The App Store: Quality control without the quality
37signals.com
37signals.com
First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob apps will flood the store, because that's what makes money. If apple implements a flagging mechanism, then you will be one click away from opening a website to purchase hard core porn (I'm looking at you On The Go Girls).
Lots of people will create apps with 5 pictures and call it "Celebrity News". For example Britney Spears News, etc. Apps will be rereleased every single day so they are always visible on the app store new releases page. People will upload apps that do nothing but just have a title people will search for. And of course, apps that call a pay hotline somewhere.
With the amount of money people are spending on the app store, and the fact that people are looking for cheap entertainment rather than useful tools, the app store would be a heaven for spammers and scammers.
If Apple ever unlocked the gates, it would be the absolute end of the app store.
I have a phone number of a reviewer and I talk to him every now and then. They get a lot of crap. The gate is not to QC an app, it's to prevent the app store from being a crapware and spammers paradise.
Of course, this is unlikely to happen as Apple is using the review process to make sure the apps are not calling private APIs or violating whatever rules Apple decides to apply. But giving up this last layer of "security" for Apple to allow for better developer AND user experience would be the best move Apple could do to improve the whole App Store frustations from developers.
If you want to be listed in the App Store and have Apple handle your payment processing and even a bit of marketing for you, you're going to have to go through their approval process. Every single store in the world decides which products it will and won't sell. The App Store isn't, and shouldn't be, any different.
However, on the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site or put it on a CD in a box and sell it at Best Buy or any other store. You can't do that on the iPhone.
I guess opening up the iPhone platform wouldn't really help DHH, since I'm sure he wants his app listed and sold in the App Store, but I can see why developers expect more parity between the two platforms (Mac and iPhone).
However, I can also see how it's easier for Apple to provide a better (and more consistent) customer experience when the App Store is the only way to buy and install apps. And since Apple cares more about customers, and customers don't really care about the openness of their phone's OS... that's probably not going to change any time soon.
Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website. And then, when customers complain to Apple, they can do... what, exactly?
In other words, DHH is wrong when he suggests that the App Store isn't about security. Sure, the App Store is not about prescreening for security holes -- obviously they can't find every hole or every trojan in their pitiful half-hour code review. But if every app goes through the store, and every store app can be revoked, and every store app comes attached to a known submitter with a valid identity and credit card...
You can get a trojan through the system. But you very likely can't do it more than once, it won't survive long in the wild after it's detected, and the FBI has a paper trail to your house.
Yeah, and doing sex with random strangers is as dangerous ... you never know what you're going to get.
That's why I'm a proponent of Sex licenses, given by state institutions after testing your general health, your mental health and the quality of your DNA ... people without a license shouldn't be allowed to have sex, to work in public institutions (since that's where people fuck around the most), or to leave town without notifying the proper authorities.
Sheesh.
Considering that Apple is going hard for the games market, they need to enforce strict control to get games publishers on side.
At the very least, this was not their original plan for the AppStore and the 'iron fist' that they wield today.
Are you saying that these apps will suddenly (by virtue of being approved) be listed on the top apps lists, and become popular? If so, what's wrong with that, let the people decide what the people want, no?
There's spammers and scammers on the web, and people fall for them all the time, is that a good argument to police the web, then?
There is a country with no pineapples. Someone grows a pineapple farm, and sells pineapples. There are no other pineapples, so he charges a lot for them. He becomes rich. Other farmers hear of this and start growing pineapples - they become rich at the start, but as pineapples become more available, soon the price of pineapples is the same as everywhere else. But people have a lot of invested resources in pineapples, so they start selling at discounts. There are more pineapples than consumers, so people start getting aggressive with their sales. The guys who made the money leave the unprofitable market to go sell maize, but the late entries who have just invested in pineapples, and the people who were dirt poor, are still battling on, trying to sell their pineapples. They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker.
People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition. When they do buy pineapples, they stick to very old and trusted names - new pineapple sellers are automatically assumed to be doing something corny.
-- What I'm saying is - the suppliers will destroy the market.
I'm not sure what you're implying, so could you tell me what you think, realistically, will happen if the approval process lets everyone in, that cannot be solved by smart filters
(ie. top apps lists, child-safe apps, as voted upon by people using the store)
It's interesting, but speculation. And it reminds me of the so-called Tragedy of the Commons, a oft-cited parable that doesn't play out quite like that in real life.
> They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker.
If there is already an oversupply of pineapples, I think suppliers would would want to stretch the ripening times and optimize for quality instead.
> People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition
With an oversupply, the consumer actually gets a very good value. The price is right, and there are plenty to choose from. Consumers like competition.
I'm not sure what this example demonstrates. Of course every individual supplier wants less competition. But don't forget that the suppliers in this case are developers, and it's the developers that are complaining about the status quo.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted.
Among other things: There is no "market". There are markets. There is a market for hardcore pron. There is a market for child-safe web surfing. There is a market for violent games. There is a market for nonviolent games. There is a market for a device you can be seen using in a corporate boardroom. There is a market for a device you can give to your mom. There is a market for a device that makes Steve Jobs proud.
