In a way, I'm glad that Apple is moving in this direction at this point. Let things get even worse, let Apple be called out widely and let Apple realize how much its cultivated brand value (even with missteps on other fronts) is eroding. Some or most of it may turn out to be irreversible. Apple has fired executives for far less (like Scott Forstall). This needs entire departments to be shutdown.
The desire and the solution are quite simple: Apple wants to increase revenues from services, so provide better quality paid services instead of looking at nooks and crannies to pick up a few (mega) pennies here and there.
Apple may be under the false impression that the competition is far behind and that its loyal user base has nowhere else to go. Sometimes these things turn the other way quite quickly. Considering the regulatory scrutiny and pressure in other areas, Apple would be better off not antagonizing its user base with the "let's put ads everywhere and collect more information from our users" initiative.
> Apple may be under the false impression that the competition is far behind.
I believe Apple is falling into the "arrogance" trap..
When we were kids, we used to be told the "rabbit and turtle race story" and, if you hadn't heard about it, you must have been born directly as a teenager :)
Apple is slowly playing the rabbit role, and yes, it can sleep for as long as it wants then, maybe waking some day to realize what damage the once-believed turtles have already caused to it.
Yes, the "rabbit" role is, by no means, new in tech industry.. Kodak, Blockbuster, Windows (with its epic IE) -to some extents- , were all "rabbits" at some points in the past but not any more. And, guess what? Nokia Mobile was also the big "rabbit" that was taken in no time by.. Apple!
I don't know if there is a proper term to describe this concept, but I will write it in plain English: I always tell myself, friends, and relatives that if any entity, whether it is a single person, a community, a company, or a government, is misbehaving and/or walking in an incorrect path, sooner or later it will pay a high bill in the future that is not apparent at present.
We're seeing the Microsoft under Ballmer story play out on a different time scale at Apple. When the erosion of Apple's innovation engine shows up as a Ballmer revenue growth slump, hopefully Apple will have enough sense to put a creative at the helm.
> Apple has fired executives for far less (like Scott Forstall).
Maps was a cover story. Forstall was fired because he was Tim Cook's only serious rival for power post-Jobs, and also because some other execs (such as Jony Ive) didn't like him. When Steve Jobs died, Forstall lost his only protector in the company.
Spinning up a maps service from scratch to match Google Maps was a monumental task, nearly impossible to do quickly and well. Apple Maps continued to suck for years after Forstall was fired. Not to mention that Siri continues to suck today. Forstall wasn't fired for incompetence. He was a proven executive who was in charge of developing iOS!
In contrast, Hair Force One has overseen a massive downgrade in Apple software design and quality. But he gets along well with the other execs, doesn't rock any boats.
>Maps was a cover story. Forstall was fired because he was Tim Cook's only serious rival for power post-Jobs, and also because some other execs (such as Jony Ive) didn't like him. When Steve Jobs died, Forstall lost his only protector in the company.
this is not how they are in person, or were. Forstall oversaw a conniving political maneuver nuisance crossing division boundaries and causing serious infighting that was resolved by reorg when he left. Cook and Jobs (having interacted with both) just were positivity-obsessed guys averse to that noise, and I think without evidence perhaps Forstall got intolerable when his old protector had passed.
also, no one is mentioning the behind the scenes participants with far longer engineering creds than Forstall, because it's just pop-culturally easy to simplify the little era into salacious snippets not aligned with reality.
> Forstall oversaw a conniving political maneuver nuisance crossing division boundaries and causing serious infighting that was resolved by reorg when he left.
That's in line with what I said.
> Jobs (having interacted with both) just were positivity-obsessed guys averse to that noise
That's not the Steve Jobs I remember. ;-) Anyway, you don't explain why Jobs protected Forstall in the first place. My understanding is that Jobs encouraged some internal arguing and conflict, whereas Cook discourages it.
> no one is mentioning the behind the scenes participants with far longer engineering creds than Forstall
Mention them in what context? I mean, the Lenin/Stalin thing is just a silly metaphor. The serious point is that Forstall, mentioned by the OP, didn't get fired for incompetence, and Maps was just as excuse, a point that you seem to agree with. But if you're aware of people with longer engineering creds than Forstall who did get fired for incompetence, then I'd be interested to hear about it.
