Apple Thinks App Discoverability is Under Control?
Friday, April 24, 2009 at 2:52PM I was a little surprised to hear that Apple thinks the App Store makes it fun and easy to discover apps. What follows is a portion of the transcript from Apple's Quarterly Earnings Call on Wednesday:
Nancy Paxton Thanks Scott. Could we have the next question please?
Operator We will hear from Charles Wolf with Needham.
Charles Wolf – Needham Yes. In view of the explosion in the number of applications for the iPhone and the iTouch, I was wondering what steps Apple is taking to ensure that the iPhone Apps can be discovered? And are these any different from music discovery on the iTunes Store?
Peter Oppenheimer Charlie, we are doing a number of things. We include easy to find top 50 and 100 Apps, both paid for and free. We’ve got them associated in various genres as well and we’re expanding those. And so I think the team has done a fantastic job making Apps easy to discover and fun to discover.
Are you serious, Peter? Have you ever done a Twitter search on "app store"? People are constantly complaining about how undiscoverable things are! Especially developers, who have the most to lose from lack of discoverability.
Do you really believe that apps are "easy to discover and fun to discover" because of top 50 and 100 lists in the genres? We all know it is notoriously difficult to get an app in these lists - what's there today tends to be hard to push out because it's the first thing people see!
Doin' the Math:
Let's look at this mathematically, too: you have a total of 40 levels, including 1 top level, 20 genres, and 19 subgenres. 40 times 100 = 4000 apps! Naturally, there will be some repetition both at the top level and in the Games genre. We will soon have 10X that many in the store, so what are you doing to ensure the discoverability of the other 90%?
Also, what that half of the population who always Search instead of Browse? Where's the "we're building a powerful new search engine that will actually return relevant results"?
Not Their Strong Suit - Thankfully!
I have to say, though, it is hard for me to be upset with them about this aspect of the App Store. Apple is a platform company: they build my favorite hardware and make sure it works seamlessly with some pretty stellar software. They are not an e-commerce company, like Amazon.
It takes a good deal of time, energy, and focus to build a feature-rich e-commerce experience, and to ensure discoverability. I speak from experience here, coming from an e-commerce software engineering background. Doing this fairly well has made Amazon quite successful, but, IMHO, it would detract from Apple's focus on the things we love.
But Whose?
So, we'll just have to suffer along until someone builds us a better one. Someone other than Apple. Someone with e-commerce experience who can design and build a large-scale, feature-rich home for App shopping. Hey, wait a minute! That sounds like me!
Reader Comments (3)
I think they're struggling with the amount of Apps developed & distributed. But forcing people to use iTunes (and the newer version at that) is going to stop a lot of people from browsing and searching for apps. Very bad move in my humble.
We need something better. Make it so!
cheers, reens (tw: rinosphere)
I mean, previously you could search on the Apple site for apps as well, now it's just a top 10 and links to iTunes. That seems limiting in a big way.
You're totally right, it is just lame on their part. But, I think they figured "we've got a distribution mechanism, so let's use it" and turned their attention back to the framework and platform. Even when you could search their site, they just didn't seem to get e-commerce.
Thanks for the encouragement, BTW - and don't worry, we've got some cool stuff on the way.