The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.
It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.
I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.
I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.
Undermining the power of software vendors is an institutional imperative at Apple. There is a memory of the days when they were dependent on Adobe and Microsoft for their hardware to be viable. When they design App stores they make the rules and game the system with this in mind.
It's not just that the stores are open to everyone-- shovelware and all. Steam does that but because they care about the ecosystem they protect pricing for premium products. They make reviews and recommendations relevant. Try to get your terrible knock off of a hit game come up in a search-- they are on to that.
It's notable that other attempts to develop game app stores for non-console platforms have fallen flat. If Microsoft has gotten any traction at all for game distribution on Windows it's because of the really different GAME PASS model. Blizzard, EA and such have apps to download their own games but don't challenge Steam for third parties, Good Old Games with it's anti-DRM stance is the only real competitor.
Steam is a model of integrity and it's a good thing that it's not for sale because it would be an obvious acquisition for irrelevant players like Gamestop who want be relevant today, it would have been a better acquisition for Microsoft than Activision but any acquirer would kill it one way or the other by violating its integrity.
An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS. It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
For years I had a machine on which the metadata database for the store would get corrupted within a month or so between a major update. I’d argue with Microsoft support to provide a recipe to reset this database (obviously possible because the update would fix it temporarily) but I was always told to make a new account —- but why am I going to mess up my installations of a lot of software that I use every day for the sake of some software I don’t use?
At work we have managed Windows desktops, since I’m a dev they did something so I can be an administrator, I can do everything but (1) edit group policies, and (2) use the Microsoft store. The only thing on the store I want is WSL2 but hey I can always ask Copilot how to do anything I know how to do in bash using Powershell.
> It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
That's good, there's a 30 year legacy of Windows software being downloadable online through a website and people clicking setup.exe to get it done. The App Store nonsense is MS clumsily following in the footsteps of Apple's "users are too stupid to be trusted" philosophy.
Also people who develop apps for Windows know how to make money in that environment so they don't feel like migrating to an environment where they don't know how to make money.
I wish I could install more apps outside the App Store. There's a few apps I came to rely on that are only available via the App Store, and when I switched jobs to a company that locks down App Store access, I could no longer use them and had to find alternatives.
Its unfortunately common when it comes to Windows troubleshooting. "Just create a new user," "Just reinstall the OS," etc. There's an entire suite of tools made by a third party for migrating user profiles between accounts and machines because it is so common.
I spent the first half of my career as a windows admin and I'm glad to be out, working entirely on macOS and Linux now. macOS has its own warts, but I'll take it any day over Windows.
It has the exact same problem complained about here. It's full of shovelware copies. Google play, orinically gives a better answer on the web, but on phones it has the same problem as the Apple App store.
When I use a phone app store I am always looking for a specific app by name and often having to avoid copycat apps, which often buy ads so they appear above the real app. One thing you notice about phone app stores is that they don't put the search box in a prominent place but hide it out of the way because they want you to click on chum links to chum apps. I'd never browse the app store for entertainment or go looking for "an app for that" because I know I'd just be disappointed.
The odd thing about the Mac App Store is how needlessly embarrassing this is for Apple. The Mac App Store doesn't need to exist, but because it does Apple is lending its authority to these apps, and every day its customers, who come to Apple expecting a level of safety and authenticity, are fooled by them.
How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".
Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.
Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.
Apple doesn't care. The iOS app store is just as full of crummy shovelware and ads. They are a "software and services" company after all.
The embarassment should be felt by the commentariat that rushes to defend Apple's store sharecropping tax by repeating ancient canards about how a fee is necessary for Apple to maintain its rigorous app review process that differentiates it from the street markets of Android, F-Droid, and whoever else.
First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.
This is actually part of the reason why people complain about the approvals process.
Your entirely legitimate app will get rejected for some confusing, badly described reason you have to guess at, meanwhile an obvious rip off with terrible functionality slides through without comment.