From Tim Cook’s point of view he’s seeing a line go up. Things aren’t getting worse for him, they’re getting better. He’ll probably be gone by the time the consequences of his management have an impact on Apple’s coffers. Assuming that ever happens, because what’s making Apple a crappy company is that it’s becoming indistinguishable from the alternatives.
The problem is that there's no good replacement, because Cook has cooked the entire company. It's "Tim Apple" now. Next in line is likely someone like Cook clone Jeff Williams.
The stockholders own the company, and all they care about is money. Remember way back when Steve Jobs forced Apple stockholders to choose between him and John Sculley? Well, they chose Sculley. Jobs only returned many years later when Apple was desperate and had to acquire NeXT (their second choice behind Be). Apple would have to be in desperate straits again to choose a non-traditional (i.e., non-MBA) CEO candidate.
I haven't bought an app in the store in at least 3 years. I installed maybe 4-5 new free apps over that period, all for smart home devices that need an app to activate / install and receive notifications.
I used to go to the store a few times a week to check for top games and see if something tickles my fancy, but I haven't done it in 5+ years now, it's mostly all junk / IAP sinks.
I have never, ever browsed the app store. My only interactions with it is getting annoyed every time they move the place you have to tap to update all your apps, or change the way you refresh the list of apps to update. In my mind, the entirety of the app store is crud that's in my way.
As for getting new apps, it's almost always through a webpage that takes me directly to the app in the store.
It has categories? Lists? Curated content? Ads? Paid placements?
Funnily enough, the only times I used the old iTunes was when I needed to upgrade my phone or something, and it was the exact same experience for me, everything in it was crud in the way of me doing the one thing I wanted to do.
iTunes had music and movies and ringtones and shit? I had no idea...
I opened the App Store today and it had its list of "Top Apps of 2022". To my shock, Microsoft Teams was at, or near, the top. Yes - Microsoft Teams (which makes me input my login / password twice, can't let me pair program by dual sharing screens, and can't let me tag Japanese people) is a "top app". It was actually rated higher than Tiktok, which seems completely at odds with reality.
I remember when I used to look for apps actively, but it seems like the last time I really did that was when I had an iPhone 4S.
I fell into the same trap, I thought it was a curated list given it's so prominent but... No, it's just a dumb list sorting by some counter (or score based on download count, reviews, etc.).
I'm in the same camp as many other commenters on this thread, some years ago (7-10) I used to use the App Store to actually discover apps, nowadays I just open it to search for exactly the app I'm looking for, mentally skip the 1st result as it's always an ad and then look around for what I actually searched for.
Terrible experience, the storefront aspect is completely useless now. Haven't bought any app that I discovered myself, it's usually through recommendations from friends or internet reviews.
Tim Cook is an extremely good bean-counter and logistics guy but definitely shouldn't be at the helm of being the judge for product development anymore. In that sense Jobs was actually pretty unique and had good taste.
They do curate. The home view of the app store is all curated. They have a full team dedicated to that view and getting selected can get you significant installs. Also all the editor's choice apps are curated.
Hardly. Calling a list 'curated' doesn't make it so. Technically an intern could look at a sort and call it curated. On both app stores the editor's choices and top downloads are all bullshit and/or gamed.
Apps drop their inflated prices for a huge perceived discount to drive downmoads and get to the top of the list.
Editor's choices are supposed to be curated by some anonymous eponymous editor but the apps are just always already popular apps, so another sort by downloads.
I'd not put it past these companies to say they their 'AI'(hate they all use this term) is curating the lists for us, so technically sort by downloads is their curation.
Google play store is worse- the sales tab is always the same scam games, top paid makes no sense, editor's choice is bullshit.
