99c

All right, some actual sug­ges­tions, which is some­thing none of the “I’m quit­ting the iPhone” rants that I’ve read have man­aged. My thoughts:

Stop list­ing “nov­elty” apps and indi­vid­ual books and spam apps (let­ters A-Z as 26 dif­fer­ent apps!) among real apps. Put all the fart, flash­light, etc. apps in a ghetto, away from the real stuff.

I’m in pretty much com­plete agree­ment. I’ll actu­ally go you one fur­ther and state that “find­abil­ity” is bro­ken across the entire iTunes Store. For exam­ple, I can’t fig­ure out a sim­ple way to just get a list­ing of all movies avail­able for rent. I’d argue that Apple needs to raze the iTunes Store and build it over from the ground up to prop­erly sup­port all the var­i­ous media types.

Sorting the top 100 lists by (units * price) rather than (units) would be a good first step; it would let more pro apps bub­ble up above the fart apps.

No argu­ment. And I’d argue that this merely fol­lows from the first point.

Allowing more direct upselling from Lite/cheaper apps to full apps. Right now it’s extremely restricted on what you can say or do to alert the user that there’s a big­ger ver­sion (some apps have got away with flaunt­ing this, but every time I’ve tried I’ve been smacked down).

I also agree on this. Apple’s hatred for demos and upselling in the App Store is weird on an almost Stallmanesque level. I mean, I know why the pol­icy was orig­i­nally cre­ated: to pre­vent some­one from offer­ing a free app and then nickel and dime­ing the users to death on con­tent. But first, there are some valid apps that use that model such as eread­ers (although that would vio­late the “no one may make money but Apple edict”) and sec­ond, the in-app pur­chase sys­tem would seem to invite that sort of behav­ior.

At any rate, thanks for some actual sug­ges­tions that don’t come across as, “guar­an­tee me a pay­check.” Which, sadly, is exactly how many of the screeds writ­ten on this topic sound like.

while i like and agree with the above sug­ges­tions, my main take on this is:

(a) price your apps as you want to. ide­ally start­ing at $10+ and up. it’s not like any­one is FORCING devs to take part in this mad gold rush that is the Top 10 list

(b) mar­ket your apps exter­nally, just as you would do with your Mac (Windows, Android, coughPrecough, insert “open” plat­form of choice here) apps.

© don’t expect to “get rich fast” because mil­lions of peo­ple will impulse-buy your $.99 app. obvi­ously.

i don’t really see how the AppStore mar­ket (in this respect; avoid­ing any dis­cus­sion about approvals, here) is any dif­fer­ent than any other soft­ware mar­ket. You get what you pay for — and you can’t really except the AppStore to do your mar­ket­ing for you (or if you do, you shouldn’t bitch about hav­ing to fol­low its idi­otic quantity-over-quality par­a­digm that the AppStore ecosys­tem has evolved into). The choice is yours.

Personally, i think peo­ple (smaller num­bers of peo­ple than those shelling out $.99 every­where, for sure) are per­fectly will­ing to pay appro­pri­ate prices for iPhone soft­ware, just as they are on, say, the Mac. The peo­ple that won’t are the same that com­plain about a $39 price tag for Mac apps and refuse to pay that (but you don’t see Mac soft­ware decreas­ing in price, because devel­op­ers, right­fully, say “if you think $39 is too steep, go fuck off”.

All that’s really miss­ing on the iPhone side, IMHO, is for more devel­op­ers to be “brave” enough to price their app decently (and telling peo­ple to fuck off if they com­plain how over­priced $2.99 is).