Or the shovelware vendors are just more willing to jump the hoops. In once case we (our legit app) just stopped jumping - because it wasn't strictly necessary to our revenue stream. Perhaps the shovelware-clones have different view of the payoff-function for the work. And so jump all the hoops, or have lots of practice navigating that minefield.
Exactly-- they don't care about the product, only a process they designed to weed out vendors for obscure technical reasons. You can have a store that prizes quality (as defined by users) but Apple doesn't care about that. Instead they emphasize things like the use of whatever new SDK feature they created.
First, a skewed distribution of "wheat" and "chaff" apps. I would bet there are at least 10x as many "chaff" submissions as "wheat" submissions. Passing that distribution through a classifier with 90% precision and 90% recall will result in "only" a 50:50 mix of wheat and chaff apps in the app store.
Actually, I could easily see the skew being 100x simply because nothing really stops a malicious actor from hiring 100 different mules to create 100 different developer accounts and submitting the same malicious app until it randomly passes review. Having only a 50:50 mix of apps now requires 99% precision and recall.
Second, the principal-agent problem. I would bet the amount of app store reviewers who are receiving bribes is not zero, and further that bribing app store reviewers is probably among the highest marketing ROI spend that fraudsters do. Apple/Google can randomize who reviews which app, but how many reviewers do they have? If I bribe one reviewer, how many copies of my malicious app (see previous paragraph) do I need to submit before one of them is routed to "my" reviewer? Probably not many.
Even with honest reviewers, I'm sure reviewers have some kind of daily quota they have to meet. If you're behind quota, are you going to carefully review an app, or reject it for tenuously-applicable reasons? That annoys app developers, but does the reviewer care? No, they hit quota, which is all that matters to them.
I'm sure someone will reply "well, Apple/Google should just ____". I hear you, but your proposal is either going to be much more expensive, much slower, or result in more bad apps being approved. In other words, it's likely that the current system is (nearly) pareto-optimal.
Both can be true. I've done mostly web, but I now work for a company that ships both iOS and Android apps and the cost of dealing with both Apple and Google app store compliance/review is not negligible.
At the same time, I'm sure they're both getting blasted with knockoff apps that find ways to stay just within the letter of the law, if not the spirit of it.
> I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved.
It would not, as the primary purpose of this entire enterprise is to maintain total control of all aspects of the market, including discoverability.
The web doesn't have a approval process at all and yet when I search "AI Chat" I don't get a bunch of borderline trademark violations on the first page of results. I get the real ChatGPT and Claude and Character.ai and Poe and some other startups that don't exist just to fool people.
Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people. This is squarely on Apple. Everyone knows the mark of a trustworthy store is that they will direct you to their competitors when they don't have what you're looking for.
Apple and Google and any app store provider have the ideal goal of zero friction for real, valuable apps and infinite friction for bad, scam apps. They can never hit that ideal, but when you're getting rage from both ends it's likely that you are in a place on the continuum that is far below ideal—you make it a huge pain for real, valuable apps and too easy for bad, scam apps. This appears to be where the Apple store is, at least, and it's an unfortunate place to be. They may be doing their best, but it sounds like their best has some pretty significant room to improve.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
It's actually both.
The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them. They learn how to game the system, because that's their business model.
I don't usually have problems, when my apps get rejected by the Apple App Store Review. I get the thing fixed after one or two back-and-forths, but it's still a big fat pain.
I do think that the scammers have figured out how to ram through a lot of crap, though, and Apple needs to look at this.
First, though, they need to consider it to be a problem. If each of the shovelware apps makes them a bit of money, they will be more willing to "look the other way," than for free apps (like the ones that I do). I believe that I am held to a higher standard than scammers.
> The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them.
It’s a cost of doing business for both of them. Surely any remotely serious developer will have at least as many resources to deal with app review as Fast Eddie’s Shovelware Emporium. It’s not really that big a deal: Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit. The developers who have trouble with this are often the ones who try to argue with the reviewer or escalate/appeal (I believe this because I worked for a company that would insist on fighting Apple’s reviewers instead of just fixing the problem).
