Success isn’t all wine and roses. Take Apple’s app stores– iTunes App Store and Mac App Store.
Who among the OS X and iOS faithful have not purchased and downloaded apps from either store? Apple makes it too easy to shop and buy, right? Or, do they? It’s easy to buy and download, but is it really that easy to shop?
Fix The Flaws, Please
It’s not that either app store doesn’t work. Both are good at displaying apps, and the purchase and download process– when it works– works very well.
The first major issue is the inability to search for apps within a category by popularity, or ratings, or downloads.
In other words, it’s not easy to figure out which applications are the most well liked by users and buyers without clicking through page after page after page.
Let me use the Mac App Store as an example. Click the Photography category menu. The choices are anemic.
See All is nice, but doesn’t let you sort by anything except Name and Release Date. Why isn’t there an option for Most Popular?
The Photography page, as with other pages, also displays the Top Paid, and the Top Free apps, each with a See All button.
Sorting is limited to Bestsellers (duh), and Name. Again. What does Best Seller even mean? User Ratings are scattered all over the searched pages, in no particular order.
The same holds true for other categories which makes it difficult to search and find high rated apps.
Similar problems plague app searches in the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad. All too often, a newly released application is publicized but cannot be found during a search of the app store. What’s with that?
Not only is search broken, so is how Apple displays search results and details for an app. Prior to iOS 6, search results were stacked vertically. In iOS 6, results are displayed horizontally which results in a loss of information density.
Skimming through app search results is annoyingly painful. The old way was much better. Apple is going backwards while trying to improve searching through a million iOS apps.
Where I once could scroll comfortably through dozens and dozens of app search results, the new method tires me out after five or six. What’s wrong with an option to toggle between the new and old search results, Apple?
Finally, both app stores need some filtering capability. I’m tried of wading through orphaned applications. Allow me to filter apps that have been tested on iOS 6, or released within the past x-number of months.
It’s a database. It can’t be that hard to create search options and filters. App discovery is a painful process in both app stores and needs to be fixed.
Here’s an added bonus complaint. In-app purchases. No, I don’t mind upgrading to more functionality from within an app (which treats the base app as a free trial with more features added for a few dollars). What I object to are bait and switch, and apps that seem to promise functionality, but hide or bury the in-app purchase functions from users.
Apple improved iTunes in the most recent version, but searching for apps remains in the dark ages.
About Kate MacKenzie
Totally agree. Filtering is also must for iOs 4 users. Searching Apps for iPhone 3g i bought month ago produced so many nasty words towards Apple and App store developers you could hardly imagine. Disgusting experience.
And asking one developer for compatibility with my older device they told they would like to do that if Apple would give them tools to do that. Not sure it is true since have no experience with that yet.
I already started long letter to Tim Cook since this is unaceptable.
Problem is that probably after period of time most users ends up using, music, video, messaging, email and web and few more apps.
Thanks for article.
Best wishes
Frantisek
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. I read elsewhere that a survey says App Store customers are less satisfied now than at any time since it launched.
Search is terrible. Display is terrible. Unfortunately, it’s also the only game in town and Apple isn’t known for listening to their customer base. Where else are you going to go?
Apple is between a rock and a hard spot. They have a million or so apps between all the stores, and app sales are important to keep developers happy. Good apps help to sell iPhones, iPads, and Macs. But Apple can’t play favorites (at least, not much), and has to spread the wealth around. Otherwise, if customers could search easily for only the highest rated apps, all the others, including new ones, would gather digital dust. By making it a little more difficult to find good applications, Apple ensures that users will try and buy more than they need (at ridiculously low prices, too) and keep everyone going.
I agree. Besides I have found that there are other better ways to search for apps on both services. In general I just don’t use the stores for searching since there are better ways to do it just using a generic search engine.