
Aiming to Ease App Discovery, Apple Pairs With Pinterest - marban
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/apple-pairs-with-pinterest-for-better-app-discovery/?_r=0
======
swombat
This is a major app store problem that a lot of developers, particularly indie
developers, have complained about, but Apple has seemingly ignored so far.
It'd be quite amusing if the answer turned out to be "just plug Pinterest's
engine into the app store"... if it was that simple.

Then again, it's hardly a hard problem - it's just one that Apple has done
almost nothing significant about over the years. Practically any solution is
better for developers (and users) than the current status quo.

~~~
michaelt

      Then again, it's hardly a hard problem
    

Eh, I'd expect app discovery to be reasonably hard when you have a few hundred
thousand developers and marketers incentivised to do anything they can to game
the system.

~~~
wozniacki
Funny you should say that ! I came across these images less than a day ago.

Here is an image of what looks like a worker in China manipulating App store
rankings using an array of some hundred 5Cs.

[http://i.imgur.com/EWyVh0X.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/EWyVh0X.jpg)

And here is an image purportedly showing the prices for a Top 10 spot in
Apple's App Store, achieved through ranking manipulation.

[http://i.imgur.com/TZuf1iP.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/TZuf1iP.jpg)

[1] This disturbing image of a Chinese worker with close to 100 iPhones
reveals how App Store rankings can be manipulated

[http://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-
stor...](http://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-store-
rankings-are-made-2015-2)

~~~
TorKlingberg
They probably only affect the Chinese App Store. The stores are separate, and
the Chinese one is censored.

~~~
c1sc0
I very much doubt those iOS devices are hooked up to Chinese credit cards. In
fact, I bet that they are set up to cycle through a series of credit cards.

------
eps
A bit OT, but is it at all possible to browse pinterest.com from an iPad? All
I get is a full-screen non-dismissible overlay forcing me to install their
app. Any ways around this?

~~~
Jolijn
No, there is no way around it. It's a verrrry annoying strategy and I'm not
sure it's worth the aggravation it causes to people like me with only a casual
interest in pinterest.

~~~
jc__
Isn't there a "Continue in browser" button right under the "Continue in App"
button?

~~~
eps
Would you look at that! It wasn't there when I posted the original comment.

Not much better now though. Now the bottom half of the screen is covered by
"continue/login" overlay and the top third is covered by fixed toolbars,
leaving a sliver of peephole for the actual content. They really go out of
their way to annoy the hell out of anyone without an account, don't they?
You'd think they'd learn a thing or two from Quora's ill-fated experiments.

------
dazne
Looking for relevant apps in the Apple App Store is a growing problem. This
should be a feature built within the App Store. Why can't Apple do the same?
Why do they need another application/service to do the "app discovery" for
them?

~~~
wozniacki
The App Store search is ( and has ) always been a farce. I don't think I've
ever not not used Google to search for the relevant app and then jump to the
Store to "Get" it.

I never see analysts charging Apple with sheer negligence in these things.

It's not for the lack of resources. They have warchests both here and
offshore. Why they don't get behind these pesky problems beats me. I mean
these are elementary things. Using your competitor to search for apps in your
store has to be downright cringe-worthy.

The only explanation for this has to be that Apple is shoring up every last
nickel for something much much larger. In the years to come we shall likely
see Apple heading into complete virgin product territories.

Apps, phones and tablets must seem like a distraction - a sideshow if you will
- to the people in the know at Apple. A distraction from the real mother lode
of things they have been working on.

If proven true, this has to be the greatest execution of strategy secrecy and
misleading of onlookers and industry watchers alike, every seen at a
corporation.

Nothing else explains why such scant attention is paid to basic things like
search, voice recognition (Siri which is again a laggard compared to Google
Now / Cortana) or maps or any other facets of the Apple ecosytem.

~~~
wozniacki
Ha.

I wasn't even too far off when I predicted this. Looks like Apple has hundreds
working on the car,per WSJ.[1]

[1] Apple Has Hundreds Working On An Electric Car Design, Says WSJ

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/13/apple-
car/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/13/apple-car/)

[2] Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-titan-car-project-to-
chal...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-titan-car-project-to-challenge-
tesla-1423868072)

------
codyb
Knowing of Apple's review process for each app (and each update) and seeing
the number 1.4 million made me wonder how many employee's Apple has reviewing.

My initial guess was that it must be quite high but a little research [0]
turned up some interesting results. It turns out the app review team is pretty
understaffed and has to deal with absolute trash all the time. It also
clarified the pornography policy, which, according to the article, is a way to
expedite the review process. I wonder if the strictness of the policy came
about because of the clogged app review process or just happened to help
alleviate that particular process after the fact.

Of course, this is relatively anecdotal, coming from one former employee, and
published in 2012 but I found it interesting. I do respect Apple's
unwillingness to compromise on quality here.

[0] - [http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks-
to-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks-to-be-an-app-
reviewer-for-apple-2012-7)

------
jacquesm
The 'ease of app discovery' was doing fine as long as apple didn't kill of
every app that made app discovery easy.

------
goblin89
Tangential, but: for a while I was wondering what the idea and use cases of
Pinterest are like, and this article seems to offer a decent explanation. (I
know I’m not alone in this as the question seems to regularly pop up among HN
comments in related threads, so I thought it might be worth a note.)

> Pinterest’s philosophy is that it can help nudge people into doing things —
> be it buying a coffee maker or trying a new recipe — by letting the site’s
> 70 million estimated regular visitors search for and save for later the
> things that interest them. If I’m looking to buy a good espresso machine,
> for instance, I could head over to La Marzocco’s website and pin a link to
> the $7,000 GS/3 to my Pinterest board to buy it later.