Many of these markets are mutually exclusive. Some of these markets are bigger than others. Some of them have higher prestige. Some of them have much higher margins.
What's stopping apple from adding a filter that says: "Child-safe" but allowing every app in to the app store, so that you can turn the filter off and browse whatever it is that you want.
By market I really meant, people, as opposed to referring to a free market of some sort. I think a free market would be great if there was some mechanism to allow the good stuff to bubble up to the top.
The App Store, like the iTunes store, exists solely to move Apple's hardware. The calculus isn't "will opening up the App Store please the handful of developers who refuse to operate under its current restrictions", it's "will opening up the App Store significantly increase sales of iPods/iPhones/iPads." I have yet to see a convincing argument as to how opening up the App Store would do that.
Is this what your reviewer friend told you? Because part of the problem is that Apple hasn't said much if anything about just what the review process is for, so everyone is left to speculate while having to decipher arbitrary and vague rejection reasons.
I'm a web developer, and if we were to open up the Internet, let me tell you what will happen:
First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob websites will flood the Internet, because that's what makes money. If the Internet implements a flagging mechanism, then you will be one click away from opening a website to purchase hard core porn.
Lots of people will create websites with 5 pictures and call it "Celebrity News". For example Britney Spears News, etc. Websites will have new content every single day so they are always at the top of Google search results. People will create websites that do nothing but just have a title people will search for.
With the amount of money people are spending online, and the fact that people are looking for cheap entertainment rather than useful tools, the Internet would be a heaven for spammers and scammers.
If we ever unlocked the gates, it would be the absolute end of the Internet.
I have a phone number of a website reviewer and I talk to him every now and then. They get a lot of crap. The gate is not to QC a website, it's to prevent the Internet from being a crapware and spammers paradise.
Or maybe you are enlightened and this is your attempt at a Zen koan. If so: pretty good.
The iPhone already has a built-in free-for-all free-of-charge Transmetropolitan Interzone, where you can develop and publish whatever you want, pron and scammers run free, and nothing is controlled by anyone, for better or for worse. It's called "Mobile Safari". The rest of the iPhone experience -- the App Store -- is different from that. That may turn out to be a major reason why the App Store is worth so much money.
My point is that there is a kind of fearmongering in comments like the one above mind -- that if somehow Apple were to open up its platform to the wild and wooly world, it'd soon be overrun by every form of scam and debauchery known to man.
Countless examples prove otherwise. There is no "reason" for Apple to maintain these restrictions other than money.
(Oh, and it looks like enlightenment will have to wait after the blow to my karma I just took on that comment above.)
It's not that you've shown that there wouldn't be "every form of scam and debauchery known to man." It's more that you've shown that there would be, but the world won't end and it wouldn't be so bad for you. But for a lot of people out there, the experience on the net is full of suckiness, because they don't have all the knowledge that you do. If someone wants to create a walled garden for those folks, why can't they? Wouldn't that be allowed in a free market? It's not like they're forcing you to buy their phone!
And there's nothing stopping Apple from making a device that truly is for everyone, with one mode that can be locked down completely so you can have someone else limit what you can do to do keep you safe, and another mode for people who don't need to be handheld and are adults and can make their own decisions without needing to effectively violate the DMCA or loose hardware support from Apple to do it. However, Apple is welcome to create whatever device they want if they think they can sell it.
That's not my experience with regular-users, and I've been around such people a lot.
The experience when dealing with a computer in general is full of "suckiness" ... I saw people that can't use GMail because the left-menu which contains "inbox" and "sent" plus the top search-bar is somehow counterintuitive to them. So the IPhone/IPad experience can't change that with flashy buttons / pinch to zoom, although it is somewhat an improvement to regular interfaces (for phones at least, I have yet to see a study which argues that the iPhone interface is more intuitive or productive that your average Windows PC).
But other than that, the Internet experience is as good as possible ... when searching on Google for a definition, more often than not the first result is from Wikipedia (which contains articles edited by many regular non-tech users).
When wanting to contact old friends, I see many people not having trouble with Facebook. Surely some may be mislead by "the Facebook of Sex" by ending up in the wrong place, but I never see people stupid enough to not figure out something's different and that's not Facebook.
When wanting to read online newspapers, I never see people wondering were to find the desired newspaper, or how to click on a story-link. Surely, there are lots of wannabes out there, that's why as an online newspaper you still need marketing to grow your brand.
Email / IM are also 2 services that are used a lot. I don't see people having trouble using Yahoo's IM (and in my country, everybody with an Internet connection and his dog has a YIM account). Email is kind of tricky in a way ... to send emails to multiple people, they never use the BCC field, and that's a PITA sometimes, but it's not like their end-goal isn't reached.
So, when making such assertions, please provide references to studies ;)
My point being that the App Store's actual decisions seem far more random than you would expect if you assumed pure greed or pure Type A control freak issues or pure Bauhaus aesthetics were running the show.
But... how the hell can Google not get GV in the store? Or Google Navigation?
There's spam in the app store now. But we're missing out on multiple, high-quality, well-backed apps because Apple's busy playing hardball with app review.
