For me the App Store is one of the worst apps on iOS. Just look at how many complain about its poor search results. I just skip them and use Google to search for iOS apps.
I have to agree, my largest gripe with the app store is searching for an app. When I look for a decent app, I currently google for app reviews, then go back to the app store find it by name and download it.
Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.
I do think the iOS app ecosystem is pretty terrible. I buy Apple because the overall security and privacy is better and of course the ecosystem ties. But I have mostly given up on shopping for apps. The app store is flooded with me too games with in-app purchases and knockoffs of legit apps. To make it worse, Apple puts advertisements before actual search results when you search for an app. Innovative new apps are rare or just get drowned in the app store.
Apples app store is way worse than the google play store. i was shocked at how bad the app store is with shitty ads and promoted content over organic search results
I’m glad Apple rejects lots apps and I’m glad it costs money to get into the App Store. Every time I look the Google Play store I decide it’s not worth engaging with, as a user. Too much garbage and malware.
Here is the beef that I have with Apple. Hands down the app store is rotten infrastructure to the core for app developers. In my experience, app discovery is so bad it shows everything but the app you were looking for unless the app you were looking for is in the top 10.
Most indy-apps are brutally left out in the cold. As a result, app downloads are stagnating.
So it boggles the mind why going forward we should invest months into the development in an app where the only benefit the app store brings is payment (for a free app) and versioning.
Apple is in dire need for an app store disruption.
I'll go further in one regard: the App Store in fact hurts Apple because it has caused a kind of filtering of apps down to those that are the sleaziest.
I used to enjoy exploring the App Store — I resent it now. I'll download half a dozen apps only to delete them within minutes of launching them because of their rent-ware attitude or just plain shitty functionality.
I'd have slight more time for apples app store if it was any good, but it does such a bad job of curation it's next to useless.
When I recently got an iPad I thought app store will be great to find good games for the kids, but it just suggests so much junk
As a developer, the experience is terrible because it's so random and arbitrary, you can have a feature in an app for years and then try to release an urgent bug fix and suddenly a reviewer is fixated on some tiny detail that's never changed
The current state of every app store search is atrocious. IOS, Android, and Windows store. Even if you search for exact terms on IOS you have to slog through large amounts of BS. This is not a new thing.
I’ve noticed something different. The apps on the app store used to be good. I’m not sure how or why but the apps on the iOS app store are _terrible_. For any given function, there appears to be no good option on the app store compared to, say, iOS app store 4 years ago (or android around the same time, the last time I used it). This is entirely on apple and not the developers, as Apple are the curators and the developers have already demonstrated they can make good apps.
I simply hate the appstore - it's so full of useless bad quality apps - don't even get me started on games. i have only oppened it a couple of times in the past two years. They killed discovery for me, i'm not even interested in checking out new apps (still no trials?!).
I think the problem with the CrapStore isn't that there is too much crap(Sturgeon's Law afterall, it's to be expected), rather Apple's interface to search, sort and present apps completely fucking sucks. Apple really ought to at least try to be more like Google search. What's ultimately tragic is that Apple won't let anyone else make a better or even different interface for searching for apps and have it be available as an app on the AppStore. What Google gets right is that any idiot can find what they want, nearly immediately, and they don't even need to see or know just how much total crap is out there on the web.
Seriously, what the hell is Steve thinking with so many hundreds of thousands of apps? When you want vanilla apps that are simple and popular enough that you know ahead of time which app you want, then the AppStore is great. When you trek even slightly off the beaten path, maybe exploring what's out there, or looking for something very specific and rare, and for which you would be willing to pay a lot more than $0.99, well, that ends up being a lost cause. All iPhone devs know that users simply won't spend any time sifting through apps, and this is why spamming your way to the top of any category lists is just as important as being on Google SERP #1.
Case in point: tonight I went to order a pizza, and thought to myself that it might be neat to try one of the pizza ordering apps. Seconds later I'm scrolling through more than 50 different pizza apps. Half of them I can't even tell whether they are for ordering pizza, nor whether they are local, nationwide, integrated with chains or just mom & pops. If I can't figure it out, and I'm a programmer, how well will a completely non-technical person fare? Do I have 30 minutes to tap and dig down multiple menu levels on several of them, read each one's spamtastic description, then read the user reviews which are worse than YouTube comments, then install it and try it out? Then do that again 50 more times? Does Steve think I'm a moron? If you can't even create software that can semantically represent "order a pizza local to me", how the fuck can we expect them to do something more complex?
I ended up going to dominos.com in Safari.
It's almost as if Apple doesn't give a shit about promoting exceptional software for the long haul over the next few years, no, they only care about churning a fast buck right now, with a horizon of just a few business quarters ahead. What Apple will end up doing is driving all of their users to the web, and then html5 is going to mop the floor with Apple's entire Objective-C walled garden. Sorry, as much as the web is flawed, it is always going to be infinitely more simple to use than apps.
That thing needs a massive re-working. There are plenty of us who have released apps, games that were great, only to be buried by apps that were terrible.
The cream definitely doesn't rise to the top using the current App Store model.
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.
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