Here is the beef that I have with Apple. Hands down the app store is rotten infrastructure to the core for app developers. In my experience, app discovery is so bad it shows everything but the app you were looking for unless the app you were looking for is in the top 10.
Most indy-apps are brutally left out in the cold. As a result, app downloads are stagnating.
So it boggles the mind why going forward we should invest months into the development in an app where the only benefit the app store brings is payment (for a free app) and versioning.
Apple is in dire need for an app store disruption.
These are complaints about visibility. Can you market it yourself? Then the app store provides cryptographically-signed peace of mind to users that they can use your app without their contacts stolen or their phones hijacked.
The problem with visibility is the following. Let's say you make a commercial/web-ad/etc for App "A".
The customer would with 0.05% probability click the link, but maybe remembers the name.
So now in their spare time they would think, let's look for this app "A" ? so they input the name and only "B","C", and "D" that have nothing to do with "A" came up, that would be not that good, right?
A real world equivalent would be: You are in a supermarket and want to buy "A" beer because you heard the radio commercial and the assistant guides you to the vegetable, the ice-cream, and the raw meat section but neither to "A" nor the beer section. So you need to know before you newly discover "A" in the beer section that there is a beer section and that "A" is the beer to try. If there are now 20,000 beers that is your problem right there.
In comparison, on Amazon it is more effective to find products through recommendations and "similar products" which help customers find new products.
The app discovery path does not work in the app store.
> peace of mind to users that they can use your app without their contacts stolen or their phones hijacked
I think you can get that part without requiring the bottleneck of a single, hand-curated app store. The OS sandboxes app processes and blocks them from accessing user information without getting permission first - if that's done well, no app review is needed to ensure apps can't hijack your data.
Unfortunately this is far from true. It's trivial use private APIs and beat AppStore static analysis. There is also a MITM attack on FairPlay DRM that has enabled malware to be installed via AppStore apps.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the latter, but looks like it requires a user to install a Windows client called 爱思助手 (Aisi Helper), purportedly for jailbreaking etc., then connect their iOS device to a Windows PC running this software. So it's hardly a typical case.
Reference: http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2016/03/acedeceiv...
Regarding the former, yes it may be possible to hardcode addresses for private APIs and target specific devices running specific iOS versions, but Apple routinely weeds these out.
Edit: I assume Apple weeds these out. I have no reference for this.
I realize it's not bulletproof, but it's still good enough to trust for me as an iOS user compared to the Android phone I was using until last year.
I may represent a minority, but I only use the app store to search for and install an app that I already know that I want, either because a friend showed me or because I found it on the web. To me, discovery via the app store is completely uninteresting and if I was developing an app, I would not care about it.
Here's my thing: how many apps do you actually need? My phone is first and foremost, a telephone, then an SMS device, then a GPS, and finally, if I really am in a pinch and can't get to a real computer, a web browser. That's all I do with it.
If I could get rid of the crapware bundled on my phone without rooting it, I'd have maybe a half dozen apps installed.
I have dozens of apps (but anecdotally many fewer than average) for a bunch of things. I have 3 book readers from different vendors. I usually use one, but if the book I want isn't available, I try the others. I have several streaming video apps which I use when traveling. I have a metronome and various audio recording apps for practicing music. I have apps for various airlines for when I'm traveling. I have a few restaurant apps for ordering on the go, but I don't usually use them. I also have several games. Then there are simple info apps like the standard stock app, weather app, maps, etc. Also calendar and email. Oh, and I take lots of photos with my phone even though I have a very nice DSLR (which I also use a lot). It's a really useful tool.
I think I'm in the minority in how few apps I use, so it seems to me that you're even more in the minority. And that's fine, but don't assume everyone else uses their device like you do!
Most indy-apps are brutally left out in the cold. As a result, app downloads are stagnating.
[2014]http://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-download-zero-app... [2015]http://www.businessinsider.sg/how-many-apps-people-download-...
So it boggles the mind why going forward we should invest months into the development in an app where the only benefit the app store brings is payment (for a free app) and versioning.
Apple is in dire need for an app store disruption.