iPhone launched on O2 in the UK
A queue at the O2 store thirty people deep, at 7.40am in a small provincial town? Sod that for a lark.
Did I really bother to get up early?
The iTunes App Store from a developer’s point of view
Following on from my earlier grumble, I’ve decided that there’s quite a bit more to dislike about the iTunes App Store.
- Subcategories For Games Are Rubbish
- Developers Are Flooding The Store With Apps
- The Icons Are Ugly (And It’s All Apple’s Fault)
- The Top Apps Are The Top Apps
iTunes App Store launches, but how do you find the games?
So iTunes 7.7 is available, and with it the App Store. There are (by my reckoning) about 500 apps on there, of which iDrops, our puzzle game, is one. Though you wouldn’t know it.
Unfortunately, Apple have taken the approach of only listing eight games in each game category. If you are one of the eight games listed under “Puzzle / Strategy”, then people can find your game very easily, and buy it (thereby pushing up your rating in the App charts). If you’re not listed, then the only way to find a game is to search by name (which is pointless when no-one knows what’s available), or to look through the “All iPhone Applications”, “All iPod Touch Applications”, or “All Free Applications” lists and scroll through 20-odd pages. (And we didn’t think to call our game “AardvarkDrops”.)
Until this changes, we might as well not have bothered creating a game. If no-one can find it, then no-one can buy it. And if I visit the iTunes store now to see what puzzle games are available to buy, then as far as I can tell, iDrops isn’t one of them.
Grr.
