#comments

So a bit ago there was some panty twisting about how crappy the App Store is. And I agree, it has many problems. Many problems. But I found myself disagreeing on the writing on why it was bad. As is my way, I found myself disagreeing vehemently. Before we go on, though, please keep in mind that despite it all – I love the App Store, I think I’ve bought more than my fair share of apps and I think it was a revolutionary step for Apple to put this in place, the evidence is that every other platform is now building their own version.

Moving on, the first piece I read was this one by Paul Kafasis. He says that a major problem with the App Store is that it brings prices down – which makes it difficult for developers to continue to put out high quality applications. I think this is probably true. But he compares this problem to the Wal-Mart problem which is so obviously a terrible analogy that it completely misses what I believe would actually be helpful solutions. Wal-Mart actually forces their vendors to reduce their prices – you are actually not allowed to have your product in Wal-Mart unless you agree to some crazy cut rate prices. Apple doesn’t force you to do anything. It is the market and, I believe, to a certain extent developer insecurity that causes them to price their apps too low.

This brings me to the second piece which somehow claims that even with certain exceptions, the App Store is not a free market. Let’s move past the fact that the App Store is the only market which maybe disqualifies it from free market, I don’t know. He grants us to skip over that and goes on to claim that the App Store is not a free market because it doesn’t have an integral way to provide free trials. What? WHAT? Here’s his central point:

iPhone apps can compete on price, coolness of screen shots and name and icon, but they can’t compete on quality. They can compete on quality only second-hand — that is, you can hear from other people (via user ratings or other means) but you can’t try an app yourself before buying.

It’s self-evident, I would hope, that a free market in software allows you to try before you buy.

Ok. First off, let’s move beyond the fact that many apps are offering free trials. Sure Apple doesn’t provide a way in the SDK, which is annoying and stupid of Apple, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is software that let’s you try before you buy.

But now let’s move on the entire notion that if there’s no demo versions of software that this somehow is not a free market. What? Apple doesn’t interfere in the pricing and users are free to see how it looks, read about how it works and base my decision on the information at hand. When I go to the grocery I don’t get any demos. When I go to Toys R Us, I just get to look at close packages. Are they also not free markets?

In my opinion the real problem with the App Store is that as an e-commerce store it sucks. It provides the least possible functionality of almost any other major retail store online that I’ve ever seen. It is true that there are tons and tons of free and $.99 applications, but they are often of the iFart and Flashlight quality apps. They should be free or cheap as hell, they don’t require much development time. They don’t compete with Super Monkey Ball. No one is sitting there looking at the screen and wondering… “Ok, iFart or Super Monkey Ball… which should I get?” High quality, complex applications still are commanding $4-$10 as far as I can see.

The issue is that Super Monkey Ball and iFart compete for visibility and this is a major problem of discovery. There’s a ton of tiny apps and they take up all the most recent lists and top x lists because they’re so plentiful and so cheap. People will download them just because and that will push them up in the rankings hiding other higher quality applications. What Apple needs to do, amongst many other improvements to the store *cough*wishlists*cough*dates-on-reviews*cough* is create more ways to discover apps.

I’m no whiz kid but what about creating top x lists for different price ranges. So right now you have free and paid, what if you further broke paid down into weight classes of $.01-$3.99, $4-$9.99 and $10 and up. This would give a lot more visibility towards higher priced apps and would move average price up. Largely this would compartmentalize apps, into light weight novelty apps, and then apps of increasing complexity.

Of course, Apple should ideally build in a true free trial solution right into the SDK so that developers don’t need to release a light version and then a full version as two entries into the store. But as a quick fix Apple should also provide some sort of grouping that will show all demo’s with a link to their full version and so people could look at those separately.

So there it is, I agree that there’s a problem with the App Store that encourages lower quality applications. But I disagree completely that Apple’s consciously forcing pricing down. I believe that this trend is a side-effect of the crappiness of the App Store interface and Apple could solve a lot of these problems by beefing up the user experience there. What do you think? Is the App Store perfect? Some Walmartian evil empire? Somewhere in between?