MS Teams is the buggiest thing I have ever had the misfortune to use. I have to log in daily to use it – the browser is a better option than the standalone client as it's easier to wipe everything and start again. Yesterday, I received the following errors during two meetings:
1) I was unable to login in Chrome – "An unexpected error has occurred"
2) In an incognito mode browser window, I was unable to login due to not permitting the use of 3rd party cookies, despite whitelisting those in Chrome's preferences
3) I wiped cookies all cookies and tried again in a normal window – I was able to log in, but when trying to have a call, I was told "This feature is only available in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge". I was using Chrome.
4) I therefore swapped to a chrome-based browser that spoofs its user-agent as the previous version, Iridium.
5) This enabled me to start a call. It worked fine, but during the process of the meeting, the mute/video/screensharing/leave bar completely vanished, leaving a black box at the top (and me unable to mute myself or share my screen)
6) During the next meeting, about 30 s after the end of the previous one (I refreshed the page to get the box back), the camera periodically turned off with the message "Your video isn't working. We couldn't access your camera".
7) I have previously emailed M$ support highlighting these issues. The response I received was "We are aware that Teams isn't perfect and are working hard to improve it continually".
The only way to get MS Teams to work reliably on my Mac is to start it up first, then click on the meeting link to go to the browser and then on to Teams. I start the process 5 minutes before the first meeting.
My personal anecdote, I don't have any issues with Teams on my Mac. Our organization is a Microsoft shop. I'm one of 3 Mac users only because I develop our iOS apps, so it isn't like our IT has some exceptional skills with Apple products.
Its absolutely a piece of trash software that needs to be open sourced so it can be better. My hatred for MS teams is insurmountable. Its buggy, slow as fuck, very sluggish, takes up a shitton of my resources and RAM. I hate MS teams with a passion.
Advertising has been the Faustian bane of tech for the last 20 years. It wasn’t always like this. I wish the government would tax advertisers like they do other ruinous/harmful vices (e.g. tobacco).
I would disagree on two points. One, ads aren't only a medium for tech. Two, ads have been around longer than 20 years.
Ads were in print for newspapers. Then in television, allowing for content and network providers to grow. Tech just became the next delivery medium for ads and a superior one at that once data harvesting and targeted ads were the norm. Tech has become the de facto medium for ads due to the margins and greater potential for returns.
Apple's implementation of IAP was to neutralize as much competition as possible, probably because they would not have been able to compete fairly. This anti-competitive behavior hurt the other ad companies but it also hurt tons of smaller businesses that were able to benefit from the targeted ads. This is probably the government intervention that needs to happen IMHO.
NB, I don't know what the solution is for ads in tech. On one hand, targeted ads mean data harvesting and all the repercussions associated with that (we know now there is no such thing as anonymized data no matter who is collecting the data) while non-targeted ads have little value for all parties involved (wasted ad spend dollars by companies and patrons being shown ads that are not relevant to them), and no ads mean less revenue for services and sites, which mean they eventually go out of business unless they have other means of monetization. What is the optimal solution? (Or just the least bad one if we must?)
Why is the discoverability in these stores so poor? Outside of top 10 in a category its miserable. Can't we allow richer interfaces? I'd love to subscribe to a blocklist that just took out all the junk apps, then incorporate verified reviews from active users on my generation and one prior generation device etc etc. No device able to review more than 10 apps and hardware link/lock reviews.
I have a time tracking app in Google Play. It has fine reviews. Yet if I search for "time tracker" it's almost impossible to get to, and if I search by its full name "Hours - time tracker", it's still on page two.
Almost all of the apps (I found one exception) that appear above my app have in-app purchases and or
ads, and most of them have a lower score than mine.
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that my app is somehow penalized for not generating income for Google.
If we had real competition with stores competing to provide the most value for the users, then I would expect non-profit apps like mine to bubble up rather than drown.
On Android, you do have competition though. There are app stores from Amazon, Samsung, and F-Droid. Not to mention, you could go direct to consumer and list the application's installer for download directly on a web page.
All I want in reviews is an indicator of how much they’ve actually used the app at the time the rate is made.
Lots of apps crank up the forced ads/other BS after they’ve nagged you a few times, and they like to that right after a dopamine hit, like beating a boss.