Yes, dealing with app review is an annoying cost, but the burden is pretty uniformly spread across all app developers.
It's a well known security problem. An attacker in this kind of environment is spending very little money per app, and gets a payoff for breaking through: The application process is their business. Someone actually building an app is focusing on the quality of their app themselves, and not getting through an approval gauntlet. The ratio of applications that are crap or scams vs apps that are trying their best and have reasonably good quality is abysmal.
If you catch 99.999% of scam apps, and incorrectly slow down 1% of honest developers, you end up with an app store that is full of scams, and the developers are unhappy.
It could be both. Black box systems that reject useful tools without explanation "because they don't want to be gamed" but also don't reject shovelware because they didn't break an unspoken rule, isn't exclusive.
I think the answer is better curation and ranking. And perhaps some sort of reputation system (eg. This app is by OpenAI vs “This app is by some unknown spot”)
They must be doing at least a little bit of that right now. Thus I assume review scammers with smartphone farms are doing their best to improve their rankings on the daily.
i like to compare this to linux distributions. the package repositories are curated by a large group of volunteers. i don't se why a company like microsoft would not replicate that.
in particular it could disallow multiple apps with similar names and an online search for the app name should reveal the correct page the first hit.
You cannot pay anyone enough to get on the debian stable repository. Microsoft would have to pay it's curators. They'd pay less than what they should to stave off corruption.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
At best a walled garden is collective bargaining -- a group of users (buyers) lock into requiring vendors to negotiate with their representative, and because their business is collectively valuable vendors have to meet higher privacy standards or whatever the users care about, which they couldn't extract if negotiating individually with huge companies like Facebook.
So, Apple will get yelled at whenever it fails to be a good agent in collective bargaining -- either by excluding quality vendors and driving up their costs, or by including low-quality vendors. Either one gives up the benefits to users of the walled garden.
An index of reliable apps is, you know, fine. An index with a business structure that ensures better collective bargaining gets interesting.
I think the principal-agent / collective bargaining framework is correct, but I would dispute that the principals (the users, not app developers) are upset by how it works.
Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.
For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.
And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.
It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.
It's both? They have a ridiculous approvals process considering the approvals process doesn't even work. They say they have to block all these legitimate apps as an accident of having tight security, but then they don't actually have tight security. Half the time it seems like the criteria for approving an app is how much ad revenue it brings the app store owner. Everyone who makes a legitimate app has stories of having updates denied after 3-4 weeks for no reason or a stupid reason, then resubmitting, and having it approved after another 3-4 weeks. And then they claim they need a 30% cut of all your income in order to pay for this process there's no possible way to eliminate even though it doesn't achieve its stated goals at all. Their stock price says they're not spending very much of it on that process.
I bet Apple's and Google's own apps don't have to wait 6-8 weeks. Maybe it's purely anticompetitive.
Edit: Oh, and the fact they get away telling such obvious lies without constantly being called out 24/7 by millions of people speaks to the power dynamic in play.
It's not just the Mac App store, it's pretty much ALL app stores that have this issue. Not just for "AI Chat" apps, but ANY (popular) app.
At work, one of my coworkers was running out of disk space on their computer and someone on my team went to help. I suggested a program called "WizTree" (not an endorsement, just what I use) but they wanted to use "WinDirStat".
Anyway, searching the Microsoft app store for "WinDirStat" popped up TONS of fake/bootleg pieces of software, none of which I would ever trust or install. I tried to explain this, but one of those apps was selected and while it did show what the large files were, I assume we'll have to now run a virus scan on that PC.
I have a somewhat popular (yet still niche) app in the store, when I first launched it it was the only result. There are now a number of copycats. Report filed with Apple, nothing was done.
I’m considering spending the $1k or so to file a trademark on the name, maybe it’ll actually make them do something? The app isn’t making crazy amounts by far, but enough that $1k could be justifiable. If anyone has been through this I’d love to hear their thoughts.
