We think online shopping in general is behind the times, not just Apple. Social networking is barely given a nod with "share this product" links, and user-generated content is generally limited to star ratings, reviews, and comments.
However, with the App Store, Apple has shown us that their grasp of e-commerce is poor, and that they cannot effectively present a large catalog of products that are more than just simply "content".
Let us compare our vision with the status quo, focusing on the three dimensions of our offering: e-commerce, social networking, and wiki functionality.
E-Commerce
We are all underserved by the App Store's poor version of e-commerce in many ways:
- irrelevant search results, though improving with age
- inability to sort results
- no search result filtering, paging, or other standard catalog browsing features
- lack of useful recommendations, similar apps, and "better with" suggestions
- very limited product data about each app
Rather than modeling our store after a jukebox program, we'll be modeling it after the major shopping sites. Our vision includes all of the missing features mentioned here, as well as many of the other e-commerce features found on the likes of Amazon, EBay, and Shopping.com.
Social
Likewise with social networking. Aside from a vague nod in the App Store category tree, Apple has historically pretended it doesn't exist. When they rolled out iTunes 9 with "social integration", this disappointingly amounted to more "share this product" links.
This is actually a good thing - it lets them stay focused on their core competencies like building awesome hardware and the software that runs it. However, we envision a world in which we can bring our friends to the App Store:
- see what they are using, what they regret buying, and what they recommend
- filter our search results across each other's app collections, items our friends have reviewed or rated, and other social dimensions
- view reviews, ratings, and contributions only from people we know, if we so choose
Wiki
We cannot neglect user-generated content. A simple "review" and star rating system may be enough for iTunes Music because the music speaks for itself. There's not much you can say about it that isn't qualitative. Apps, on the other hand, are complex, and understanding what they do and how they do it is often difficult until after you've pressed the buy button.
We'd like users to be able to help each other by adding content to the app pages: descriptions, walkthroughs, tagging, screenshots, even videos and tutorials.