Try living in a small European country. 10-100x less reviews on all apps and no way to view reviews from users in other countries without opening the app store page on a desktop..
Basically means they will be incentivised to make their app discoverability algorithm worse, to encourage companies to pay them for ads. Kinda like Google did with ads coming above the search results forcing companies to buy ads to be displayed at the top even when you search for the company directly.
The sooner the app store model is broken down for ios devices - the better. People should be able to decide what to run on their devices (and unlike consoles phones are not sold at a loss) and it will also solve the discoverability problem.
the nvidia shield store for games was pretty solid when it was around
I'm not sure how I'd rate the quality of the amazon app store but they did have cool features that let you trial an app in your browser
in all honestly with these two stores owning the entire us market there's never going to be much iteration or innovation.. even something simple like a ios version of itch.io would be fantastic
The 10 years part is not quite accurate.
Play store used to have fantastic organic discovery that gradually started deteriorating some 7 or 8 years ago until it reached the current state where everything is an ad of some sort.
AppStore never had discovery this good, but relied on being heavily curated for quality instead.
I do feel play store is in a much worse state still. The curating is barely there and the algorithms had user interests (our at least my interests) optimised out of them.
The fact that it used to work so well is insulting in a way. It's like when android took out the process manager.
There is a beautifully simple game with a very inclusive and fun concept. But everytime I want to play it I have to scroll through my installation history
If you search for the title word for word, you will never find it. If you search for the description word for word you will never find it. It is so deeply buried under a mountain of garbage that I sometimes wonder what other gems the play store keeps from seeing the light of day.
Ah but you're free to not use the app stor- oh wait
Ah but I *like* the 30% cut I'm forced to give for apps on the store like Spotify or Netflix. Because for my sacrifice I am allowed to live in the ivory tower above the plague rats of Android!
I think F-Droid and de-Googled repair-friendly devices like the Fair Phone is the ivory tower, and at the bottom are the Android and Apple peasants arguing which of their favorite anti consumer mega corp is the best to consume. :D
Not if you want decent hardware. I really wanted to go with Pixel 6 with Graphene, but the many bugs (both software and hardware) and especially that emergency call thingy that is still ongoing made me choose the Apple ecosystem (which is unmatched in hardware by any android phone, unfortunately)
Indeed, few Android phones can match Apple's quality, but not every Android phone and OS has such bugs though.
I don't trust Apple's ecosystem one bit, especially after the whole "we're gonna constantly scan your phone (actually our phone since we own it but you're paying for it) for child porn pics and we're gonna limit functionality because it upsets the CCP". This is boiling the frog. Maybe next year they're gonna scan for Pepe the Frog memes on my phone to report me as a right wing extremist to my government.
I'd rather have average hardware but have freedom and privacy, than live in big-corp's authoritarian prison for the sake of comfort.
Proprietary app stores are a monopolistic abuse that must be legislated away. I acknowledge the argument for not allowing the platform to run any executable code the user can get their hands on, but this should not be used against the consumer.
Alternate application stores, that fulfill a basic number of legal and commercial conditions, should always be a choice for any owned hardware, perhaps at the cost of the device warranty.
Modern devices however are unusable without software and the warranty usually covers at least a minimum of software performance.
I understand why manufacturers wouldn't want to deal with bricked devices, which are technically still perfectly functional yet require some exotic firmware download over JTAG to reboot.
That is just wrong. You can get CC agreements with only a percentage fee without any fixed fee per transaction if you need it and have the scale. And at Apple scale they are most likely under 1%.
Credit card fees are usually around 6% if you take everything into account and Apple likely managed to negotiate a discount. That still leaves 24% for Apple.
The desire and the solution are quite simple: Apple wants to increase revenues from services, so provide better quality paid services instead of looking at nooks and crannies to pick up a few (mega) pennies here and there.
Apple may be under the false impression that the competition is far behind and that its loyal user base has nowhere else to go. Sometimes these things turn the other way quite quickly. Considering the regulatory scrutiny and pressure in other areas, Apple would be better off not antagonizing its user base with the "let's put ads everywhere and collect more information from our users" initiative.