The App Store turns 10
apple.com
apple.com
I can just leave a new phone next to the router. With windows, I have to sit and monitor a lot of things for those four hours along with hunting down the most updated executables and setup files.
I feel that mobile got software distribution correct. Thanks a ton, Scott Forstall.
It's more like mobile got package management right.
Windows is terrible as an example to use for installing/removing software as it has extremely crude (almost non-existent) package management system (referring to Windows Installer here -- .msi files). [0]
I like to think of the App store (and equivalent) as a Linux command-line beautified by a GUI shell in a mobile form-factor.
But doesn't that make you better at troubleshooting and fixing problems in Linux -- a useful skill to have?
When I get a new Debian box, I just sudo apt-get install a list of my most-common programs and I'm off to the races.
Export the packages:
dpkg --get-selections > list.txt
dpkg --set-selections < list.txt
apt-get -f installJust looking through the list here though, that's going to dump out the list of all of the installed packages, not just the ones I've requested explicitly I think. That's the part that the App Store gets really right. I still want all of the dependencies for the packages that are getting installed, but a way shorter list of "these are the things you've explicitly asked for"
It seems like that is actually inside Apt somewhere too... since it does keep track of packages to auto-remove when their reverse dependencies go away.
To me, part of what makes PCs "Personal Computers" is that I don't need to go through some third party to distribute or acquire software. I don't need anyone's blessing, and I don't need to jump through hoops rooting the device or compiling from source, I just do it because it's my computer.
If all Windows applications were PortableApps, all you'd have to do when getting a new computer is copy over the directories where your applications are stored. Installs are a copy, uninstalls are a delete.
Then you'd have to spend your time waiting for the author of your walled-garden app to fix the problem or spend your time finding a different app to use and then spend more time transitioning to it.
In any case, I think that the trade-off needs to be acknowledged for what it is. You're trading your freedom for convenience. Of course this is the American way, what with all the overflowing amounts of freedom that we have.
Most people don't think "Oh man I love Instagram v50.1.2",they just use Instagram.
It's the same thing with the OS. There are always tons of complaints after a new release of iOS.
> ...I'll just use another one.
Yep. And you'll spend your time looking for another one and then you'll spend more time transitioning over to it.
> Most people don't think "Oh man I love Instagram v50.1.2",they just use Instagram.
Nope. Instead they think - "Oh man, Instagram sucks after that last update, but what can I do about it??" and then they give up.
If I really really hate an update, I don't spend more than a minute transitioning. I just look at the "Apps like this tab". Another feature that is not there natively in Windows/Linux and requires third parties to make subpar lists.
If new software was really so terrible, people would be abandoning apps, not complaining about them which is what happened with Linux and to a lesser extent, Windows.
Yes they are. The definition of empirical is that you can observe the evidence. This is easily observable.
What have you presented besides your own anecdotes?
> "Apps like this" on Windows/Linux
It's called Google. The same thing I use to find iOS apps because Apples app store search and recommendations are horrible. None of the app store searches are really any good and I'm pretty sure Google is the number one place that people usually search for things. I don't know anybody who opens up their app store to search for an app.
Anyway, argue all you want - you're wrong. People care about updates that mess up their stuff whether you can bring yourself to acknowledge that or not.
The total reviews will be less than ten percent of the installs. The negative reviews are a fraction of that percentage.
As such you cannot observe via reviews what the majority of the users think of the app.
Then, by the definition you have just given, app reviews aren't empirical.
Sorry, but none of your badly formed, hand-wavy reasoning has proven that wrong. Also, nobody is arguing that "the majority" think something - I'm arguing against your completely anecdotal and un-evidenced claim that it "rarely" happens.
What evidence do you have that it rarely happens? None that I can see so far...
It's like surveying a small percentage of an electorate by asking them who they'll vote for for and deciding the result based on the survey.
Anyway, once again... where is your evidence that this rarely happens?
My evidence can drawn from the fact that ten percent of people write reviews. A fraction of that are negative. If an occurrence happens say five out of a hundred times,that's a rare occurrence.