~~~
smackfu
People planning weddings or home decoration used to have scrapbooks where they
pasted in cutouts from magazines showing ideas they liked.

Pinterest is the online version of that.

~~~
furyofantares
People still have scrapbooks, and for lots of reasons more than that,
including simply as a hobby.

It's also very similar to vision boards (actually, I think the similarity is
stronger, and may be where the "pin" metaphor comes from).

------
mandeepj
if you can install an app from google play store's website to your android
phone then why can't apple provide the same feature?

~~~
zaroth
I would imagine Apple's intent would be to potentially allow that on
pinterest.com, or perhaps on any site which pays a hefty fee.

The closer we can get to selling apps directly on websites, the more the app
store becomes irrelevant. You still have to go through review to get the file
signatures, but perhaps you can pull the binaries from a different source.

That would be a really interesting vertical.

~~~
jon-wood
I think they were referring to the feature on the Play store which allows you
to request an app be installed on another device from the web interface,
rather than being able to download APKs from the internet.

I find it a really nice touch when I've been linked to an app from another
site to be able to instantly get it installed on my mobile without having to
fish it out of my pocket and do something silly like take a photo of a QR
code.

~~~
andyjohnson0
I agree on its usefulness. On a couple of recent occasions I've read about an
interesting Android app while at work, logged into my Google account, gone to
the Play Store web interface and told it to install the apps on my tablet at
home. When I got home the apps were already installed and there were
notifications reminding me to try them.

I'm surprised that the App Store doesn't have a similar feature.

~~~
coob
It does, you just have to do it from iTunes.

~~~
fpgeek
If you have to use iTunes, that doesn't sound similar at all. There's a huge
gap between virtually any browser you're willing to log into and a computer
that you can run iTunes on.

------
kristiandupont
I agree with the sentiment in here that search in the app store sucks, but I
don't think it matters much.

If I've heard or read about some specific app, I can find it by name pretty
easily. For everything else, google and the web works just fine. Right, it's
an extra click or two but I don't really think that qualifies as a "problem"..

------
tempodox
The AppStore needs improvement desperately, but the idea that pinterest could
help here is a joke almost as bad as the AppStore itself. Even if pinterest
didn't suck like hell in its own right, using it would still break
integration. Who would buy iOS apps from pinterest?

------
smackfu
I don't understand how apps would get pinned in the first place. Is Apple
going to create pins for every app that would show up in searches on
Pinterest?

------
mynegation
It probably will solve the app discovery problem for some users, but not for
me, for the simple reason that I do not have it. I am an app junkie and over
the years installed close to 500 of them, keep 200 of them on the phone, and
regularly use maybe 50 of them, 10 most useful ones almost every day.

Between app store search, google searches for specific features or
integrations, apps that come with devices like activity trackers, reviews in
blogs, and occasional promo actions in Starbucks, I think I have it covered.

------
mandeepj
Hackers, What you say about this app discovery site -
[http://appcrawlr.com/](http://appcrawlr.com/) ?

------
marban
Add: [http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2015/02/12/apple-
pairs-...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2015/02/12/apple-pairs-with-
pinterest-for-better-app-discovery/?_r=0&referrer=)

~~~
dang
We changed the url to that from
[http://blog.pinterest.com/post/110786995184/install-the-
best...](http://blog.pinterest.com/post/110786995184/install-the-best-new-
iphone-and-ipad-apps-from) because it is more informative.

------
TwoKows
I develop apps for friends and family, and offer them on the app store for the
curious. I have used Pinterest in the past to post screenshots, and a few
customers have mentioned they saw it on Pinterest.

Despite the phenomenal FUD, no one ever says they can't find an app they want.
They try out the top 5 and pick one. Or make their own if they are
industrious.

Huge numbers of shovelware apps aren't really a problem, but realize its time
to focus on marketing that mediocre app if you want it to sell better.

The market is dictating the success of all those mediocre app developers
properly: relegation to 2nd class and app obscurity.

~~~
smackfu
FUD? So you search for "twitter" and try the top five apps.

#1 is Twitter's official app. So they get a point for that.

#2 is Instagram. Close but no cigar.

#3 is TwiGrow which looks like some kind of scheme to get more followers.

#4 is Pic Jointer, an app to join photos together.

#5 is Happy Park, a theme park game.

It doesn't get any better after that. Waze, Flipboard, emoji keyboards. I
don't know how far you have to get down the list to actually find another
twitter client.

~~~
TwoKows
99% go with #1.

Its a twitter client, it works, why bother with anything else?

