The App Store, 3 years later: Apple just doesn't care.

1) It's effortless to build an infrastructure that handles reviewing half a million apps and hosting billions of downloads, and to scale up to those levels from nothing.

2) The app store review process doesn't serve its intended purpose.

If that interpretation's correct, how do you support those assertions?

#1 is demonstrably false, given the effort that many companies exert to handle reviewing and approving numerous kinds of content, and then vending that content to consumers around the world. Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google are just a few companies that have large chunks of their organization devoted to approving content (be it movies, ads, apps, or ebooks) and then supporting the systems which host and vend that content around the world. Both are non-trivial problems and difficult things to scale at those magnitudes. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.

I'd also claim that #2 is false. Malware is not a problem on the App Stores, and I feel eminently confident as a consumer that I can trust apps purchased on Apple's App Stores. As a developer, the review process has caught bugs in my apps before they've hit my users, and they've also been quick to approve updates that address urgent bugs that slipped past both my and their testing. You may disagree with some of their policies and the review process does make mistakes, but I don't believe you can assert they're largely ineffectual or incompetent, nor do I believe you can claim the process doesn't offer benefits to consumers. What other software store is as confidently and easily used by consumers around the world?

Sure, that part does scale. The fact that scalable processes can scale is not a myth. The myth comes in when we get so dazzled by those awesome new scalable processes that we handwave away the distinction between that which scales, and that which does not.

When you speed up one portion of a process you don't speed up the process, you just move the bottleneck. The slowest and most expensive part of shipping an app used to be printing and mailing disks. Now it's App Store reviews. [1] Or producing documentation. Or deciding whether the buttons work better on the left or the right. Or the volume of calls to your support line, or posts to your online FAQ. In whole sectors of publishing the bottleneck is marketing: Your book, movie, app, or platform can't grow faster than the number of people who can be convinced to buy it, and convincing people is a very human-scale process; to build trust requires attention, and attention is not a scalable resource. Despite modest advances in brain-enhancing drugs, we still think and feel at about the same rate as ever, and despite advances in font technology the number of words we can read per waking hour is about the same as it was two hundred years ago.

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[1] Of course, the rate of shipping app updates depends on the speed of the review process, but the first derivative of the rate of shipping app updates depends on the rate at which new reviewers can be hired and trained, and that is even more of a human-scale process.

(Ironically, things with no customers are easy to change. And things that are obviously broken are also easy to change: It's broken, the worst that can happen is that it becomes twice as broken, so just go for it.)

There's a famous aphorism attributed to Napoleon: "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake." Rule zero of systems engineering is the inverse of this: Never interrupt yourself while you're succeeding. Do not kill the golden goose.

So, the first thing that has to happen for Apple to make significant changes in their process is that they have to stop succeeding so darn much. While the App Store is working they're unlikely to change the process. And, indeed, it doesn't seem like much has changed: They've fixed obviously broken things like months-long review wait times (as I said above, fixing obviously-broken things is relatively easy) but they haven't really changed the fundamental game plan. Why should they? It's raining money.

There are several reasons why it takes so long to improve working things:

Entire companies are built on the existing Apple model, broken as it may be. Break their revenue stream and these companies will scream and yell.

It's easier to swim with the tide of institutional inertia than against it. If you have to hire one hundred new App Store reviewers per month, those people need to be trained. There is (at least at first) no textbook for that job, or perhaps the manual is two years out of date. And nobody reads manuals anyway. And some important parts of any job are not written down anywhere. So the new folks will learn by watching over the shoulders of existing App Store reviewers. And so it goes: As things scale up, it becomes easier and easier to let the existing culture maintain itself, bolting on new parts as necessary, rather than try to change that culture.

When you want to change a working thing, it's not enough to show that your new version works. You must also demonstrate that it's a significant improvement over what you're doing now. This can take a lot of time. Science is patient work. If you're lucky you can run continuous A/B tests of small changes, and thereby gradually inch your way forward to a brighter future, but how do you A/B test App Store features when the developer community has a clue and a forum? Offer a feature to one developer on Monday, and by Tuesday night all the others will be at your metaphorical gate with metaphorical torches and pitchforks, demanding the feature for themselves. You have to go very slowly. It pays to do so below the radar.

I think it may be more possible now that they are starting to rely/focus on icloud for various things (backups, match, sync). There is still a close relation between syncing media with iDevices via itunes though, so I can see how unifying stores outside of itunes would be challenging and possibly confusing to many end users.

I really would like to see itunes becomes lighter and more usable though.

"The App Store’s biggest flaw, at the end of the day, is that it is not a free market. It is not a meritocracy, and app success is slave to the whim of a corporate overlord that changes it mind without explanation more often than a 5 year old."

If I were Apple, after reading that I wouldn't give you the time of day.

>I just want to explain myself here. My most basic complaint is not that there are a lot of junk apps, nor am I suggesting that Apple remove them from the App Store. I'm merely pointing out that it's a problem, and causes problems for legitimate developers in the same way that newsletter clutter makes it hard to read emails from human beings when your inbox has 10,000 emails.

I agree that it's a problem too, but I consider it to be a problem akin to democracy, i.e it doesn't always lead to the best result, but the alternative is even worse.

I think this would not be an issue if the App Store's search functionality was not piss-poor, and if Apple had better discovery mechanisms in place for people to find the gems, which often are not present on the top charts.

I think a lot of people make those decisions based on third party reviews and app review sites, though.

With 500,000 apps it would be very difficult to do something about it, considering that great masses of people might even like shitty apps over some gems (like great masses of people prefer the latest bullshit blockbuster over Inception, or NCIS over FireFly).