The iTunes App Store from a developer’s point of view

Posted by Dave on July 10th, 2008

Following on from my earlier grumble, I’ve decided that there’s quite a bit more to dislike about the iTunes App Store.

  1. Subcategories For Games Are Rubbish
  2. Developers Are Flooding The Store With Apps
  3. The Icons Are Ugly (And It’s All Apple’s Fault)
  4. The Top Apps Are The Top Apps

Read on to find out why…

#1 Subcategories For Games Are Rubbish

UPDATE: Kudos to Apple – they’ve added a new “More Games” box underneath the “Categories” box in iTunes. Clicking on each category in More Games takes you to a list of all games in that category. This is the ideal fix, and I’m impressed with how quickly they’ve done it.

They’ve also updated the iPhone version of the app store to list all games – kudos again for doing this so quickly. The only downside there is that the games with a lowercase first letter appear at the bottom of the list, after those beginning with a capital Z. That’ll teach us for being fanboys and calling our game “iDrops”.

Here’s what I posted originally:

The App store uses subcategories for games. Unfortunately, Apple have only listed eight games from each subcategory on the App Store. So whilst you can go to Business and see all Business apps, you can’t go to Games and see all Games. Even worse, if you go to Games and click to “See All” Puzzle / Strategy games, you just get a list of the eight from the Games portal. No mention that any other Puzzle / Strategy games even exist (and especially no mention of iDrops, which I co-wrote, dammit).

The fundamental problem seems to be that the existing iTunes Store metaphor – of portals and lists – doesn’t really work for the subcategories used in the games section of the App Store. The only option is to go to Quick Links > Browse, and look at a list of Puzzle games. This view lists the Name, the “Artist” (which is actually the company), and the “Album” (the game name again), with no description of the game itself.

This problem is even worse on the iPhone version of the App Store. It goes: Categories > Games. And that’s it. 15 games. Other than that, it’s “Featured” or “Search”.

And why is “Chess & Backgammon Classics” listed under “Business”?

#2 Developers Are Flooding The Store With Apps

Certain developers have flooded the store with lots of apps – most notably “AppEngines”, who have added 43 (that’s 43) ebooks, each as a separate $0.99 application. When viewing the “All iPod Touch Applications” list, every one of the 24 pages contains a couple of these “apps”. Likewise with iLingo’s ten travel applications (all thankfully listed under i for iLingo). If I was one of the developers who hadn’t been able to get their app approved for the App Store launch, I’d be mighty annoyed with AppEngines.

Of course, part of the problem (to be fair to AppEngines) is that the iTunes payment model doesn’t lend itself to “buy the app, then buy the content”. AppEngines couldn’t sell an eBook reader and then enable users to buy new books for it – that just doesn’t fit with the established iTunes Store metaphor on which the App Store is based.

(On that theme, my friend Ben suggested a scratch card app to me the other week – where you would “scratch” the touch-screen interface to find out if you had won. If not, you’d simply buy another scratch card. With the App Store metaphor, you’d have to ship a whole lot of apps, each with a different image under the scratchcard. And one of those apps would be a whole lot more popular than the rest.)

#3 The Icons Are Ugly (And It’s All Apple’s Fault)

The iPhone and and iPod Touch automatically pre-render the shine on your icon for you. So does the App Store. Unfortunately, this really does not make for a good App Store experience. There are plenty of badly-designed icons on the App Store, before they get rounded and sheened. Part of the problem here is that app developers haven’t been able to preview how their icons will look in the App Store until now. The result, unlike the square-edged, nicely-drop-shadowed album covers of the main App Store, is a bit of a mess.

Also, icons seem to be a bit off-center on the app store, as if they’ve been rendered a couple of pixels too high.

#4 The Top Apps Are The Top Apps

The problem with having a “Top Apps” list on a new store is that the Top Apps are inevitably the featured apps. If you’re not featured, you aren’t going to be breaking that list any time soon. (See #1 above. Not that I’m bitter.)

I’m sure more will come to light soon :)



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Reader Comments

Comment:
1
Written by:
John Kooz
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 7:23 pm

Nice tips. I’ve got the sdk so this is helpful. True, if you get in the “top app” list, you’re home free in terms of marketing.

Comment:
2
Written by:
Alex
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:17 pm

Looks like alot of whining about nothing. So your app isn’t blessed as a “top app”. Cry me a river. Good thing you’re not a musician, you’d be complaining that your latest beatbox composition isn’t being promoted as well as Madonna’s latest single.

Things will be improved over time. Much like the iTunes Music Store, the iTunes Movie Store, the iTunes Podcast Directory, yada, yada, yada.

