chance of finding it.
I think better solution is to add some kind of 'curated' and 'non-curated' category. Actually it means 'passed' and 'non-passed'. Low quality and obvious clone will be stored in 'non passed' category and not highlighted but could 'level up' to 'passed' category if they pass specific threshold (ex: 10K downloads from different IP), meaning although they're clones or low quality, there is interest in them. I think that's a win win solution: - General users would not see much of obvious clones/LQ in highlighted area / itunes. - The choice is still there, if you want clones or if the doomed app is actually good for you, you can find it. - It's encourage developers to create better app/games. - Apple could be wrong to non-passing a particular app, but the developer should be able to send a ticket to request at least one re-review. - It could be cheated in some ways (ex: download bot), but I think it will be minority.
If you look at the number of "A" alphabetic apps in the App Store that get shown on the "list" first and look at the number of so-called Role-playing games there--my, my a nail salon app is a role-playing game?, you would quickly realize something's not right. Maybe someday that situation will be cured. But I think basically it's up to us individually to promote our apps in a good way. It's up to Apple to fix that. The good thing about the App Store is that it's given us Indie game makers a way to get our apps distributed without breaking the bank. That was part of Steve Jobs' vision and I think they've done that very well. It wasn't his vision to charge us 1000 dollars a year to make a game for ios. If that ever happened, most of us would switch to making Android games where the charge is $25 and not a year--it's a flat fee. : ) So Google will take over the world if you want to charge $1000 a year for an iOS license. Then again, we could charge $14.99 for our games on iOS and add in app purchases for 2.00 a pop. : ) But I think everybody who's an Indie would move to Android and the Google Play Store. I'm comfortable with iOS but could be motivated to get off the couch and push the button to make our game work on Android if I had to pay 1000 a year for an iOS license. It would take not much more than a button push. And a very slow learning curve. It's on my todo list as we have the Android license already. : )
This is not how it works, at all. There are different things that effect ranking as well as discoverability. Currently, you have 100 characters for keywords which including commas, isn't a lot of keywords to describe your app. Any words in your name are considered keywords. Since organic discoverability is crucial for small apps, app developers are pretty much forced to make long names. We WANT to just call our app Super Penguin Bowling but the cold reality is, we'll get 50% more downloads if we call it Super Penguin Bowling - Club March Free Game for Kids. Notice what I did with the second one. If a kid types in Club Penguin, a popular Disney app, my app will come up. It's piggybacking off of hot traffic and keywords to get my app more exposure. Google Play does not work this way, their search system is much better as it indexes the description. So you can have a short name and a good description with your keywords in it and people can find your app that way. Don't blame devs for long names, blame Apple for this one.
I know how it works. That was just something I thought apple was doing to counter it. But they should just remove weight from key words for people doing this. I agree it is partly an Apple problem and they should end it ASAP.
