What is missing from the iTunes App Store?
Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 12:29AM I've been giving that question a lot of thought lately, as I sit in frustration looking for hot new iPhone apps. My initial thoughts have lead me to a couple of things that I'm pretty sure are, um... insufficient? You may or may not agree with these, but here's what I think is wrong with the App Store:
- it's not enough like Amazon
- it's not enough like Facebook
- it's not enough FUN!!
Now there are probably those who disagree with this. However, I haven't yet come across them (so far as I know). Everyone I've spoken to about it agrees: you can't find things on the iPhone's App Store easily enough, and when it's not frustrating it's just kinda boring. Not only is the built-in App Store application on the iPhone underpowered, even iTunes, itself, offers little more in the way of features to make it easy and fun.
Don't get me wrong; I think iTunes is a killler application, both from a user standpoint and from an Apple stockholder standpoint. Not that I own any, of course. But, while it serves its main purpose admirably, the core issue with the App Store seems to be that iTunes was designed to sell music, not software!
Music is hard to describe. Once you get beyond Genre, Artist, etc. there's not a lot to say. Sure there are sub-genres (more than can be counted... ever heard of "Smarty Arty Pop"?). And you got bitrate, file type, and other technical stuff to content with. But beyond that there are not many quantifiable attributes. You describe it qualitatively: "it's like the Beatles with a little Beyonce and some Kenny G thrown in". [As an aside, if you ever describe your favorite album to me in that way our friendship may be at risk!].
Software, on the other hand, is much easier to nail down. While the feature set and design may be subject to taste, there are a lot of informative things that can be said as fact, rather than opinion. These are what I mean by quantifiable attributes. It is these that make search, filtering, and identifying similar products work on large e-commerce sites.
A few iPhone-specific attributes:
- does it make use of the GPS?
- how about the accelerometer? for gravity or steering?
- does it integrate with my corporate network, or with some web-based social network? which one(s)?
In addition to attributes, the App space could have sub-categories galore. For instance, though I can find out that OmniFocus is a Productivity app, I'd prefer to be able to find it more intuitively. If the App Store had more subcategories, perhaps I could stumble onto it in Productivity->To Dos. Perhaps I could also find it over in Productivity->Personal Time Management->GTD (which stands for Getting Things Done, David Allen's excellent system). That would be nice, because then I could see all of the apps that have been classified as GTD apps easily, regardless whether the developer put that into the descriptive text.
I also have to wonder why it is that Apple acts as though they have never heard of tagging! If we could add tags to iPhone Apps, that would make them so much easier to find. Since GTD was kind of a specialized example, perhaps it wouldn't actually be a GTD category, but a GTD tag I'm filtering on.
Another way to put it at a high level is that the iTunes App Store lacks:
- real e-commerce features
- real social networking features
I will probably go into detail on each of these some other day. For now, let me just share some of things people are telling me they wish they could do when they're looking for iPhone Apps:
Browse or search more like on Amazon: this is a big one! Amazon has spent a great deal of time figuring out what works and doesn't in the e-commerce space. Browsing and searching is not merely a matter of high-level categories and textual lists, but rather an information-rich experience where you can drill down across any number of category-specific attributes.
View related/recommended/also-bought products (also more like Amazon): when you look at a product page Amazon provides you with a great many suggestions. So many, in fact, you can barely scroll to the end of the page! But this triggers a lot of good ideas and most people are, in fact, grateful for these features.
Get more comprehensive opinions: let's face it, iTunes reviews and ratings are weak! Ratings are a little too one-dimensional - is it only a 3 because it's got mediocre gameplay or mediocre performance? And why aren't the reviews searchable? That fill some of the hole left by the lack of tagging. Some people would love to find more detailed information without having to go search the web to find out who's "really" reviewed it.
Find out what my friends are using: one of the best ways to find useful or entertaining things is word-of-mouth. In the age of social networking, this often takes place on the web. While it is useful to see "Customers Also Downloaded" on the iTunes App Store, I'd really like to see "Your Friends Also Downloaded". Better yet: "People In Your Groups Also Downloaded", so I can see the top used applications by all other Software Engineers, Californians, or Humans (like me!).
Hopefully, I'm not angering the army of Apple engineers who probably worked on the app store. This is not their fault, obviously, but a result of the priorities that Apple has to constantly juggle. These are early days, too; Apple iPhone applications are only just beginning to hit the market. As integral as they have become to my life, it was less than four months ago they weren't available (at least, not without voiding my warranty).
Already there are several thousand apps in the iTunes App Store, with many hundreds more being added every week. There are already a phenomenal variety of activities available to us on our iPhones, but we'll just keep wanting more. Growth seems steady so we ought to start wondering: how will we find good, relevant, or exciting applications when the App Store hits 20,000? What about 50,000? 100,000? How do you find them now?
Reader Comments (2)
I agree with you 100%!! I just found your blog through twitter - I am really interested to see what kind of app store replacement you are working on. I wrote an article a little while back saying pretty much the same thing http://www.nimblebit.com/2009/03/the-trouble-with-tribbles-and-the-iphone-app-marketplace/
another frustration i have with the app store is the lack of a shopping cart, or any way of bookmarking an app for later investigation or purchase. i want an amazon-like "saved cart" or "wish list"!