App Store massively dissapointing...

[.Andy]

I've spent about $200 on apps. Can't complain at all. The Netter's Apps are wonderful. It's like any store - there's a lot of stuff that isn't targeted at me or just plain doesn't interest me. I'm not going to get up in arms about it though. What there is has added fantastic functionality to my touch.

 

[FJR]

One thing I am worried about is that there is no hosting fee. So while there may be a lot of crappy apps, I don't know exactly what is going to make them go away, as is. Apple could very well require that a program can avoid the hosting fee if its downloaded to X number of iphones, if it fails to meet that threshold, it has to pay a fee. This would likely clear out a lot of the cheap apps that have as good if not better free counterparts and the just plain bad apps.

An option to sort by popularity would also work pretty well, I think.

But my bottom line right now is that the app store is new, has borught much more goodness than annoyingness and its justifiably pretty far down the list of things apple needs to worry about right this second.

let's get a slightly better version of 2.0 that cuts out the memory leak and other bugs first.

 

[Night Spring]

From my perspective I don't really care about trial periods, but I respect the opinion of those who would like them. I think the best compromise, and perhaps the intended method of dealing with this, is the ability to review apps.

But in order for people to be able to write useful reviews of paid apps, they have to pay in order to download and try them out. So someone has to "sacrifice" their hard earned money in order to try out the apps and warn others to stay away from the ones not worth their price. Doesn't exactly strike me as a fair system....

 

[FJR]

But in order for people to be able to write useful reviews of paid apps, they have to pay in order to download and try them out. So someone has to "sacrifice" their hard earned money in order to try out the apps and warn others to stay away from the ones not worth their price. Doesn't exactly strike me as a fair system....

Fair or not, isn't that essentially the system that 99% of all software is on?

 

[wronski]

No one needs to try out iDemocrat or iRepublican to know that it's an absolute disgrace to the store.

 

[marksman]

I wish Apple had some sort of standard of quality for the apps. There's a lot of very poor ones.

I agree with the later but disagree with the former.

I don't want Apple making judgment qualities about what I want or need for my iPhone. As soon as they start doing that, they are going to take stuff away from people.

What if your favorite app is deemed of low quality or not necessary?

I want them to keep their hands off any kind of judgment. If this means we have 100 tip calculators for whatever ridiculous reason, then we do. It is a small price to pay to make sure those apps we really do want are not somehow filtered away before we can get them.

 

[ayasin]

One thing I am worried about is that there is no hosting fee. So while there may be a lot of crappy apps, I don't know exactly what is going to make them go away, as is.

Well Apple charges devs $100 / year to keep their certs active. Presumably if you let your cert lapse your app will be removed. This has 2 potential benefits. First you don't end up with apps where the dev disappeared 4 years ago so you don't ever get support if something goes wrong. Second it makes you think about whether you want to keep sinking $100 into something that's not returning you enough profit if your apps are no good.

 

[ayasin]

No one needs to try out iDemocrat or iRepublican to know that it's an absolute disgrace to the store.

I'm not sure what people's obsession is with these two apps. Ok they're crap, we get it. I don't think it's a disgrace to the store any more than a gaudy souvenir shop is a disgrace to a city. These types of things will correct themselves in time, have faith in the free market .

 

[yg17]

My biggest complaint are the reviews


"OMG TEH APP IS 2 EXPENSUV NO ONE WILL BY IT U SHUD LOWER TEH PRISE N DEN MAYBEE I WILL USE UR APP!"

or other things like "THIS APP IS USELESS N SERVS NO PURPOSE WHY IS IT ON HERE?"

not to mention the lovely review I saw about the iQuaran application that brought up 9/11. I'll let your imagination figure out what exactly that review said.

I think Apple needs to require that in order for you to write a review, you need to have had the app installed for a week. That will prevent all of the useless reviews from people who've never downloaded the damn thing.

 

[AJsAWiz]

My biggest complaint are the reviews


"OMG TEH APP IS 2 EXPENSUV NO ONE WILL BY IT U SHUD LOWER TEH PRISE N DEN MAYBEE I WILL USE UR APP!"

or other things like "THIS APP IS USELESS N SERVS NO PURPOSE WHY IS IT ON HERE?"

not to mention the lovely review I saw about the iQuaran application that brought up 9/11. I'll let your imagination figure out what exactly that review said.