For what it’s worth I know my product is clearly better - my users tell me - but it’s infuriating to see a knockoff show up before my app in the search results when I tell someone to look up the app in the store.
Yep, that's the "official" link, but my team member insisted on using the Microsoft Store. WinDirStat is not in the store, but tons of forks/knockoffs are.
but for both, the first instruction is just plain download. i think the average user can handle that. the others are alternatives for users that are familiar with them. i don't see the problem.
what could be changed is to add a message like: "if you don't know which one is right for you, you probably want this one:" followed by a link to the win-x64 version
To be clear the problem isn't WinDirStat's fault really. The problem is that users won't find that site (nor the GitHub one) because they're trained to go directly to the App Store and look for whatever app they need. And WinDirStat isn't in there, while numerous ripoffs are.
Before I used GitHub and got used to its interface I felt that the majority of repositories used as public-facing websites were the most confusing way to get releases. Why is the source code that seems to need some sort of tool or program to use sitting next to the installation program? Do I need all that extra stuff or can I just use the exe/app? Why is there not a page with a “download here” button that’s as plain and simple as other closed-source programs?
When you let anyone submit an app with little to no criteria other than “no using private framework abi’s” this is what you get. No curation. No quality control. No remorse.
This the race to the bottom, first it was the apps. Now it’s the shopping experience. Be glad someone sold you something you ungrateful clod.
Tiny bit of curation? I’ve seen complaints about this Apple App Store policy:
4.3 Spam (b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.
Even if I do find the exact tool for the job on Mac App Store and even if it is 99c I won’t buy it.
Essentially everything I’ve bought or installed for free from there eventually got abandoned or was a pain to upgrade (numbered versions to paywall updates etc).
Just last week all googling was leading me to one 99c MAS app as the solution but I spent 15 more mins googling and adding “GitHub” to the query and found an open source solution and I’m glad I did.
The experience and ecosystem around it just sucks.
One of the reasons I value SetApp so much for Mac apps is that it's curated and I don't have to worry about filtering a bunch of shady or low-quality apps.
From: Philip Schiller
Subject: Urgent: Temple Jump !!!!
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:23:15 - 0800
What the hell is this????
Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low
ratings?
Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of
stores in quality of service?
How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the
store?
Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any
anyone see an app that is cheating the system?
Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the
store?
This is insane!!!!!!
- - -
Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.
Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?
When i saw the "flea market" i genuinely though someone actually made a way to resell "used" apps (that you don't use anymore) for a cheaper price, like you could do in CD/DVD times.
The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.
It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.
I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.
I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.
It's not just that the stores are open to everyone-- shovelware and all. Steam does that but because they care about the ecosystem they protect pricing for premium products. They make reviews and recommendations relevant. Try to get your terrible knock off of a hit game come up in a search-- they are on to that.
Steam is a model of integrity and it's a good thing that it's not for sale because it would be an obvious acquisition for irrelevant players like Gamestop who want be relevant today, it would have been a better acquisition for Microsoft than Activision but any acquirer would kill it one way or the other by violating its integrity.
For years I had a machine on which the metadata database for the store would get corrupted within a month or so between a major update. I’d argue with Microsoft support to provide a recipe to reset this database (obviously possible because the update would fix it temporarily) but I was always told to make a new account —- but why am I going to mess up my installations of a lot of software that I use every day for the sake of some software I don’t use?
At work we have managed Windows desktops, since I’m a dev they did something so I can be an administrator, I can do everything but (1) edit group policies, and (2) use the Microsoft store. The only thing on the store I want is WSL2 but hey I can always ask Copilot how to do anything I know how to do in bash using Powershell.
That's good, there's a 30 year legacy of Windows software being downloadable online through a website and people clicking setup.exe to get it done. The App Store nonsense is MS clumsily following in the footsteps of Apple's "users are too stupid to be trusted" philosophy.
