App Store Improvements

This has been so desperately needed for years, but the conventional wisdom was Apple cared more about being able to claim that they had 12 million apps (or whatever) than 2 million <i>decent</i> apps.<p>I&#x27;ve searched in the last few months and found apps that had screenshots that were clearly from iOS 4 or 5.<p>David Smith said he had been working on a piece before this was announced (1) and believed about 50% of apps never got updated.<p>Also the fixes to stop things from being named &quot;Candy Soul Saga Crush Game Match Three Slots For The Win Pokemon Insurance Dating Fun Free Time&quot; is a serious improvement too.<p>Random idea based on other stuff I saw app developers talking about on Twitter the other day: is this the first steps in going 64-bit only next year? If the apps haven&#x27;t been updated they can be pulled before iOS 11 comes out and then OS update wouldn&#x27;t get blamed.<p>1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;_DavidSmith&#x2F;status&#x2F;771405838607089665" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;_DavidSmith&#x2F;status&#x2F;771405838607089665</a>

It might be an unpopular opinion but I still have apps from iOS 4 that works perfectly fine on my iPhone running iOS 9. To me this is a testament of the great engineering that allows this iOS 4 app to be binary compatible with iOS 9. Sure the apps won&#x27;t use the latest APIs and they look a little blurry (because screens have gotten larger) but they still work fine and I don&#x27;t want apple to kill them, making a cloud backup restore impossible.

This is great and is something that should be done to the Play store (or maybe it is but it&#x27;s ineffective?). I can&#x27;t tell you how many times I redownload an app I had on an old phone and apparently it hasn&#x27;t been updated since like 2012 and it simply crashes on start on the newer versions of Android and yet it still let&#x27;s me download and install it. Very frustrating.

My favorite guitar tuner app no longer works, sadly, as of this or last version.<p>I paid for it originally, which is not -really- a sore spot, but also sort of a quirky thing. Paying for something that just doesn&#x27;t work at some point in software because of how upgrade cycles work is interesting.<p>Do wish I could find a simple guitar tuner that doesn&#x27;t spam me with ads these days though. =(

I would like A flag that tells me whether the app contains ads or not.<p>It really sucks to download and install an app just to find out that it displays ads. I don&#x27;t use apps that have ads.

In some ways, it&#x27;s actually an improvement to the <i>offerings</i> of the App Store and less a direct improvement to the App Store itself, from the consumer&#x27;s perspective.<p>It&#x27;s a good step, but the store experience is still a bit busted, IMHO.

The email announcement also said they&#x27;re restricting app names to 50 characters.<p>Nice to see some changes.

&gt; don’t follow current review guidelines<p>Will this culling apply to the Mac App Store? What&#x27;s going to happen to the many grandfathered non-sandboxed Mac apps?

There are 2 million apps on the App Store... they are going to review every single app? From my experience the app review team is very inefficient and dealing with them is a very unpleasant experience.

I wonder if this had anything to do with the jailbreak app recently going live on the App Store for a few hours. There might be some renewed emphasis on store content after that slipped through.

Does Apple have metrics on which apps are used and how frequently or they only have metrics on installations and updates? That would be an easy way to filter which apps deserve another review.