
The iPhone Crapp Store? - nickb
http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/the-iphone-crapp-store
======
gabrielleydon
Think about it this way, you can crank out 10 apps a month and your bills get
paid OR you can work on one app for 6 months and risk crashing and burning or
even getting rejected. Its not to hard to see why the apps are low quality.
Its a symptom of the iphone app market.

The console game industry has the cure to this but it isn't pretty: $30k dev
kits, minimum funding/budget requirements, and long approval processes

Personally I would rather stick with the current apple approach. The crap apps
are cheap (or free) and if you have the guts to make a serious app its easier
to stand out.

------
jexe
So RussB is looking at the summary of all these apps and declaring them crap?
Sounds something like the flood of bogus app reviews in iTunes put there by
people who haven't even downloaded the apps.

But he has a point - In a (somewhat) open catalog like the App Store, we as
users desperately need a better filtering mechanism than the one iTunes
currently has. The answer isn't to restrict app entries to someone's
definition of quality or marketability, but to provide tools to make the
user's decision making process simpler.

I think there's a startup opportunity in there somewhere.

------
dejb
This is another problem with apples 'App Store Only' policy. If they weren't
the only possible provider of Apps then they could legitimately reject ones
they didn't like. The authors would just have to sell it somewhere else. But
because they are determining whether an app can exist on the platform they
have to be a lot more carefull about what they reject.

------
bprater
So far, Apple has done a pretty poor job of managing the store. Look at all
the '...zomg, you're charging for this!!?!!1!eleven' "review" posts.

I'm hoping they throw someone at the project that has some common sense.

~~~
thamer
I agree with the article and probably with you too on the large number of low-
quality applications, but there is no obvious solution to the problem of
decreasing quality coming with an increasingly large population (of
developers, of HN users, of Usenet posters...)

In your opinion, what would common sense be in that case? Apple got criticized
for censoring applications; True, that was because these applications were
competing with Apple's own services, but the move still sent a strong message.
Apple will probably want to retain a large control over what can go on an
iPhone (hint: Flash wouldn't), and an arbitrary decision on what is acceptable
or not in terms of quality can be a very bad thing. IMHO, the review process
is probably the best hope in this case, the first few people buying an
application rating it to warn (or invite) other customers.

~~~
jonknee
There is a great solution... Only accept high quality apps but then let
developers distribute on their own. That way all the stupid repackaged public
domain books can be sold, but don't have to litter the app store.

------
RomanZolotarev
I think every open store will have the same set of "crapp".

------
rokhayakebe
One man's crap app is another man's treasure app.

