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iPhone App Store, Part 1

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Okay, so it's been a couple weeks, and like everyone else, I'm addicted to the iPhone App Store. Everyone's raving about it and I don't see a lot of complaints. That puzzles me, because I am finding a lot to complain about.

Now don't get me wrong: the App Store is a zillion times better than anything else out there, better than most desktop application stores, let alone mobile phone software. Apple has truly set the bar high. But that doesn't mean it is perfect. Here are a few areas Apple and developers need to work on.

App and OS Stability
This is the number one problem for me. In the whole past year I rebooted my iPhone maybe a half dozen times. In the past two weeks, I've rebooted it a dozen times. Five times it crashed so hard the whole thing locked up. I often have to force quit locked applications. I've actually seen error messages (one app told me it was out of memory and then everything froze). I've even been forced to reboot it just to have stability return.

Now some of this is the fault of developers, of course. Apple can't fix the bad programming of others. But phone's whole operating system seems more unstable than in the past. For device like a phone where it must work reliably as a phone at all times, that's not a good thing.

I do believe this is a relatively minor problem. This is a brand new OS with brand new apps: I'm actually surprised it isn't a lot worse than it is. That everything is as stable as it is shows how well Apple orchestrated this process: can you imagine the hell a year ago if Apple had allowed third parties to willy-nilly stick apps on your phone? Apple has spent a year refining the process and the results are magnificent. There's just a bit of bugginess I'd like to see go away. Even a 98% uptime on an iPhone is not great: what happens if your phone dies at a critical time because some game or utility crashed? If that happens even occasionally, people will learn to distrust third-party apps and the whole market will die off.

App Store Organization
While the App Store is impressive in its 1.0 incarnation, I am surprised Apple didn't come up with a better organizational system. The search feature is nice and much needed, but the rest of the categories need work. Apple is making improvements -- there's now an ebook category that wasn't initially there, which is a good start -- but currently there are a thousand applications. What happens when there are ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Fifty? That's going to be a nightmare to sift through. It's already a chore now.

Apple can obviously add a lot of categories, but when there are hundreds or thousands of categories, even organizing and wading through those becomes tedious. Apple needs to innovate here and come up with some radical ways to help users sift through the wheat and the chaff.

For instance, how about a 3D view similar to Cover Flow that would allow you browse through available apps visually?

I'd also like to see user preferences for the types of apps you don't want to see: like being able to tell the store to not display apps you've already downloaded or apps that have a low star rating (you set the level, of course). I'd also like to be able to "delete" apps from my view of the store.

(It'd also be nice to be able to that with reviews, too. Either delete them or rate them, so that lame reviews that are critical or praiseworthy with no reasons given are hidden. I really don't need to see twenty "Great app!" review posts when I'm trying to find out if the program has a certain functionality I need.)

Another nice feature might be a way to add apps to a "suggestion list" -- you can add apps you might like to try in the future but don't have time to mess with right now. There could also be some sort of social networking app suggestion thing going on: like if someone I respect or who has similar tastes as me recommends a certain app, I might receive a suggestion to check it out. (A "people who bought this app also bought..." recommendation list would be good.)

I'm not saying the App Store is bad or unusable; just that it's already feeling crowded and the store is in its infancy. One of the things I love about the store is the way it gives independent developers a chance to sell their products on the same level as the big developers: I'd hate to see small developers get shut out simply because their products are lost in a sea of other products.

App Store Functionality
Another problem with the store that frustrates me is the way it switches you away from the store to show you the icon downloading on your home screen. That's annoying since I'm usually wanting to order more than one app. Why can't it be like the iTunes Store that just queues up items I want? (I also don't like that Apps default to the main home screen: why can't they default to last screen or a screen I choose?) The slowness of the App Store and the way it wants my iTunes password means I'm much more likely to download apps in batches, so Apple needs to add that functionality ASAP.

