From a aspiring indie developer perspective, I've never worried about the 70/30 split.
I've been much more concerned with getting my apps visible to anyone. The app store is so flawed when it comes to discoverability (even as a user it is frustrating to find apps that solve a need) I would give up even more share if people could find my app to begin with.
Agreed: The terrible discovery is the worse problem, it leads to a market of hits, with no long tail.
Whereas if you open the play store on an android phone, it suggests apps your friends have, and many other 'discoverable' things. It leads to a better long tail, eg supports indies.
I know more indies making a living out of android, and i know far more ios developers, being one myself.
+1, completely agree. Might as well throw complete itunes connect overhaul into this. It's an absolute nightmare working with itunes connect, managing users, working with beta and internal testers.. the whole process is completely disconnected and really demonstrates the launch of a rushed product.
> Might as well throw complete itunes connect overhaul into this.
Funny considering the current iTunes connect is a complete overhaul, which only came out recently with iOS 8.
The new iTunes Connect acts like someone's first attempt at an Angular app (which it is), with a complete disregard from doing things in a performant way.
Well, then they chose the wrong ones, or widely failed at defining something that works. Working with this new website (which about 30% of the time still uses old pages... Bug reports anyone?) is a huge chore.
I remember being locked out of an important project for an entire week because their buttons for adding people to projects was broken. One day, it started working again, no communication from Apple at all.
There's also this usability issue where you have to try to validate your new version of an app and only then being welcomed by an error. No pre-validation of the input fields, hello Apple?
There are myriads of small annoying issues like:
- can't share 1 email with multiple teams in iTunesConnect and Developer portal. You have to have a unique email in iTunes Connect for each of your projects. This is just ridiculous, especially when you know that on the Developer portal this works fine. I have now tens of myname+theproject@mycompany.com accounts in iTunes connect, and managing passwords is simply... damn..
- can't delete a version of an app when you have created it (but not yet uploaded a binary). WTF? I was trying to test the "beta" service, and was forced to create a new version of the app. Once created, you cannot remove it for any reason. I was stuck there with a version that I deemed was "beta", and couldn't create a new one, or remove this one.
- Seemingly random crypto export renewal. Sometimes, when issuing a new version of our app, the website will ask for the crypto documents, whereas they are in their database. Othertimes, they won't be asked.
- Once the crypto export documents have been provided, you cannot submit another one. This bit me once, because there was only _one_ "upload" button. So I sent the US Gov. crypto document, and then the page moved on, not letting me upload the French one. Afterwards, impossible to get back to this page, and Apple support kindly told me I was to drop the deployment to the French store if I wanted to continue using the App Store... The correct solution would have been to ZIP the entire set of documents, then upload them as 1 file.. which is not intuitive. Or the Apple team could have asked for the french document through their support interface, which they never did. I got out of this by uploading a dummy binary, then dropping the version entirely, and creating a new one. Bizarrely, the export documents were not asked for the next submission.
This website really sucks. I usually brag about how the iOS distribution system is superior to Android's in terms of security and separation of roles, but last month I submitted an app to the Android Play store and I was baffled by the web UI. Drag-and-drop the APK, AJAX-enhanced buttons, very quick, not fiddling with two accounts (developer and iTunes connect), overall ease of use..
Man, Apple seems to have been too busy shoveling the cash.
I know more indies making a living out of android, and i know far more ios developers, being one myself.
Really? Can you elaborate on this at all? What kind of apps? I know the Pocketcasts guys have said that they now get the bulk of their revenues from Android but the conventional wisdom is still that iOS is where the money is for indies.
As an indie developer with no platform allegiances I'm willing to go wherever the customers are.
I'd rather not have my purchases/interests being broadcast to my "friends", thank you.
What are these "friends" anyway? Everyone in your contact list?
The last thing when buying an app I want to do is to worry about "What if X sees that I got this app?"
My purchases are my business. Not theirs. If I want to recommend an app I can do so through a variety of way in this communication age. I do not need some automated snitch for that.
Even basic filtering like "hide all apps that haven't been updated for iOS 8", or something along those lines would help with discoverability (and in this example, reward the developers who are stay on top of their updates).
