The iOS 6 App Store 'is a disaster' for developers

News & General Discussion
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Indies speak out on lack of discoverability and claim new OS favours established

"The App Store in Apple’s newly released iOS 6 is a disaster for developers and users, it has been claimed.
As discussed on the LightWood Games Blog for developers, Chris Newman and a number of other indies said there were a number of problems on the latest OS, particularly concerning the lack of visibility for new apps.
He explained that there was no longer a “sort by release date” option, with tabs for games searches restricted to paid, free and top grossing.
There’s no more “Sort by Release Date” option

Newman questioned how small developers and studios could become successful and get noticed on the App Store given that exposure was restricted to options which largely listed the same games.
“For a small developer, this is terrible news,” said Newman.
“Although it’s only for a short period, the ‘new release’ exposure is extremely valuable. It’s our opportunity to grab people’s attention, build the initial user base and gauge the public’s reaction without needing to spend a fortune on marketing.
“The new system only gives exposure to titles that are already in the charts. How does a new app break through? There is absolutely no way of being discovered unless a user is linked to your app directly, or searches for the app by name.”
Newman also criticised how new research results were displayed, highlighting that users could previously quickly flick through five visible apps per page to find a game or app they were looking for.

This has now however been changed to one game per page, slowing down the search process and preventing discoverability of titles on the store.
"This is a massive distortion of exposure towards the already-successful apps,” he said.
“Those that are top of the search results (we assume, although we don’t know, because they are popular) are placed full screen in a user’s face. To get further down the list requires effort. A lot of effort.”
Newman went on to criticise the lack of space available to show a game’s full title, the lack of support for landscape apps and distorted search options, having been recommended bird puzzle” after searching for “word puzzle”.
A number of other developers also commented in agreement, with one developer Katherine suggesting that whilst there is a “New" section hidden away, the apps listed were in fact months old.
“Someone has just pointed out that if you tap Featured, then Categories, then choose something, it has a “New” section, which is all a lie,” she said.
“The items in there aren’t new! In Word Games, Abble Dabble appears 13th and that’s not even been updated since March! It’s just like Google Play, users will think they’re seeing new things, but it’s actually just what Apple wants us to see.”

http://www.lightwoodgames.com/blog/2012/09/everything-thats-wrong-with-the-app-store-in-ios-6/#.UGGjVa4oRjn

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to make matters even worse, on my iPhone4S, the appstore crashes when I open genius, at latest when I try to drag.

That reduces the discoverability to 0.0 within the store.

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Actually, head over to Chris Newman’s blog. He listed more valid criticisms of the new iOS 6 App Store. Such as :

Landscape apps are penalised
There’s not enough room to show an app’s name
Stupid search suggestions
Direct links appear to have changed
…

Its very good read!

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looks like apple have some serious work to do to get their reputation resolved. many issues with the latest release, even making national news :L

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On top of all that, they obsoleted my less than 2 year old ipad. No updates for me, no more new apps. What a disaster this version is.

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oh well, the ‘no more new apps’ already was the case before for higher profile games cause apple fucked up the iTouch4 and iPad1 out of the box when they decided that the iPhone4 is fine with 512MB ram but that the other two can go with 256MB which is an absolute fail at math as 120mb of RAM + VRAM at 1024x768 screen res to feed is not even remotely realistic anymore. And they pretty surely knew that as Epic has not created the citadel demo in 2 days.
There are various iPad only games including 3Sprockets Cubemen that actively unsupport the iPad1 and that for good reasons.

I guess apple even decided to last minute cheapsake on at least the iTouch 4 given that the citadel crashed on the itouch4 due to the previously unknown fact that it was RAM neutred compared to the iphone for no obvious reason (come on, RAM in this sizes costs about nothing, its not worth cutting it just for ‘the fun of it’, thats an active disservice against any paying idiot called consumer)

I’ve myself an iTouch4 and iPad1 here as test device, so I know how annoying it is to have them. the itouch4 originally was meant to be a 64gb one but luckily read about the 256mb instead of 512mb before the order was shipped so I cancelled it and switched to a mere 8gb as ‘lame retina test device’

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Well, on top of that, the new iOS 6 MAP is a DISASTER of epic proportion. I think this iOS 6 is just a huge step backward for Apple, they are simply not ready!! Not to mention this non-standard resolution screen (1136 x 640). Tim Cook really drops the ball on this one only one year after Steve is gone. Tsk tsk tsk.

This may very well be the turning point for Apple to go down hill AGAIN just like 1984…where it ceded its market share and superiority to the IBM PC clones. Only this time there is no Steve Jobs to rescue Apple again…

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Apple needs Steve back. I wonder what the future will hold for them.

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This is a huge problem, and the only suggestion in the Apple dev forums right now is to file bug reports. I get the feeling that won’t work, though. I have several bugs in OS X still open from 2006 on Radar.

