why Mac users complain about the App Store
Mac fanboys (this correspondent included) don't like to admit it, but there is one simple truth: Mac users are spoiled. And we can be awfully whiny about it, too.
The App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch is underscoring exactly how spoilt we are. Listen to the complaints about the apps available there. As Mac users, this kind of choice is completely foreign to us. We're used to having a pretty small range of top-notch apps available to us. We're also used to having to rely on word-of-mouth for our app recommendations if the app isn't available in the the Apple Store. Compare that to our Windows-using friends and family, who walk into Fry's and see hundreds of boxes on the shelf, and then walk into Best Buy and see hundreds of different boxes on the shelf. My local Fry's has a thinly-populated shelf dedicated to Mac games (a sizeable chunk of which are Sims 2 expansion packs), whereas it has two whole aisles dedicated to Windows games (which has even more Sims 2 expansion packs than available over in my lonely Mac aisle).
So us Mac users are whining about the quantity of the apps on the App Store, since such a quantity essentially guarantees that not everything will be of the highest quality. There are certainly plenty of apps in the App Store where I read the description, roll my eyes, and wonder why anyone would develop such a thing, let alone why anyone might buy (or even waste the bandwidth on downloading) it.
There's a certain segment of the Mac userbase which thinks that Apple should actively decide which apps go into the store based on quality. These users think that Apple should ensure that apps are of a sufficient quality, where quality is some undefined and nebulous idea. These users don't want to see the junk apps. I fundamentally disagree with them. I agree that Apple should provide some gatekeeping (I'd be pretty cranky if an app I downloaded somehow managed to turn my iPhone into a zombie spewing out spam), but I don't think that quality should be an axis on which Apple makes a decision about the apps.
I think that these users have identified a problem, but are articulating the wrong solution to the problem. They want to buy apps, but they feel stymied. While the App Store has made it easier for me to find all of the iPhone apps that are available, it's introduced a new problem. Browsing the App Store is pretty difficult, certainly more difficult than walking into Fry's and seeing what they've got on their shelves (even in the case of 2 aisles of Windows games). Search means that I have to have something in mind, plus it's really intended to search for app names instead of descriptions of apps. If I just want to get a feeling for the games in the App Store, I click on games, and then I get a pretty random-looking list of games. With 300+ games in there, that's meaningless. There's no categorisation, there's no sorting, there's nothin'.
With only a single source for getting apps for my iPhone, and with not a lot of information in the store about the apps (and no demo mechanism, except for the developer-dependent workaround of creating two different versions of the same app), how do I figure out which apps to buy? Users are frustrated at the lack of information for making a choice. Reviews only go so far — my tastes and needs differ from yours, so reading reviews is both time-consuming and not necessarily terribly helpful in my decision-making process.
Apple can't make judgment calls about the quality because the App Store is the single source for iPhone apps. There's someone at Fry's and Best Buy and the Apple Store who decides what software they're going to carry. They don't carry every app out there, and they don't have to carry every app because they're not the sole arbiter of what is available to you. When deciding what apps they'll carry, there's a decision-making process that they employ. Their processes might not be ones that I agree with, or I might not understand why they stock one app over another, but there is some kind of mechanism by which they determine which apps are worthwhile of being stocked. The App Store is more like a warehouse: everything's there, and it's all jumbled together.
A lack of information and a plethora of unwanted choices means that us Mac users are unhappy about it. We don't want to buy junk. We don't even want to see the junk. Having the choice of hundreds of apps isn't all it's cracked up to be. We want simplicity, and we just want the best. The App Store isn't giving that to us, and we're complaining about it.
How does this get fixed? Is it simply that I have to rely on word-of-mouth to hear about the best apps? Do I have to figure out which review website has the closest match to my needs and tastes? Should there be a mechanism for me to have Nadyne's App Store where I can somehow sell the apps that I think are worthwhile, just as I could set up shop in downtown Mountain View and sell the stuff that I think people want to buy?
