Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

It’s insulting to real developers of decent apps and games when obvious trash can make it onto the store so easily, remain there, and make money hand over fist, when other apps have to put up with scrutiny and back-and-forth rejections over trivial non-issues even in 2017.

Right now, their “improved” App Store doesn’t even have what I would call a search engine. I can search for apps BY NAME and they still show up like #30 on the list below a whole pile of stuff that (I assume) only matches due to some weird random match of letters that happen to be in my search term. There is NO way to narrow the search category, NO filters (not even something so basic as “search only apps released in the last month”), etc. And every single iOS store issue is 1000x worse on the Mac store. They need to take that 30% cut and invest properly.

And search problems wouldn’t be so bad if their top-X lists made any sense. Top grossing, really? Great way to see the same 10 apps for like 3 weeks in a row. “Limited Time Prices”? At this very moment on the Mac store, ALL TWELVE “Limited Time Prices” apps are LEGO games! What good is that?

I'm not an app dev but a mere user, but I completely understand your frustrations. As a user, the discoverability of new apps is abysmal. I don't understand why Apple can't look at what Amazon etc are doing with their stores, and recommend me apps based on apps I'm using recently ? Whatever happened to Genius suggestions ? And why can't I filter for e.g. strategy games without IAP in the 5-10$ range ?

It's terrible and i can only imagine how much this hurts devs. Apple really doesn't care about the long tail.

> I don't understand why [large company] can't [do simple thing]...

The answer to questions like that is always money. Apple have a monopoly on selling apps on that run on Apple hardware. There is no measurable short-term benefit to them from making the user experience better. In fact they probably figure it'd hurt revenue.

As it stands the app store has about 20 slots that make serious money. Every app company wants in those slots and will do anything for it, eg give up 30% of their revenue and indulge various forms of payola.

Apple have created an artificial scarcity and it makes them something like 10 billion a year. And thanks to the monopoly enforced by crypto, there is no possibility of a competitor forcing them to change.

It's the perfect cash cow. Why screw up a good thing?

Because, over time, it might not be a cash cow as other stores like Play Store improve and innovate. Your post reads like, why should Microsoft invest in IE after v6? No short term benefit? As if. 5 years is still short term and if Apple can't learn from Microsoft's mistakes then it deserves to lose the market share and eventually the profit.

To Apple's credit, 90% of iPhone users won't switch to Android no matter what. So Samsung and Google can innovate as much as they like, apple's user base is not going anywhere.

That's the whole point of Apple. Vendor lock in.

If Microsoft could have blocked all 3rd party browsers, they could probably still be coasting on IE6 2017 Edition today.

That's silly. If Apple ran a more efficient market, users would buy more apps, developers would make more apps, and Apple would make more money.

Large companies don't always do a good job of simple things, for all sorts of banal reasons related to specific people in management, organisational politics, etc.

Same with the Android store, just a few categories and a search box to lookup by name. I don't even look at the categories as again it's just trash, for example based off my recent activity I'm recommended 'Bethesdas Pinball', and I dont even play games on my smartphone.

Really these stores are setup for people who know exactly what they want before they even open the play store app. It's a shame and I'd love a more advanced filtering functionality, but instead all we get is a new sets of icons every couple of years.

I long ago concluded that the app stores are useless wastelands. Even if you know the exact name of what you want, there will be 30 scammy knockoffs that show up in the search results. (All "free" with in-app purchases and ads, of course.) Okay, so can you search the broader internet for what you want, then click on a direct link to the desired app? Sorry, no -- the search results are dominated by garbage articles about "50 apps for X." It's pretty much hopeless.

Yep. Search is terrible. I don't see how the app store search ranking is so irrelevant, especially after the "clean up". How can crap like this get in the store at all. I recently had to resubmit our legit app over and over for what seemed to be almost random nitpick rejections for things that aren't documented in the rules. And then struggle to get enough exposure for a handful of downloads per day. This is so discouraging.

Can't agree more with you. Especially about the back and forth rejections. It's insane how easily such apps escape the scrutiny of apple's review team.

I perfectly understand the frustration, but this is a kind of interesting phenomenon.

1. It may not be that easy to evade the scrutiny of Apple's review team. It's hard to tell... of course, you only see it when they succeed. (Conversely, you won't see app developers post captivating and emotionally charged posts each time app submission works as expected, and no one would read them if they did.) There's a lot of selection bias going on here.

2. Legit app developers are usually focused on putting out their app while scammers are focused on finding cracks in the app submission process.

“improved” App Store... it really is terrible. I used to quite often click through different categories looking at the top games / apps etc. Now I hardly bother going into it because its such a cluster fuck to navigate.

* I will note though that I do like the editorial type landing page they added to the store during the big "improvement"

While it would be awesome if the app store would be actually good at app discovery, that is unlikely to happen. Instead you have to brand and advertise your app outside of the store. See the app store as something like "apt-get install". The user needs to know what he/she wants before going to the store.

That’s just it though — when I type in an exact name, it may not even show up in the first couple screen-scrolls of results. I can easily see many potential customers just giving up after a page or so and assuming that the app isn’t in the store, especially since Apple is known to pull apps for various reasons.

This means that even if something outside the store mentions your app, you’d better hope they included a direct link to the store and not just the name.

> See the app store as something like "apt-get install"

You know, the first place I search for desktop software is on the apt repositories. Even when I'm looking software for Windows (then I repeat the names on Google to see if they run there).

Searching in aptitude is much better than on the web.

To be fair, FOSS repos are easier to organise as devs wont use dirty tricks like fake reviews to promote their apps. Kinda like the meta keyword in the early web.

After experiencing what iOS 11 has done to my iPhone SE, I'm pretty sure the "Software Engineers" Apple employs these days can't tell the difference between obvious trash and legitimate attempts at useful, working software.

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