There are a bunch of other filters that would be useful too.
There's also the issue of the filter's they do us now. The "Essential" apps on the Front Page of the App Store don't even seem that essential. Why is an app to teach kids to spell considered "Essential" for an Apple device?
Our iOS game has been featured a couple of times under "Best New Games" when it's been out for a year and was actually an update. Could be Best Games, Best New Games, and Best Updates to keep things more accurate.
Not going to gripe about any feature too much, but I wonder how many App Store visitors find that sort of thing annoying?
I looked in the list of "iPad Air 2" apps the other day, expecting to see a list of apps that I'd consider upgrading for, but half the list is already installed on my old iPad 2. Very strange.
Yes. Since 2010, I've been begging in forums on Android and iOS to use a heavily layered category system or tagging system that would allow me to narrow and filter my search as much as I need to. I want this as a consumer. I want this as a developer. Why it doesn't exist makes absolutely no sense to me. Especially for games.
I should be able to go to action games, then platformers, then side-scrolling, endless, speed run, leveled, then filter out only those with boss battles, or powerup-ups, or 8-bit graphics, etc, and so-on.
The only thing I figure is that the developers will abuse the ability to tag their own apps, making the fine-tuned results even more ridiculous than general results.
I think what you want could be solved by a better search. If there was a better search you could search for an 8-bit platformer game and find a list of them. Tagging doesn't really add anything that a better search couldn't provide. Plus, a better search in descriptions means that the terms still have to make sense in a description. I guess you could load the description up with terms, but I suspect that it is more likely that one would get caught gaming the system that with tags.
In my opinion, it's in Apple's best interest to improve discoverability as it could result in more apps being sold.
The problem with a lot of categories is that it makes navigation cumbersome as you'd need many taps to get to an app.
Oh, and if you want change (at least in the iOS case), send feedback to Apple and/or a bug report. Complaining on forums does nothing.
Sadly, yes. There's no evidence that Apple has any interest in improving the App Store experience for devs or for customers.
In fact, I'm not convinced that Apple knows how to improve the experience. No one in Cupertino seems to be acting as dev or consumer champion, and upper management are apparently too removed to understand what's needed.
Yes but, in light of that, this would be a simple solution apple could implement overnight if they wanted. I'm sure they won't for political reasons but I hope they think about it.
It's always interesting to me how simplistic significant changes to a product seem to outsiders. "Overnight" was the key word here. What most people don't consider is that the UI may need to undergo a serious revamp (with nearly unlimited possibilities to evaluate in order to find what Apple's design team believes best), the testing that QA has to perform to catch edge case bugs from the revision, not to mention that these changes may only be deliverable through an update to iOS itself (something that is already considered to be an unwelcome burden by some users).
If you don't think that Apple and its competitors genuinely want to deliver the best experience that they can within the time and cost budgets that they have to adhere to if they want to remain competitive then you severely underestimate the people who put in the long hours required to get these products into your hands.
Apple has made many changes to iTunes Connect already.
Xcode, OS X, iOS, and iTunes have been getting regular updates for years now.
Apple took the time to design a whole new language for app development, a whole new framework for game development, and another new framework for low-level graphics.
So any suggestion that the company doesn't have the time or resources to do a better job on the frontend doesn't square with reality.
Apple has no competitors in this category. There is no other app store you can use with an Apple product. All they have to do is achieve the bare minimum functioning product.
There is an idea I described in a blog post a few years back which would potentially improve discovery from top charts.
Have a switch which would remove apps already installed by the user so that others would bubble up
I've brainstormed a discovery model where your content gets seen by say, 100 people. If X% {buy|pay|like} it, then another 100 people see it. And so on. Rotating.
Ironically, this is effectively what Blizzard's Battle.net custom game list screen did. (every time someone joined, it would bump up a hosted game to visibility)
I've been much more concerned with getting my apps visible to anyone. The app store is so flawed when it comes to discoverability (even as a user it is frustrating to find apps that solve a need) I would give up even more share if people could find my app to begin with.