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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.

The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.

There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"

Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.

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I actually do open the app store specifically to find a cool new app to install. I do this maybe a couple times a year.

It never works. The apps it suggests are all ad farming garbage. I have found maybe one fun game doing this over the years, but mostly its been repeated frustration. I keep doing it occasionally in hopes that I find another diamond in the rough but I think Google has just trashed this whole thing up.

There is probably a set of users who download tons of apps and throw money after them like crazy, and that's probably what Google has optimized for.

You can do that with F-droid, it's a lot of fun seeing what open source app people developed

I always do this on F-Droid, always find nice gems in there.

Wouldn't dream of doing it on Play Store, it's all trash, and even the stuff I go there to download specifically, I wish I didn't have to most of the time.

well, for now at least

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794

Games are the exception here. The category has real creative churn and relies less on name recognition. Discovery still feels too shallow though. Reddit is still the best source for game recommendations.

Of course they know the UI doesn't really do what you want. But they also know they make more money when it's filled with manipulative anti-patterns.

Companies love algorithmic content because because it's the ultimate shield from criticism. "Don't blame us for bad content! It's just the algorithm and we can't control it! Maybe if you interact with it more it will give you better results." Or course in practice it means they have plausible deniability when they shove a stream of ads in your feed.

The one that kills me is on YouTube: "show fewer shorts". fewer than what? Why isn't zero an option? It just means they will shove them in your face again and again. Don't want them at all? Too bad! We need to increase metrics so the PM of shorts can get their promotion!

In the old days, TV was chock full of ads, sometimes to such a degree that you watched more ad time than movie time during a movie, assuming you didn't switch to other channels in between, always either missing the beginning of next part of the movie, or resigned yourself to watch some ad content afterall in order not to miss that beginning.

Ads will always be around, I guess. Doesn't Google offer a pay search version too, without ads? Like youtube...

You can disable short videos on YouTube or turn them into regular videos using plug-ins.

> the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system

Why do you go to the play store to view and manage installed apps? If you swipe up from home screen you should get to the app drawer. Or Settings > Apps.

If you want to do manual updates you do it in play store rather than the OS settings utility. That is buried under your account settings which isn't logically related.

I have bookmarked the play store update view as separate icon by long pressing the play store icon, then long pressing/dragging the my apps section to an own "app".

That way I can skip the store garbage and directly go click update all apps button.

I just tried on apple device s few weeks ago and it took me many minutes to find the listing where I can update installed apps and it was missing the update all button...

It's simply optimized to upsell you on other apps when you are there for a different purpose.

Just how supermarkets are designed, IKEA is the most egregious, they try to force you to look at and tempt you with a whole load of other products on your way to getting what you came for.

But you go to IKEA for IKEA and get IKEA. With the phone stores or search engines you go to them for $result and you get $something_else.

It's similar but not quite the same. Even the parallel with the physical world fails us here, IKEA can't put everyone's desired product at the entrance. Google can.

When I go to IKEA for a desk chair, I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs. The difference is that IKEA sells IKEA only.

> I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs

That's what I was trying to say earlier with the limitations of the physical world. IKEA implements a lot of psychological tricks to get your eyeballs on as many products as they can but at the end of the day they can have only so many corridors and entrances to the store. You want a chair, I want a pillow, someone else wants a flower pot. Sooner or later someone will need to walk a bit to get to what they want, IKEA can't put everything right at the entrance.

But Google can put my desired result right at the top, at the entrance. It's the advantage of digital, it can be changed to suit each individual user. As it turns out, Google made it only their advantage.

When I go to IKEA for a desk chair, I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs. The difference is that IKEA sells IKEA only.

This is the sort of thing that makes people on HN start screaming "ZOMG! Walled garden!!!!11!!eleventy!1"

I mean, that's not what a walled garden is. A walled garden would be if IKEA sold houses that you can only put IKEA furniture in.

Opening the App Store to download a bunch of apps - in general - is probably the #1 thing people are doing when they open the App Store. Of course, installing a specific app is a top use case. But I think you're just not the average user. Lots of people open the App Store frequently to just check out what's available.

~10 years ago I would do this all the time. It's fun, kind of like surfin' the net was back in the old days, but in a walled garden of applications.

I'm surprised to hear this, as I am in the same boat as the other poster. Of course it makes sense, they wouldn't build that junk if there weren't junk consumers on the market. But I still can't grasp the concept of "just installing apps".

is there actually any data to back up the claim that the "#1 thing people do" is open the app store to see what's available besides your singular story about what you used to do a decade ago when all of this was much more novel in general?

It seems plausible that casual browsing and downloading remains a significant use case. Apple surely wouldn't design the App Store focusing on discovery this way otherwise. Not sure about the #1 activity hypothesis. What I'm certain about though is that the App Store is deeply broken and they've started rushing down the path of platform "enshittification" (real thing) where online platforms become less useful, less enjoyable, or less user-friendly.

10 years ago that was fun. Today it’s an awful experience.

> As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.

Analytics driven development.

They realized that doing it this way leads to greater ad clicks and time spent on the app.

As an aside, am I the only one who has problems finding the Play Store icon amidst the various Google tools? All these icons look the same. They're basically all red/green/yellow/blue.

I swear I am basically icon blind at this point over the course of years and thousands of icons across a handful of operating systems

I am not baffled, because managing and viewing your already-installed apps is almost certainly lower marginal revenue than showing new apps, for the bulk of app store users.

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