There are effective community spam countermeasures (see XNA) that work, and work well. I wouldn't be opposed to charging a per-app submission fee to keep spam out.
Of course simply replacing app review with nothing would be a disaster. But nobody's seriously suggesting that. The computer industry has decades of experience dealing with spam. The only really dumb idea is to hire full-time employees to find it by hand.
I have a G1, and anyone can release apps to the app market. While there's crap available, it is nowhere anything like your scenario.
Maybe I just don't spend enough time checking out new apps.
With 140,000+ apps, the bulk are bound to be shit.
Deal with spammers and hardcore porn like every other site on the web deals with it. "Is this inappropriate?" flags. It's worked fine for places like Flickr to keep out the pornsters, it can work fine here.
This is a sham argument for control.
(Yes, it's quite a bit smaller than Apple's App Store, but it's still plenty big enough that if you were on track, we'd see evidence there.)
"Nudity and Sexually Explicit Material We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites."
Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android. I find it hard to believe that apps like Wifi Analyzer or Mabilo Ringtones are really being updated 2-3 times a week. Maybe but it seems strange to me. They could just be honestly submitting daily builds or something. Supposedly 1.6 has made improvements to the Market that might nullify the problem (I'm stuck on 1.5 so I wouldn't know firsthand)
For security concerns we did see the fake Bank of America app make it into the Android Market briefly. It's not a widespread problem but it's happened so we can't ignore it.
Yes, that's the point. DHH isn't recommending removing all rules; he's recommending eliminating the approval process to get apps/updates into the Store. Apple would still, of course, have the ability to remove apps that violated the TOS.
The Android Market is run in just this manner, and it isn't overrun with pornography. So having rules and enforcing them but not having to pre-approve every release seems to work.
Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android.
While there do appear to be some developers pushing fake updates, I'm not sure that exactly constitutes a problem. If it ever gets out of hand, there are a lot of ways this could be managed that don't involve pre-approval.
I also think fake updates will tend to backfire on abusers, because users are presented with two options: upgrade, or uninstall.
The Android's market share is garbage in comparison to the iPhone. The Android phones are surely fine pieces of hardware but they just don't have the saturation yet to be used in examples like this. I obviously can't prove this but I would be willing to bet that if the Android Marketplace had as many apps as the App Store it would be full of trash blocking out the good stuff. There's plenty of low quality stuff on the App Store even with the review process but high quality applications still float to the top.
Further down someone makes the twist on his predictions by comparing it to the Internet. Sorry folks, but the Internet is full of junk. More of you should be aware of this now that the front page has had several "make money fast" posts recently. It's not all rainbows and butterflies out there; people will do anything to make a dollar and they don't particular care about changing the world with their new Ruby on Rails driven to-do list web application.
The fine folks on my partner team, XNA Creators Club Online, have developed a clever solution to the app review problem. The whole process is transparent, community-driven/crowd-sourced, insulates Microsoft from legal liability, and has been running effectively for over a year, albeit not at App Store scale.
Read about it here: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/quickstart_main
The same technology backend has been white-labeled for other communities: http://creators.rockband.com/
Note: Protecting content can not occur without tight control by apple, otherwise apps for accessing pirated content would proliferate. I'm starting to actually think that Apple has found the perfect racket and there is no way open systems can compete until someone comes along with Apple's design and manufacturing skills. There platform is just bigger and more consistent than any other competitor's with better tools and less variation in hardware designs.
ps. If you think the App approval process is annoying try being a game developer, it takes months to get your game through the processes required by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Games love it, it's the rest of you that aren't used to it, for us it's a welcome improvement plus it's a platform that extends beyond games into lifestyle applications and communication.
Huh? You're saying that iPhone Apps are 'locked-in' because they require an iPhone to run them. Does MS Windows 'lock you in' because you can only run it on x86 hardware?
My only slight rebuttal is that you can't trade or resell your purchases like you could with console games or regular desktop software.
I believe there are other factors that can contribute to this. I think the laptop/desktop portion of Apple still attracts a certain individual that typically requires things to be well designed and stable. Unfortunately the cell phone market is not the same way, especially when you factor in free or extremely cheap applications compared to more expensive OS X counterparts. The iPhone appealed to a wider audience, including Windows users who arguably put up with a lot crappier inefficient software.
I think when originally putting the app store in place, it was a fear to have this crap trickle into the Apple app store.
Also, Apple has a vested interest in the success of applications in the app store whereas it doesn't have as much direct benefit from applications released and sold independently for OS X.
Apple sometimes rejects applications for using private APIs they must be checking at some level. I'm not sure how much damage you could do using public APIs. We haven't seen any iPhone App Store malware so whatever they're doing must be working. It's hard to believe no one has tried to slip something in over the last 2 years. In my personal experience with the iPhone I cannot recall a third party App Store application locking up my phone, crashing the OS, or otherwise preventing me from taking an incoming phone call. Either iPhone developers are being incredibly careful, Apple's App Store policies are working, or I'm very lucky.
30% of every dollar that goes through the App Store.
Apps will look like X, behave like Y, and we will nix anything we wish to.