Comment:
3
Written by:
C. Gasser
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:23 pm

Yes, the subcategories for games “feature” is poorly implemented. I could only find iDrops when I went to the list of all applications. It is criminal that there is not a “list all” choice under “games” and also under each category.

I like iDrops and will probably get it when I get 2.0 (I am waiting for the “official” iTunes US release).

Comment:
4
Written by:
ceejayoz
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:29 pm

Well, there are other ways of promoting your app.

Comment:
5
Written by:
Dave
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:31 pm

Alex:

I don’t mind the Madonnas of this world (Monkey Ball, Remote, Bejeweled) getting top billing. They’re much bigger apps, with more going for them. What I resent is that if you go down the categories route, we’re not even on the list. It’s one thing not to be top billing, it’s quite another to be missing entirely.

Comment:
6
Written by:
James
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

You can find iDrops in iTunes by clicking “All iPhone Applications” (in the “Categories” list on the left side).

I agree it would be nice to also have it in the Puzzle category; I suspect they’ll be doing a lot of fine-tuning to the store.

Comment:
7
Written by:
Adam
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

Dude, you can disable the “shine” rendering. Read the docs!

Comment:
8
Written by:
Dave
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

Ceejayoz: You’re absolutely right, and we missed the boat in promoting our app outside of the App Store. We should have had a demo video on YouTube, and made more of our online playable demo. Ah well. Next time :)

Comment:
9
Written by:
Dave
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 8:37 pm

Adam: I know :) Thing is, our icon actually plays on the shine, and the whole curved corners / icon shine effect is featured throughout our app’s interface, so we thought we’d get the App Store to do it for us in the standard style. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have taken the Apple route of getting the iPhone OS / App Store to render the icon for us.

My gripe in this article is more about the sheer volume of shiny icons in one place.

Comment:
10
Written by:
Brian Robbins
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 9:51 pm

I think you’re right on here Dave. The interface via iTunes is a bit better, since at least you can browse into the categories (but then you don’t even see the icons anymore!). Searching for games via the iPhone or iPodTouch is horrible for all of the ~145 games that aren’t in the list of 15 under the games category.

We’ve been fortunate in that our free game (Spinner Prologue) shows up in the top 10 of free games within iTunes, without that I doubt many people would ever see it.

Comment:
11
Written by:
Mike Rundle
Posted on:
July 10th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

Hey Dave, I’m glad you wrote this entry because your app looks very cool. Can’t wait to check it out further once I get OS 2.0 loaded onto my phone.

I understand your frustrations about not being featured, I can see that as a big pain in the ass after you’ve spent all this time writing the app. Might as well rename the thing to start with the letter A so you show up first in alphabetical. App Store hack :)

Comment:
12
Written by:
R.S.
Posted on:
July 11th, 2008 at 12:11 am

I get how you feel, but you should probably wait a little longer since the App Store was released only today (June 10th). I’m sure it will come to a lot of people’s attention, considering it seems like a pretty damn good app. I can’t wait until the iPhone 2.0 Software Update comes out so I can see it on my iPhone…

Comment:
13
Written by:
Robert Jung
Posted on:
July 11th, 2008 at 6:13 am

While I understand your frustration at being lost in the crowd, spamming the internet with your same complaint-cum-advertisement is not the way to garner goodwill. Having read the same “It’s not been all fun and games for application developers…” rant on a dozen websites today is enough to turn me away from buying iDrops for my iPod Touch.

Perhaps, instead of complaining about your competitions’ promotional advantages, you should’ve spent some time thinking of customer-friendly ways to promote your own title.

–R.J.

Comment:
14
Written by:
Dave
Posted on:
July 11th, 2008 at 7:10 am

@Robert Jung:

You’re right, of course. Posting one’s annoyance across the Internet is a bit knee-jerk; doing it with the same text is just being a jerk. In retrospect, that was a mistake – apologies for the irritation caused.

As others have noted elsewhere, we should probably be grateful that we’re on the store at all. It sounds as though plenty of developers didn’t make it into the program for launch day.

In good news, Apple have already added a “More Games” box to rectify #1. Good work Apple for the quick response.

Comment:
15
Written by:
Colleen Doering
Posted on:
July 13th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

Just wanted to say I had no problem stumbling across your game, iDrops, and I LOVE IT!

Kudos from Canada!

Comment:
16
Written by:
Oliver
Posted on:
July 17th, 2008 at 9:44 am

The Number one app on the German AppStore is MonkeyBall. The number two app is – for a whole week now – a shopping list application, which is featured nowhere. So people are able to find and buy non-featured-applications!