I think Apple needs to require that in order for you to write a review, you need to have had the app installed for a week. That will prevent all of the useless reviews from people who've never downloaded the damn thing.

Great

 

[yg17]

Great

Oh noes teh nazi kitteh dusnt aproove!


Apple really needs to hire people to read reviews before they get posted. I reported about 10 more hateful comments from the iQuaran app. The hatred and stupidity of people never ceases to amaze me. And this is the kind of garbage that should never be allowed in the reviews.

 

[janey]

Only people that have actually purchased/downloaded/used the application should be able to leave a review. I can't imagine it'd be that difficult for them to filter this, after all you use your username when downloading an app and leaving a review!

No. way.

Why the heck is everyone suggesting this? What kind of review sites have you been on where you were required to be a customer of the product before being able to write a review? It's very illogical.

I outlined my own long opinion about how Apple should rate, count and rank reviews on the app store: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/5873884/

I'd have to say my way makes a LOT more sense than having only customers (biased group right there) saying anything about the app.

 

[yg17]

No. way.

Why the heck is everyone suggesting this? What kind of review sites have you been on where you were required to be a customer of the product before being able to write a review? It's very illogical.

I outlined my own long opinion about how Apple should rate, count and rank reviews on the app store: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/5873884/

I'd have to say my way makes a LOT more sense than having only customers (biased group right there) saying anything about the app.

How can you review a product that you have never used?

 

[janey]

How can you review a product that you have never used?

Did you bother to read that post?

 

[yg17]

Did you bother to read that post?

Yes.

Tried it on someone else's phone? That's nice, but you probably didn't get a good chance to really use it. Unless you've borrowed someone else's phone for an extended period of time. Unless it's something stupidly simple like the flashlight apps, you need to have used an app for more than 5 minutes to write a decent review.

Used the jailbroken version? Sorry, but I don't want to read reviews on the hacked together version of it. I want to read reviews on what I'm about to download and put on my phone, not some previous version that was never even supposed to run on an iPhone.

Better alternatives are nice, but that's not what reviews are for. Maybe they could use a separate discussion forum for such posts, but when I read reviews, I want actual reviews from people who have used the app. I don't want it cluttered up with crap, making the useful stuff buried on the 27th page and difficult to find.

I'd wager that customers who have used the app, maybe even paid for it, are the least biased group out there. The biased comments come from people who have never used the app, for example, some of the crap on the iQuaran app, or the other comments from 10 year old internet trolls who don't even own an iPhone or iPod and have nothing better to do but post fake "reviews"

 

[janey]

Tried it on someone else's phone? That's nice, but you probably didn't get a good chance to really use it.....

Not really. It didn't take me 5 minutes with super monkey ball to figure out that the accelerometer settings needed to be tweaked. didn't take 5 minutes for bookshelf to crash. didn't take 5 minutes to get the gist of urbanspoon.

Used the jailbroken version? Sorry, but I don't want to read reviews on the hacked together version of it...

Sorry, but out of all the apps I do see in the app store, the jailbroken ones are almost functionally similar to the app store versions (yes I have purchased the ones that are not free because I liked them when I used them on my jailbroken phone), maybe with a few improvements. The only ones that are actually sorta different are tap tap revenge (well, it's missing the iTunes library), twinkle (arguably worse than before, but maybe that was because of the simplicity)...

Better alternatives are nice, but that's not what reviews are for....

Apple has no other way to show similar apps, other than purchases made by similar people and categories. This sucks when the search feature sucks and gives me completely irrelevant results that I don't want. Case in point: how the hell do I search for all the gas/car tracking apps? I can't. It's insanely difficult and searching for the logical phrases ends up in lots of irrelevant results. The only way I can tell anything is through reviews.


Soooo, if you read my post, you'd get my reasoning. Non customers should have their say but it should count less to none and be less visible compared to customer reviews, and customer reviews should be marked as such.

