Should there be a shelf life for iPhone apps?
Should there be a shelf life for iphone apps? Would this cause more harm or more good to the iTunes store?
Lets look at both. First the harm. The harm this would cause is that great apps would be unnecessarily pentalized because of a clock rather than their performance and popularity. A great app should not come to an end because of a calendar date. The other effect would be to discourage developers. If you were to work really hard on something knowing it would only last a year or so would they still put forth the same kind of effort? What about the people? Perhaps the people should decide if they want the apps around or not. So maybe a system where unpopular or rarely downloaded apps would be dropped for poor performance. That would ease the search of what iPhone apps you were looking for.
The good of the shelf life. The main advantage is to cycle through and turn over the store. It would get rid of alot of unnecessary applications. Would also give other apps a chance. If something is ranked in the top 10 its very hard to overthrow it when it has the exposure. Even if that app was not as good, just being in the top 10 would keep it there from shear download amounts. Now Apple will say it has a formula for helping the natural order of things, but they will not say. I think not because of security of manipulation but because they have not found a good solution yet. A shelf life would clean it up. Developers could always reupload their app and let it fight it out again.
There are many pros and cons to this but as we approach 50k apps this year or next there needs to be a system to find what you want. And please, don’t let Google do it.
I LOVE MY IPHONE!!! … BUT to Answer your question:
Yes, for the really “crappy” apps that appear abandoned by their devs (made their million and ran?); or ones that have bugs that never get fixed; or ones that never get updated for 6-9-12 months; or ones that should never have been approved by apple in the first place! (such as Not Including a Cursor for Typing!!!) oh don’t even get me started, lol.
Frankly, Most of the apps are pretty bad (is it beyond devs to include all that is needed in ONE app so we don’t have to buy 3-4-5!?); or the apps are re totally shallow, mindless, and frivolous baloney (adding to the already evident “dumbing down of America”), imnsho. :-/
Another app peeve are the non-detailed Descriptions!! Plus lack of dev contact info, & on & on it goes.
I’m totally against the “New World Order Police State,” but apple needs to hire some “App Police” to go through the growing useless apps mess!
And that’s just the apps! Now let’s go after The App Store itself!! Grrr
HUGE apple BLUNDER: No “save basket” or “shopping cart” on/in iPhone app store. If you are scrolling down long lists of apps (& have to tap More several times), when you see an app you like & go buy it — because there is no place to save/store it — you Lose Your Place in the list of apps you were scrolling down & now have to go back & start over from scratch, re-tap More and More and More, etc.
Absolutely Miserable Experience! Multiply that times ever how many apps you stopped & bought that day!
SECOND HUGE apple BLUNDER: The iPhone app store Search is not worth half a cent! It does not search app descriptions but seems to only search app titles! So unless you know exactly what the title is of the app you might want, your chances of ever finding it are low, or it could take you all day. Add to that the fact devs do not always Name Their Apps to include what they do, so they don’t even show up in apple’s search!
Example: Earlier today I was hoping to find a better email app that includes bold, italics, underline, font size/style choices, colors, etc. Naturally I searched the word EMAIL and then MAIL. Zilch (except for the one that has NO CURSOR as described above!). Now at a loss of word to search for next, Editor came to mind (as in Rich Text Editor) and this time an app showed up with title of HTML MAIL! Hmmp! So why didn’t that show up earlier when I searched for MAIL? It would have saved me wasting a buck on the No Cursor email app. :-/
To end this rant on a productive note, everyone send ALL your gripes to apple via their iPhone feedback link here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html. I sent them a long list the other day.
Additionally, I make good use of the “Submit A Report” option at the bottom of every app in the app store, even if there’s not a bug, you can check the option “My Concern Not Listed Here” & enter whatever you don’t like about the app (of course you have to have bought the app to be able to do that; ditto for leaving a Review, which helps other customers but does little to let apple or the dev know of your concerns, bugs, or peeves.)
BTW, what’s wrong with google? (aside from its Big-Brother-like data-mining capabilities). Can’t see apple and google hooking up anyway, or did they kiss and make up?
OK, enough for one day, eh?