With one million titles and no human guides, the Apple App Store has become incomprehensible for mere mortals. A simple solution exists: curation by humans instead of algorithms. Here’s an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook making that case:
Dear Tim,
You know the numbers better than anyone—I don’t need to quote them to you—but we all know that the iOS App Store is a veritable gold mine. Unfortunately, the App Store isn’t being mined in the best interests of Apple’s customers and developers, nor, in the end, in the interests of the company itself.
The App Store may be a gold mine, but it’s buried in an impenetrable jungle.
Instead of continuing with this complaint, I’ll offer a suggestion: Let humans curate the App Store.
Instead of using algorithms to sort and promote the apps that you permit on your shelves, why not assign a small group of adepts to create and shepherd an App Store Guide, with sections such as Productivity, Photography, Education, and so on. Within each section, this team of respected but unnamed (and so “ungiftable”) critics will review the best-in-class apps. Moreover, they’ll offer seasoned opinions on must-have features, UI aesthetics, and tips and tricks. A weekly newsletter will identify notable new titles, respond to counter-opinions, perhaps present a developer profile, footnote the occasional errata and mea culpa…
The result will be a more intelligible App Store that makes iOS users happier.
If I’m so convinced, why don’t I drive it myself? I look back on my years at Apple with a certain affection, and would be happy to repay the company for what it did for me, so, yes, I would do it for free… but I can’t bankroll a half dozen tech writers, nor can I underwrite the infrastructure costs. And it won’t pay for itself: As an independent publication (or, more likely, an app) an App Store Guide isn’t financially viable. We know it’s next to impossible to entice people to pay for information and, as the Monday Note proves, I have no appetite for becoming a nano-pennies-per-pageview netwalker.
So, the App Store Guide must be an Apple publication, a part of its ecosystem.
Best,
JLG
PS: We both understand that ideas are just ideas, they’re not actual products. As Apple has shown time and again—and most vividly with the 30-year old tablet idea vs. the actual iPad—it’s the product that counts. If you see the wisdom of a human-curated Apple App Guide, and I hope you do, I will not seek credit.
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Regular Monday Note readers will remember I already tilted at the App Store curation windmill: Why Apple Should Follow Michelin and the tongue-in-cheek Google’s Red Guide to the Android App Store. Who knows, the third time might be the charm.
To play devil’s advocate, let’s consider a developer’s bad reaction to an Apple App Guide review. Let’s say MyNewApp gets a thumbs down in the Productivity section of the Guide. I’m furious; I write Tim or Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue an angry letter, I huff and puff, threaten to take my business elsewhere—to Windows Phone, for example. I exhort my friends, family, and satisfied customers to contribute to a letter-writing campaign…
Why risk this sort of backlash? Particularly when today’s formula of “featuring” apps seems to be working:
But…does it really work all that well? Today’s way of choosing this app over that one already upsets the non-chosen. Further, the stars used to “measure” user feedback are known to be less than reliable. A thoughtful, detailed, well-reasoned review would serve customers and developers alike.
This leads us to the Guide’s most important contribution to the app universe: Trust. An Apple-sponsored App Guide can be trusted for a simple reason: The company’s one and only motive is to advance its users’ interests by making the App Store more trustworthy, more navigable. As for developers, they can rely on a fair and balanced (seriously) treatment of their work. The best ones will be happier and the “almost best” others will see an opportunity to get their improved work noticed in a future review cycle.
There is also the temptation to shrug the suggestion off with the customary ‘Don’t fix it, it’s not broken.’ Sorry, no, it is broken. See what Marco Arment, a successful Apple developer, says on his blog [emphasis mine]:
“Apple’s App Store design is a big part of the problem. The dominance and prominence of “top lists” stratifies the top 0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that, by definition, won’t happen to 99.98% of them. Top lists reward apps that get people to download them, regardless of quality or long-term use, so that’s what most developers optimize for. Profits at the top are so massive that the promise alone attracts vast floods of spam, sleaziness, clones, and ripoffs.”
and…
“Quality, sustainability, and updates are almost irrelevant to App Store success and usually aren’t rewarded as much as we think they should be, and that’s mostly the fault of Apple’s lazy reliance on top lists instead of more editorial selections and better search.
The best thing Apple could do to increase the quality of apps is remove every top list from the App Store.”
We can now turn to my own biases.
Why do I care? Good question, I’m now 70 and could just sit in zazen and enjoy the show. And there’s a lot of show to enjoy: The tech industry is more exciting now than when I was a rookie at HP France in 1968. But in today’s app stores, the excitement fades—and I’m not just talking about Apple, Android’s Google Play is every bit as frustrating. I see poorly exploited gold mines where quantity obscures quality and the lack of human curation ruins the Joy of Apps. There are caves full of riches but, most of of the time, I can’t find a path to the mother lode.
Is it a lack of courage in anticipation of imagined protests? Hunger sated by too much success too soon? An addiction to solving all problems by algorithm instead of by human judgment?
I hope its none of these, and that we’ll soon see a newsletter/blog and a reasoned, regularly enriched guide that leads us to the better App Store titles.
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