Anyway, here’s my own angle on this.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/152222-This-sounds-like-a-rant-but-it-s-really-a-plea-for-help!

Apple needs to fix this. I’ve seen a huge drop in sales almost overnight, and others have too. It’s killing off interest by a lot of indie developers.

Google could swoop in here and woo us with their better store, but theirs has been pretty craptastic from day 1.

-Chilton

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The original iPad was… lacking significantly in horsepower. It is true they did not update it to iOS 6, but it is not true you cant get new apps. You still can download apps and update those apps. You just wont be able to get anything that developers set to require iOS 6.

I still keep my trusty iPad G1 at home and use it every day. Still have not upgraded, may get a mini if they launch next month but not because my G1 cant download apps. Simply because I had issues with apps running out of memory forever.

It should not just be seen as a “lame retina test device”. Lots of kids got that thing as a DS alternative, so it’s a perfect device to test bottom end performance of an app. I may get another one since I broked mine a while back (still works but lock/power button is damaged making it hard to take screenshots.)

As for a reason to do less ram in the device, how much would you say ram that size cost? It’s not nothing. 10 bucks? Let’s say 10 bucks. If Apple was to get 100% of the price tag to their pockets (assume the store makes nothing, or more realistic, sold at apple store and ignore store sustenance costs) that is 5% of the profits there. If you set a 20% margin lost to the retail and fulfillment chain, then we may be talking about 6.25%. Those numbers may seem low to you, but they are huge numbers when you are moving the unit counts Apple is moving.

Not saying they were not stingy still, but also keep in mind: the iPod Touch attempts to squeeze a $600 device into a $300 one.

The original iPad with just 256 MB of memory.
The iPhone 4 Antenna.
The buttonless iPod Shuffle.
iMovie 08
Mobile Me.
Ping.
The G4 Cube
The Hockey Pock mouse
The original OSX release.

Yea… Apple never made any blunders under Steve Job’s time. Tsk Tsk Tsk indeed…

The maps indeed are bad internationally (although interestingly enough, seems for China they are a huge upgrade over Google Maps) This App Store changes have me a bit on the edge, and not as a developer but as a customer. But the entire “this is apple without jobs” is absurd.

Yea, that iPhone 5 record breaking 5 million indeed showcase how Doom looks like!

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Not to detract from IOS 6 App Store sucking, but…

I’m unfamiliar with the mobile store wars, as I’m only making very basic looks at the various mobile distribution setups. Yes, I read the articles about the IOS 6 App Store, and how it’s horrible. How is the Google App Store as horrible?

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I have been Using the iPhone 5 now for a few days now and I have to say from a user point of view it’s great, only downside so far is the maps. Not me personally, but I know a lot of people are happy to play zynga spawns, so I don’t see apple failing in the next year or two At all. Maybe for indie developers, but this will just give the large companies that opening they need to cover it, just like consoles. So yes, this may be a failing point for us, but saying apple is doomed, no.

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Unfortunately for me and all iPad 1 owners, Apple is pushing down Xcode 4.5 which by default supports IOS 6. The vast majority of developers will simply target 6 and be done with it. I realize that it doesn’t stop my iPad from running it’s existing apps, but I’d be hard pressed to buy a computer that only had support for a year and 10 months.

I could even buy the “it’s not powerful enough to run the new OS” arguments (or at least try to), except that the 3GS, which is significantly slower, is still supported. This appears to be nothing more than a push to get people to buy a new iPad - furthermore, it appears you can jailbreak your iPad 1 and install IOS 6 unofficially, making it seem even more like a money grab.

The attitude is worrisome. Yes, I’ll buy an iPhone 5, but that Kindle HD would make a good replacement for the pad.

I’m not at the point where I’m saying it’s the beginning of the end for Apple, but they do seem to be making some foolish mistakes. Maybe they know something we don’t and this will all play out better in the end? Or maybe a bunch of people are feeling some new-found freedom with Jobs gone.

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Biggest advantage in iOS has always been how new releases get some highlight. Either by users sorting by release/update date, or by Apple picking your app as a featured app for a week.

Apart from some very rare exceptions, your app will gain momentum only while in the featured section, something that last a full week. It’s very very rare for something that was never featured to suddenly gain momentum, but you can still get some OK profits by showing up in the recent releases under some category.

Search has never been the App Store’s forte, though. You will eventually get some sales from search, but it’s mostly linking and features that get you moving for real profits.

It now appears that Apple is making it harder to search by release date, killing one of the boosts developers would get from updating their apps. They also made it harder to look at multiple apps at a time, sort of understand the reasoning but I don’t think it’s something that will be effective. One of those things that sound good at first hand but don’t actually work in practice.