That being said, I'm sure Windows could have done some stuff better, but it came of age in a hardly connected era and you need omnipresent internet connections for the mobile software distribution model, so it's kinda hard to blame Microsoft too much for being able to see around the corner.
Cannot believe how quickly a decade has passed since the debut of the first-gen iPhone and subsequent launch of the App store. I still have faint memories of watching a recap of the launch event keynote by Mr. Jobs on a local news channel (though my preteen brain didn't grasp its significance), while being completely oblivious (not that I was unique) to the revolution it was about to unleash in the lives of MILLIONS of developers in every nook and cranny of the planet -- with Google following suit, of course.
Think of the innumerable industries that have been born, millions (billions?) of lives that have been changed, trillions of dollars of value generated, all as a result of this tectonic shift in software distribution.
The Play Store (other than the horrific naming) strikes a decent balance, but isn't particularly great either.
Don't know why app stores seem to be so challenging for all the players in the space.
Anyone have anything that backs that up or hear the same thing? It's interesting that 10 years later we're still there ;)
Non exhaustive list of web APIs broken on iOS Safari:
1. WebRTC Data channel
2. WebGl 2
3. Limiting WebApp storage to 50MB, just because. Oh, and purging it at random, just because
4. Web push notifications
5. Disallowing 3rd party browser engines (Every browser on iOS is a wrapper around iOS's WebKit)
......
Heck I'm just getting into web development and honestly... web apps seem to be JUST barely now getting there when it comes to app quality, polish.
True. And this is the time for Apple to support and reach parity with other browser vendors on emerging Web features. Unless their true intent is to unfairly drive devs and users to the app store,
Palm's WebOS put web technology first on its platform, and sought to compete with the existing mobile platforms.
So it really is a combination of things.
And of course once Jobs saw the App Store model, there is no turning back.
There are no in app purchases for most of the apps that people are claiming that could be PWA's
Platform owners don’t want that for obvious rea$on$.
Besides, what was the monetization strategy? People weren't going to give their credit card information out to dozens of websites.
Maybe it could have been made to work but I wasn't sad to see it go...
In almost all cases they still resemble HTML pages rather than feeling like a native app.
But People thought that not long ago too... ;)
Even for simple apps (like productivity) they eat battery like crazy.
Slack does less than what ICQ could do 20 years ago, and wastes 1000 times the resources.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Maybe next year they'll resurrect Reader :(
Edit: I know it’s a gif. I’d like to know what tool(s) Apple likely used to create the gif.
Could be anything, but since there is a lot of 3D my bet would be on Cinema 4D with some cel shaders.
See this: http://www.eyedesyn.com/tutorials/using-cel-shader-to-cast-s...
The 3D effect is just an optical illusion coming from all these simple movements in 2D space.
Some creativity goes a long way!
Look how there is no perspective change on the rising blocks and the shadow underneath. Blocks just move straight up and down and shadow just increases/decreases in size.
People movements are just tween animations.
That said, they do offer a search API which should be (slowly) crawlable over time: https://itunes.apple.com/search?country=us&entity=software&t...
Quick edit: Cro-mag is still alive and kicking, looks like it just got iPhone x support too. Crazy.
Does anybody know if the App Store enforces this and what (if anything) they do to vendors who violate this?
It seems that there are numerous complaints on the review page of "word with friends" by people who paid for the Ad-free version but when they moved to a new device, they no longer have access to the Ad-free version
Otherwise, an app, and its in-app purchase set remain available via a user's iTunes account indefinitely as far as I can tell.
I'm not expecting CoolApp to be forever supported. CoolApp works fine for my use case, so I planned on continually using CoolApp until it made sense for me to upgrade. But now that CoolApp2 is the only version available, I have to buy the newer version alongside my new device. If I turn on my old phone, I can still use CoolApp without skipping a beat. I think that's what the other commenter was getting at.
I reset it and downloaded older versions of apps last year.
I believe you can link maybe 5 devices to one account?