HEY APPLE, WOULD YOU PLEASE RENT THE APP STORE TO AMAZON?
Here's a puzzle. I'm sure there's tons I don't understand about this, or stuff I'm just missing. So I'd be eager for your comments or corrections or rumors.
I have a 5 year old daughter. If I want to buy her a book, I can log on to Amazon, and choose a department.
Once I choose that department, I can choose kids books:
And once I choose kids books, I can specify my kids age:
Once I specify the age, I'm given a list of the best books for kids of that age:
(Yea, I know, I said 5, but she's really really smart.) And if I don't want just the list of best books of the month for kids her age, I can specify a genre — let's say history:
And within that genre, subgenres:
And once I've specified the subgenre, I can then filter based on customer reviews:
Producing the top books for a 5 year old (really effectively 6), in US history, according to the views of readers of these books:
Now let's imagine I wanted to do the equivalent on the App Store. My daughter has two older brothers. They are both obsessed with Minecraft Roblox. For Christmas, I got her a used iMac, so she didn't feel left out. But as cool as the machine is, I am keen to find cool apps too. Educational apps, ideally games that teach, ideally rated by parents with kids who want games that teach.
So I open the App Store, and am given the choice of categories. There's no "children's" category, but there is Education:
If I select that, I can see the editors picks, and I can see a link to a window collecting all education apps.
And when I go to that page, I learn that there are about 3,500 education apps — spanning apps to teach the ABCs to How to Speak Japanese.
But if I want to filter those 3,500 apps, to find apps possible relevant to a 5/6 year old, wanting an app in math or history or whatever, I'm given two ways to sort these 3,500 apps: Either by release date, or alphabetically (because of course either of those two is really really essential to picking a useful or appropriate App).
Now of course, none of this is new — but that's my point. When my daughter's brothers were first exposed to the App Store, I noticed the same glaringly obvious gaps. But I had expected, over time (literally years) things would improve. Why wouldn't they? Apple has thousands of developers spending generations of time writing cool and effective code for millions to use. Why wouldn't Apple implement the most obvious techniques for enabling us to find that cool code?
But it hasn't, still. Why? Is it really so hard? And if it is, here's a pretty obvious solution: Apple, give Amazon the ability to sell OS X Apps. It doesn't need to be exclusive. You can keep your store as well. But I predict that if you did, then magically, as if by an invisible hand, the App Store would become user friendly. And great code would rise to the top without simply competing to find clever names beginning with the letter A.
There must be a reason for this crudeness. I'm sure I'm missing something. So what is it, dear reader? What am I missing? What interest could Apple have in running such a cloddish store? What blocks them from implementing even the most obvious filters?
Posted by: Kris Murray <krismurray@gmail.com>
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