How is this different from Google? Google does not look at your apps. You upload an app and it’s instantly set for sale. Since Google never sees your app, they are insanely unlikely to ever see if it’s a quality product or not. Look at the Google app store features and you will see it dominated by big studios or apps that already got momentum on their own. I hear some indies that have friends inside Google can pull some strings too.

In the Google store, an app may be released and no one will ever find out, not even Google. You are forced to play the Search Engine Optimization game injecting keywords into the text of your body. Even then, there are so many kids doing apps (usually garbage) for free that customers rarely will download a pay alternative over the cheap rip-off.

Apps that already made a name in iOS can also get a big boost from android users searching them up by name. In many ways the most successful Android Apps tend to be so only after they became successful (even if for a limited time) in iOS.

In my experience the Amazon Android store is not much better, especially with their whole “free app of the day” thing where you can get a different free app every day, mostly games. If you have that and are looking for entertainment, even if just for cheap time killers, you may never find yourself lacking something free to play.

The Nook store seems to be best in this respect, low install base but they don’t allow ad based profits nor in app purchases, so everyone is selling, no one is giving anything away for free. This actually makes, in my eyes, the Nook store the second best place for devs. Unfortunately they so far have not announced a refresh to their hardware, I fear they may end up falling too far behind.

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A developer that goes with defaults is extremely unlikely to be very capable of doing a decent app. We are not talking about average users, these are developers. They should know better.

The 3GS has the same memory as the iPad 1 and the same GPU. However, the iPad is trying to push 786432 pixels while the 3Gs is pushing 153600. That is 512% the memory requirement just to keep the screen running. Then the same CPU must do operations on 512% the pixels… so you have basically the same hardware attempting to do more than 5x the work.

As they say: at your own risk. I used to say the same about the iPhone 3G and iOS 4’s multitasking, I jailbroke mine and “laughed” at apple’s inability to money grab from me… only I ended up with a barely usable phone that took a minute to open the browser.

Apple made many mistakes with the first iPad, they know it, and they want to leave it behind because it just was that bad. There are notes in Jobs biography about him being depressed after hearing the bombardment of negative reviews, not because they being negative (it WAS jobs, he was used to that) but because he knew a lot of those reviews were 100% right. The hardware was pretty much crap.

Their mistake was not recent; they are trying to clean up after a mistake from the Jobs era.

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Unfortunately, I have experience with this before, when they killed the original ipod touch. Games that would work on it were just not marked compatible, and that was the end of it.

While they do share the same CPU, don’t forget that the 3GS is clocked at 600mhz, the iPhone 4 is clocked at 800mhz, and the Ipad is clocked at 1Ghz. Also, they have the same GPU, while the 3GS and 4 are clocked at 150mhz, the iPad is clocked at 200mhz.

Just looking at the benchmarks (Geekbench for iPhone):
3GS scored 275
iphone 4 scored of 375
ipad scored 454

So, let’s throw out the 3GS argument, because of the screen.
The iPhone 4 is still slower, with a similar number of pixels, and still supported.

edit: I don’t want to derail the thread, I like ios 6 in some cases. I’m not happy in others.

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This is all just very depressing for someone like myself is attempting to get my 2nd game into the app store by this winter. I’m hoping doing a lot of promotion and self marketing online will help with discovery, etc. I think if the indie devs continue to market their games in non-intrusive ways, they can still get the sales they hope for. I liken this to the business theory of destination business vs. an impulse visit based on passing by the storefront by chance. Replace “business” with a game product. I think you can counteract this letdown with Apple’s app store by making your game a “destination”, directing people to an iTunes link, a web site with a demo, etc. More than likely these days, customers will no longer “wander by” your app in a category, they are going to have to seek it out by being directed from an external source. Maybe I’m just telling myself this to stay positive?

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This is all very concerning, I am soon to release my first iOS and Android game. I was hoping the iOS market might drive Android users to get it also. However, with how Apple is handling things, it seems like I might be out of luck!

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I never said Steve Jobs didn’t. It was never this bad before. The problem with build quality (dents and scratches on brand new sets) on iPhone 5 is now headline news too, the Map fiasco, the App Store fiasco, on top of that, very strong competition from the competitors (namely Samsung Galaxy SIII)…

Oh and this lawsuit thing that made Apple to look like a bully - with a huge backlash and resentment against Apple like never before.

Obviously, you were too young to remember! :smile:

Things start falling apart little by little - it may look like Apple is doing great right now, just like back in 84’, but it was at the peak and then it went into decline with series of blunder while ignoring the threat of competition. Apple was lucky to hold on to their tiny niche market and survived til the 90s and almost went bankrupt at one point it needed Microsoft to bail them out.

Honestly, I am very worried. I like App Store. I think it still the best store to market your software, but right now it feels like the tide is turning and the sky is falling…

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While I am concerned that this may be another '84, Apple’s high stocks will likely allow some buoyancy for a while at least.