Currently when you download an app the phone switches to the home screen and the App Store has to reload where I was in the store when I relaunch. That takes time and it's lame; usually I want to leave that screen (it's the app I'm downloading) but I'm forced to wait while it reloads it.

The download/app viewing process is also prone to sluggishness. I don't recommend visiting the app store on Edge -- it's barely tolerable on WiFi. Sometimes it's faster than others, so it makes me think it's a problem with Apple's servers. Hopefully they'll get it figured out soon, but several times I've forced the App Store application to quit because it seemed frozen. It seems like downloading apps using the same Store bandwidth pipe as viewing the Store. I found it's often better to wait until an app is fully downloaded before searching for the next, but that drags out the whole process and is annoying.

Apps Organization on the iPhone
Last year when Apple revealed a way to let you rearrange and add icons to your iPhone's home screen, it was hailed as a nifty feature (love those jiggling icons). But while that was fine for a few web page icons, today with the multiple third party applications, it's an interface that needs an overhaul.

First, moving icons from screen to screen is a pain. While the phone will autoscroll one screen, it stops after that, meaning that if you want to move an icon several screens over, you can to drag-let-go-and-drag-again multiple times. It's extremely tedious. I've got six screens and all of them are already almost full!

Second, there's no way to jump to a particular screen -- you can only scroll horizontally between each "page." That means finding a particular app can be troublesome.

Speaking of finding apps, I'd also like a way to label the pages. For example, I have my screens organized with games on one screen, utilities on another, and rare utilities on yet another. Ebooks are on a page by themselves. I can remember that mentally, to an extent, based on the visible icons, but it'd be much nicer if I could just label the page. Then I could scroll faster to find the page I want instead of having to identify icons.

Another problem happened to me this past weekend: a whopping nine apps of mine showed up with updates and when I installed them I was horrified to discover that they did not remember the screen they were originally on! Here I'd carefully organized all my apps and suddenly nine of them were out of order. Worse, when my first few screens filled up, they just started autoflowing wherever they could find a free icon space, meaning I ended up with a horrible jumble of applications. Because some pages were full, I couldn't move icons to them, and it made rearranging everything took me a long time. I was probably working at it for twenty minutes! This is a monster bug, Apple: fix it. Just place the update in the same place as the original app. Simple.

App Store from Developer's Perspective
Developers, while in general happy with the App Store, have their list of complaints. Biggest among them is that there is no way to release a beta version of their application to a limited group of testers. While you can test an app internally, the only way to distribute an app to a group is via the App Store, and that's available to everyone. As iPhone apps become more complicated, testing is going to be more and more important, so Apple needs to figure out a way to address this need.

Similarly, there's no way release a demo or time-limited app via the Store. Some vendors solve this problem by offering two versions of their application: one free and one that costs money, with different feature sets. That's not a bad thing, but can be confusing to users, and it's more work for the developer as they have to maintain two sets of code.

It's not a problem yet, but what about upgrades? Free updates to existing apps are not a problem -- Apple has solved that elegantly as your iPhone will automatically tell you if any of the apps you've bought has a new version available. But there's currently no way to charge for paid upgrades: existing buyers would have to pay full price for the new version. For inexpensive apps that's not such a big deal, but I'd balk at rebuying a ten dollar app unless the new features were really compelling. Apple will need to address this at some point.

Another issue that's related is that Apple still has all the iPhone developers under NDA (non-disclosure agreement), meaning they can't talk about anything they are doing. This means they can't share development tips, reveal techniques and solutions, or even share code. That's very bizarre. We hope it's only temporary, but Apple has given no sign of when the NDA will be lifted. My personal feeling is that Apple did this to keep any bad reports or development problems from leaking to the press and public during the quite complicated initial iPhone 2.0 rollout and they'll be lifting the NDA soon (possibly at the same time as iPhone 2.1 is released). But until then it's an unusual problem and one Apple will start taking some heat for soon.

Next Time: Marc explores actual iPhone applications.

macopinion@designwrite.com