‘Ringtone Apps’ – The Problem of Getting Noticed in the App Store

Ah, the App Store. You’re nothing but a problem, are you? Sure, for many people that problem is “What the hell do I spend all this money on? I’ve already bought a new Mac Pro, a platinum-plated Aston Martin and Michael Jackson.” For others, the problem’s coming up with a good idea for that killer app in the first place. (Answers to the e-mail address in the side bar, please. We’ll go splits on the profits.) But for established iPhone — and Mac — developers like Craig Hockenberry of the Iconfactory, the problem is getting your apps noticed among the App Store’s other 9,999. This is an issue which he raises in an open letter to Steve Jobs, and which we’ll take a punt at here, too. Because when the Chock blogs, the Interwebs listen. So read the linked article, Gruber’s response, and the mobile-phones.co.uk piece for good measure, then meet me in my rooms for a seminar afterwards.

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on Hockenberry — because apart from anything else, if Steve actually saw and replied to the letter, I dare say his response was reduce-a-grown-giant-to-tears hard enough for all of us — but it appears that he’s suffering from a touch of the bail-out syndrome. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m as down on the inequalities and random cruelties of the Free Market as the next Euro lefty, but surely running the risk of your product failing to recoup its development costs is all part of the whole Capitalism thing. It goes hand-in-hand with the getting to keep all the excess profits you could make bit. Blaming your reluctance to bring a product to market on the fact that everyone else is selling their apps for less than you’d like to sell yours is a poor excuse. And I think of all the companies in the world, Apple is about the last you’d want to take that complaint to.

But let’s sidestep all the larger economic questions — such as whether software development hasn’t become just another manufacturing industry, subject to the same drive towards lowest-cost efficiencies — and focus instead on the technical and administrative causes which Hockenberry briefly mentions. The lack of a ‘try before you buy’ option is chief among them, closely followed by the way that the various ‘Top 10′ app lists have become the main method of marketing your app to potential customers. Hockenberry gracefully declines to offer Steve any advice as to how these can be fixed, which is a shame, because I bet it would have been a corker. But of course that doesn’t stop the rest of the blogosphere. Gruber, for one, suggests:

What Apple could do is weight the best-seller list by revenue rather than unit sales. That way a $10 app with 1,000 sales could get ahead of a $1 app that sells 5,000.

(Whoops. Accidentally quoted his whole post. Sorry.) I know I seem to be tugging on Gruber’s pigtails a lot recently, but apart from treating the symptom rather than the actually condition, that’s also a particularly dumb idea. For a start it assumes that just because an app costs more it deserves more attention. If this system were in place a couple of moths ago, I Am Rich would have been propelled to the top of the best-seller list, where more idiots would have accidentally bought it, causing a feedback loop which would have eventually caused the App Store to disappear up its own bumhole. Parallel lists divided according to price bands — eg. ‘budget’ for sub-$4.99 and ‘full price’ — might work, but would further confuse and clutter the App Store’s interface. (Which is before we consider the problem of apps which switch price between the different bands.)

The problems faced by iPhone application developers are not new. In fact, you can find an almost identical situation elsewhere in iTunes. Short previews aside, the record labels and movie studios are also provided with no marketing mechanisms except for charts based purely on current popularity. Is this a problem for them? No, because marketing for their products has always been concentrated (mainly) outside their distribution channels. The weekly charts have always been more about recording what people have bought, rather than influencing what they will buy. So maybe the problem is iTunes. It works brilliantly as a tool for distribution but not marketing, and simply wasn’t designed with the App Store in mind.

If you’ve read this far then I dare say you’ll stick around while I set out my suggestions for what is to be done. (No, I’m not afraid of telling Steve what I think Apple should do. For all the good that will come of it.) There doesn’t seem much that can be done to improve iTunes as it stands. Introducing price bands into the Top 10s might help, but you would lose the simplicity of the current system. Charts based on average ratings are a nice idea, but there’s no way of enforcing that every user provides a thoughtful, fair rating of each app they use, and without that kind of large-scale coverage it’s open to abuse. A limited-time trial, like movie rentals, seems to be the best idea as far as encouraging people to download and at least try your app, but it doesn’t solve the greater problem of visibility.

Ultimately, iPhone app developers are going to have to embrace the movie and music model and concentrate on winning hearts and minds outside of iTunes. Which basically means advertising. In some ways it’s funny that Hockenberry should raise this issue, since he’s well placed to leverage his standing in the Mac community into oodles of free publicity. (See, for instance, coverage given to the recent release of Frentic. Or even this post.) But the problem is that the iPhone is popular far beyond the usual Mac circles. This mean that the average Indie Mac developer is going to have to step outside their comfort area in order to promote their app. (There’s some signs that this is already happening. As a typed this, an advert for iPhone game The Plateau popped up in Twitterific.) It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a development we should have seen coming from the moment that Kleiner Perkins chap stepped on stage at the iPhone SDK event. The Mac still has the feel of a little pond about it, where software can flourish based on its own merits and word of mouth. The iPhone is another league entirely. It’s mainstream, a consumer product rather than a computer, and reaching the majority of iPhone owners is another skill developers are going to have to master.

• Craig Hockenberry
• Daring Fireball
• Mobile Phones (.co.uk)