How to prevent the App Store from becoming the Crap Store

This thought occurred to me as well. I think it's of merit but Apple actually has a really hard problem on their hands, namely that the app store UI is terribly simple and at the moment doesn't appear to have a good way to prioritize suggestions.<p>Given the metadata that they must have, it would be trivial to switch to gross revenue, or rev * review score, or any number of other things, including time. (Reddit/HN method of scoring articles)<p>For that matter there's no reason why they can't compare app store purchases you've scored to the scores of other people who've purchased the same application to suggest things. (Amazon "people who purchased..." or Netflix way of doing things)<p>Hey Apple, give me the ability to affiliate your store. You can have 95% control of the UI (I want a banner at the top) but I get to pick the sequence things are offered for a given search. Give me 5%, I will make you rich. (Netflix challenge way of doing things)

All this would do is force the prices the other way. People would be trying to sell crap for more using WOM or some other way to inflate 'box office revenue' and once they are on the list, instead of lowering the price to stay on it, they'd be increasing it. While that will get rid of crapware for .99, it will drive the prices of the same soft up, ultimately hurting the consumer. Best solution to this is app genius that recommends apps based on what you want to do.<p>Until that happens, use word of mouth to your advantage. Use Google Mobile App as an example of online campaign. Once techies get your app on their phone, they will be the platform for homing in their less tech friends to your apps.

The author doesn't paint the complete picture.<p>The iPhone application they wrote, "Classics" was released after "Stanza" (<a href="http://www.lexcycle.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lexcycle.com/</a>). Stanza is free, I believe they plan on charging for their desktop software in the future. The main difference between stanza and classics is that classics has fancier animations.

The author misses that the different parties have different goals. TapTapTap wants to maximize app revenue. To do that, you do want to sort by revenue. (Actually, probably something like revenue per last n impressions, so that apps that have a traffic spike won't stay up there when the spike is over.)<p>But Apple makes most their money off the sale of iPhones. So they want people to be happy when they use the app store, even if it doesn't make them as much money directly. When someone downloads and enjoys a free app, that's meaningless to TapTapTap, but it's great for Apple. You can't exactly measure user enjoyment, but it's not unreasonable to suppose that "number of downloads" is a better proxy for user happiness than "net revenue".

Mobile apps do not have to be driven by impulse. I was dating a med student when ePocrates was all the rage for doctors and med students on Palm devices. She had hers on a Sony Clie. ePocrates was great because you had searchable pharmaceutical information that was also updated every time you synced. The fact that it replaced a few big honking volumes was great. There was no App Store back then. My impression was that advertising was largely word of mouth.<p>I intend to develop applications for specific niches, so I won't be depending on being in the "What's Hot" lists. Instead, I will be providing something that spreads by word of mouth because it has real value. (I'll also be hitting up blogs and other media.)

Is that blog using Fertigo Pro for a font? That's incredible.<p>I don't know much about economics and the App Store, but I'd be inclined to trust this article. TapTapTap makes some excellent apps. Classics is a favorite.

There is no busness like the show business.<p>If you have a hit you make it big, otherwise you get next to nothing.

I think Apple wants apps to be $0.99 or free. Otherwise they would have been ranking by revenue from the beginning.

Ship. Meet Sailed. Sailed, Ship.