Comments on: 7 things Apple can do to REALLY clean up the App Store

By: SolarSaves

SolarSaves — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:44:33 +0000

It would be difficult for Apple to censor the apps more than they do now. And just because you (or somebody) doesn’t want to see them, doesn’t mean that somebody else really wants some of what you deem as “useless”.
But if Apple could provide a “view/don’t view preferences filter” where you could check off the categories that you don’t care (or want your child to have access to) to view…
Now that would be a welcome and workable upgrade to the App Store.

By: blue

blue — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:16:15 +0000

I think that these ideas are all opposing the (hopefully) more open trend of the app store. I hope that apple will undergo a major shift to both organizing the app store and allowing an open marketplace with the addition of more categories and business models.

That will make the app store better.

By: Chris O

Chris O — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:08:23 +0000

What about those “Survey apps”

Like: What kind of lover am i? When am I going to die? What is my pornstar name? etc etc Stupid.

By: Harold

Harold — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:16:38 +0000

I agree 100%. I find it so bad, I have stopped going to the Apps Store. What a waste of time, and I’m retired with time to spare. One more problem is not enough subcategories that would make searches a lot easier and quicker.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:32:08 +0000

Great suggestions. One more way to clean up the store is doing some quality check on the language learning apps. Some are just lists of words riddled with mistakes. It doesn’t help people learn if what they are learning is wrong.
At the same time Apple cannot check every single language learning app, so a simple reporting option where learners can notify of really bad mistakes could help weed out the worst apps and thus flag the companies that assemble them.

By: Justin

Justin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:59:57 +0000

In complete agreement with this article, and with Mike’s suggested addition of book “apps”. It seems a tad fallacious to quote the number of apps available in the app store when half of them are garbage.

By: Eldav

Eldav — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:41:23 +0000

“Remove foreign-language apps” ? Great idea, all these English-speaking apps were cluttering the AppStore anyway

No, seriously, don’t be so narrow-minded, puh-leeeeze!

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:06:57 +0000

Now these are some actual, worthwhile suggestions, and it’s what Apple should be focusing on a lot more than an anti-porn crusade (though I do think that sexually-oriented apps, even non-porn ones, should be in their own category). Really, pulling apps that have sat for more than a year without a single purchase would probably get 90% of the garbage (then again, maybe not), but might result in an increased load on the reviewers when these devs resubmit the apps after “improving” them in attempt to get relisted. Or not–maybe even they don’t care if it hasn’t made money for that long, there’s just no benefit in removing them.

The problem with the rest of the categories is codifying them. To avoid coming across as random and jerkwad-ish, Apple has to (or rather SHOULD, if they’re at all going to be decent about it) have specific things in the submission guidelines under which the spam apps fall. Writing them such that they can effectively cover the garbage without dinging “real” apps is a challenge.

Having language-specific sections would also be nice, and I say that coming from a bilingual household–I am very, VERY glad that the App store isn’t going to be another “you get exactly the music and videos licensed for your particular country, nothing else” like the iTunes store. Having language-specific sections would actually help multilingual users, too–it would be nice to be able to, for example, look through Japanese-language apps without getting spillover Chinese-language ones that might have the same search terms due to writing similarities.

The bargain-bin paperback books are the other touchy one; I could think of legitimate reasons to want to, say, sell your interactive comic book as its own app, rather than through an eReader store. Maybe iBooks will be set up such that the temptation isn’t there, but it’d be a shame to ding “real” standalone-book-apps alongside cookie-cutter public domain text ones.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:04:50 +0000

I totally agree with you on everything you said about the App Store. It’s hard enough to find good apps with all the 15,000+ ones fighting for our attention. But those crApps that no sane being would ever willingly install on their iPhone should simply be removed. Or consolidated. Or shipped off to Australia.

By: Victor

Victor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:03:03 +0000

Whilst we are getting rid of all the foreign language apps, we should also delete all the English apps as well. After all, English is a foreign language for the vast majority of people!