Accidental Tech Podcast, episode 66

Accidental Tech Podcast, episode 66

On the App Store’s apparent success (starting at about 1h23m50s):

Marco Arment: If you look at it from the super high-up executive’s point of view, […] every quarter, they can point to some number, like look, here’s how much we’ve paid to developers overall, we’re doing great, we have all these apps on our store, people keep buying them, or people keep putting coins in to candy, whatever, and it’s fine, there’s no problems.

John Siracusa: That metric-based approach, though, is what annoys me the most, because they get up there, and this is what they say. They have these numbers, and say: Here’s how many bajillions of dollars we gave to developers. Here’s how many apps we have in the store. Let me show you this awesome app that is great. If they lay them all out like that, you’re like, the App Store is great. But what they don’t realise is that the awesome app that’s great sells nothing. All that money is from bilking a bunch of whales out of money for in-app purchases for crappy games, and the number of apps in the store is high because there’s millions of keyword-spam, clone, piece-of-crap things. And, those three numbers are big on their own, but together they don’t make an App Store filled with awesome games and developers making a lot of money. And I don’t know if they know that, or if they just look at their metrics, and say: that metric’s good, that metric’s good, that metric’s good, therefore the App Store is good. ‘Cause I think when they see these [apps], like [as Apple:] Look at this app, isn’t this a beautiful app used for medical imaging–? [as self:] That sells like ten copies! No one buys it! Everyone is buying Candy Crush and getting their money sucked out of their pockets, and– [as Apple:] There’s so many apps, look how many billions of apps there are! We have more apps– [as self:] Yeah, they’re all crap, what we’re all complaining about is that we realise those things are so different, and we want there to be a store with lots of good high-quality apps made by developers who get a fair price for them and customers who are satisfied with them. And that is not the App Store that exists. But the individual metrics–the numbers look good. I really wonder whether they are fooled by those numbers, or whether they just bring those numbers out and say, well this makes for good PR, but we know internally there’s a bunch of problems.

Something to think about during the keynote next week.