Personally I take them ALL with a grain of salt, cause some customers don't know sh*t about what they're reviewing. How frustrating. There aren't many great review sites for all the apps available on the store now..TouchArcade is a nice one but games only? Meh.

I'd wager that customers who have used the app, maybe even paid for it, are the least biased group out there. The biased comments come from people who have never used the app, for example, some of the crap on the iQuaran app, or the other comments from 10 year old internet trolls who don't even own an iPhone or iPod and have nothing better to do but post fake "reviews"

Not always, but Apple should be reviewing those disgusting reviews and removing them in the first place. Reasonable reviews even by non-customers should be left alone.

 

[ayasin]

No. way.

Why the heck is everyone suggesting this? What kind of review sites have you been on where you were required to be a customer of the product before being able to write a review? It's very illogical.

I outlined my own long opinion about how Apple should rate, count and rank reviews on the app store: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/5873884/

I'd have to say my way makes a LOT more sense than having only customers (biased group right there) saying anything about the app.

Hotels.com only allows people who've actually stayed at a hotel to rate it. Many people rate hotels down if they are bad and the quality of the reviews is extremely high. I prefer tested methods to your conjecture...sorry

 

[janey]

I prefer tested methods to your conjecture...sorry

A software review site?

I guess you don't frequent many of them then.

 

[Railrider]

The biggest disappointment for me is the slow pace Apple is taking with putting up new apps and updates. Yesterday they posted about one page of new stuff. We all know that 1password has already been submitted, as have updates to a variety of apps. Something's seriously wrong if it takes them this long to review and get apps up there.

 

[megatronbomb]

No. way.

Why the heck is everyone suggesting this? What kind of review sites have you been on where you were required to be a customer of the product before being able to write a review? It's very illogical.

I'd have to say my way makes a LOT more sense than having only customers (biased group right there) saying anything about the app.

Eh... I'm not opposed to weighted reviews, but just because "everyone else does it that way" isn't a good argument. I get tired of wading through reviews and trying to figure out who actually has used something and knows what they're talking about or whether an individual is simply a know-it-all and/or has an axe to grind.

I'm not exaclty sure how customers are a biased group. After all, they're purchasing or downloading an app, using it, and then stating whether they felt it was worth their time and money. How is that biased?

 

[ayasin]

A software review site?

I guess you don't frequent many of them then.

LOL. The only software reviews worth reading are the ones where they actually use the software and describe it's functionality etc. I don't care if person x doesn't think app y is useful from the description and screenshot. No one does. They can see if the app is useful for themselves with the exact same info. People want to know if the app is good from someone with MORE info than they have (i.e. someone who's actually used the app).

 

[Night Spring]

Fair or not, isn't that essentially the system that 99% of all software is on?

Nope. I get most of my software nowadays through the shareware/trialware system, where you get to try a software for a limited time period before you buy, or you get a "light" version of a software for free, and you can upgrade to the paid version if you think the extra features are worth it. I can't even remember the last time I paid for a software without trying it first.

Some developers are in fact offering "light" / "trial" / "introductory" versions of their software in the Apps store. I haven't seeen any time-limited software -- perhaps Apple hasn't provided that functionality in the SDK?

 

[admanimal]

I also agree that the only way reviews really make sense is to limit them to people who have actually purchased the app. It's really the only way to get rid of most of the crap reviews.

 

[BrokenE]

Well, the app store is disappointing to me because as some have pointed out, most of the apps are crap. I mean, why did Apple decide to limit the number of pre-launch developers to 4,000 or whatever the number, giving the impression that they were being very selective, and that the apps were going to be all hi quality....only to have most of the stuff be crap? What was the point then? They should have let more people at it, maybe there would have been a few more good apps.

 

[ayasin]

Some developers are in fact offering "light" / "trial" / "introductory" versions of their software in the Apps store. I haven't seeen any time-limited software -- perhaps Apple hasn't provided that functionality in the SDK?

You could do it, there's nothing in the SDK preventing it and I don't think it's a bad idea. Perhaps this is something Apple will add officially in the future (30 day trial as part of the install of the app...if you don't delete it within 30 days you get billed).