I spent the first half of my career as a windows admin and I'm glad to be out, working entirely on macOS and Linux now. macOS has its own warts, but I'll take it any day over Windows.
https://www.apple.com/us/search/ChatGPT?src=globalnav
It has the exact same problem complained about here. It's full of shovelware copies. Google play, orinically gives a better answer on the web, but on phones it has the same problem as the Apple App store.
How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".
Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.
Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.
The embarassment should be felt by the commentariat that rushes to defend Apple's store sharecropping tax by repeating ancient canards about how a fee is necessary for Apple to maintain its rigorous app review process that differentiates it from the street markets of Android, F-Droid, and whoever else.
I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.
Your entirely legitimate app will get rejected for some confusing, badly described reason you have to guess at, meanwhile an obvious rip off with terrible functionality slides through without comment.
First, a skewed distribution of "wheat" and "chaff" apps. I would bet there are at least 10x as many "chaff" submissions as "wheat" submissions. Passing that distribution through a classifier with 90% precision and 90% recall will result in "only" a 50:50 mix of wheat and chaff apps in the app store.
Actually, I could easily see the skew being 100x simply because nothing really stops a malicious actor from hiring 100 different mules to create 100 different developer accounts and submitting the same malicious app until it randomly passes review. Having only a 50:50 mix of apps now requires 99% precision and recall.
Second, the principal-agent problem. I would bet the amount of app store reviewers who are receiving bribes is not zero, and further that bribing app store reviewers is probably among the highest marketing ROI spend that fraudsters do. Apple/Google can randomize who reviews which app, but how many reviewers do they have? If I bribe one reviewer, how many copies of my malicious app (see previous paragraph) do I need to submit before one of them is routed to "my" reviewer? Probably not many.
Even with honest reviewers, I'm sure reviewers have some kind of daily quota they have to meet. If you're behind quota, are you going to carefully review an app, or reject it for tenuously-applicable reasons? That annoys app developers, but does the reviewer care? No, they hit quota, which is all that matters to them.
I'm sure someone will reply "well, Apple/Google should just ____". I hear you, but your proposal is either going to be much more expensive, much slower, or result in more bad apps being approved. In other words, it's likely that the current system is (nearly) pareto-optimal.
At the same time, I'm sure they're both getting blasted with knockoff apps that find ways to stay just within the letter of the law, if not the spirit of it.
> I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved.
It would not, as the primary purpose of this entire enterprise is to maintain total control of all aspects of the market, including discoverability.
Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people. This is squarely on Apple. Everyone knows the mark of a trustworthy store is that they will direct you to their competitors when they don't have what you're looking for.
It's actually both.
The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them. They learn how to game the system, because that's their business model.
I don't usually have problems, when my apps get rejected by the Apple App Store Review. I get the thing fixed after one or two back-and-forths, but it's still a big fat pain.
I do think that the scammers have figured out how to ram through a lot of crap, though, and Apple needs to look at this.
First, though, they need to consider it to be a problem. If each of the shovelware apps makes them a bit of money, they will be more willing to "look the other way," than for free apps (like the ones that I do). I believe that I am held to a higher standard than scammers.
It’s a cost of doing business for both of them. Surely any remotely serious developer will have at least as many resources to deal with app review as Fast Eddie’s Shovelware Emporium. It’s not really that big a deal: Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit. The developers who have trouble with this are often the ones who try to argue with the reviewer or escalate/appeal (I believe this because I worked for a company that would insist on fighting Apple’s reviewers instead of just fixing the problem).
Yes, dealing with app review is an annoying cost, but the burden is pretty uniformly spread across all app developers.
If you catch 99.999% of scam apps, and incorrectly slow down 1% of honest developers, you end up with an app store that is full of scams, and the developers are unhappy.
It could be both. Black box systems that reject useful tools without explanation "because they don't want to be gamed" but also don't reject shovelware because they didn't break an unspoken rule, isn't exclusive.
in particular it could disallow multiple apps with similar names and an online search for the app name should reveal the correct page the first hit.
At best a walled garden is collective bargaining -- a group of users (buyers) lock into requiring vendors to negotiate with their representative, and because their business is collectively valuable vendors have to meet higher privacy standards or whatever the users care about, which they couldn't extract if negotiating individually with huge companies like Facebook.
So, Apple will get yelled at whenever it fails to be a good agent in collective bargaining -- either by excluding quality vendors and driving up their costs, or by including low-quality vendors. Either one gives up the benefits to users of the walled garden.
An index of reliable apps is, you know, fine. An index with a business structure that ensures better collective bargaining gets interesting.
Anyone dispute the agent/collective bargaining framing before I internalize it forever? :)
Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.
When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.
For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.
And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.
It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.
I bet Apple's and Google's own apps don't have to wait 6-8 weeks. Maybe it's purely anticompetitive.
Edit: Oh, and the fact they get away telling such obvious lies without constantly being called out 24/7 by millions of people speaks to the power dynamic in play.
At work, one of my coworkers was running out of disk space on their computer and someone on my team went to help. I suggested a program called "WizTree" (not an endorsement, just what I use) but they wanted to use "WinDirStat".
Anyway, searching the Microsoft app store for "WinDirStat" popped up TONS of fake/bootleg pieces of software, none of which I would ever trust or install. I tried to explain this, but one of those apps was selected and while it did show what the large files were, I assume we'll have to now run a virus scan on that PC.
I’m considering spending the $1k or so to file a trademark on the name, maybe it’ll actually make them do something? The app isn’t making crazy amounts by far, but enough that $1k could be justifiable. If anyone has been through this I’d love to hear their thoughts.
For what it’s worth I know my product is clearly better - my users tell me - but it’s infuriating to see a knockoff show up before my app in the search results when I tell someone to look up the app in the store.
Infuriating enough to pay for paid placement at top? :(
Sorry, that stinks, and hope someone can confirm the trademark approach. Disappointing support is not resourced/empowered to resolve this for you.
https://github.com/windirstat/windirstat
> Install it by downloading the appropriate version for your system from the release page
> Install with winget install -e --id WinDirStat.WinDirStat (or use winget upgrade subsequently)
> Alternatively install with scoop install extras/windirstat (requires scoop bucket add extras)
The what what now? The average user is going to be able to do none of these things.
but for both, the first instruction is just plain download. i think the average user can handle that. the others are alternatives for users that are familiar with them. i don't see the problem.
what could be changed is to add a message like: "if you don't know which one is right for you, you probably want this one:" followed by a link to the win-x64 version
This the race to the bottom, first it was the apps. Now it’s the shopping experience. Be glad someone sold you something you ungrateful clod.
Tiny bit of curation? I’ve seen complaints about this Apple App Store policy:
4.3 Spam (b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.
I remember when Apple used to be insanely customer-focused. Now they’re just another big tech company with an industrial design ethos.
But cannot distinguish Al Pacino and Robert De Niro by face alone.
Why do friends claim I have autism? That started two years ago, and 35 years long, nobody mentioned it.
Essentially everything I’ve bought or installed for free from there eventually got abandoned or was a pain to upgrade (numbered versions to paywall updates etc).
Just last week all googling was leading me to one 99c MAS app as the solution but I spent 15 more mins googling and adding “GitHub” to the query and found an open source solution and I’m glad I did.
The experience and ecosystem around it just sucks.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance
What is worth $33 a month there? Seems like a bunch of basic utilities
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ngy8mz/setapp_pri...
I mean, can you sell your apps after you bought them?
I thought they were somehow linked to your AppleID directly after purchase.
What the hell is this????
Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings?
Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of stores in quality of service?
How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the store?
Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any anyone see an app that is cheating the system?
Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the store?
This is insane!!!!!!
- - -
Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.
Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?
https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/app-store-rejections
If you want to access the most lucrative smartphone market segment in the richest country, you have to play ball with Apple. There is no other choice.
Yeah... i need another coffee.
I wish someone would bring the hammer down on them.