What's wrong with the App Store?

Well, many of you may say: "Nothing", as it already has almost 65,000 active apps - and the figures keep on growing every day. However, many of you may also agree that lately the App Store has given many terrible news to rant about, from the rejection of Google Voice, to the stupid rejection of a dictionary (btw, what the dictionary has to do with the ninjas is that it is smart, quick, and deadly accurate. I can see why they could be concerned about the former app, but about this one??). At least they had the good sense to ban a developer who flooded the App Store with spamming apps.

But the truth is that the reviewing process of the App Store lacks a lot of things - and so it does the searching capabilities on iTunes. I mean, I love the App Store and I think it has helped lots to improve the way software can be purchased on the Internet - but there are many flaws that could (and should) be solved:

1. The evaluation process
Developing for iPhone seems a little risky, when you don't know how long the evaluation process will take. In fact, your app can be easily rejected without much feedback from the evaluators. Communication with the evaluators should be improved, or at least better evaluation guidelines shopuld be provided. It's funny how nice and useful apps can be rejected, while crappy apps that simply copy previous ones just keep on getting green light. How comes the reviewers didn't notice all those cloned apps before?

2. Promoting the apps
Ok, so, maybe you decide to launch a smaller version of your app to test the market, and if it gets approved and sells, then upgrade it to its full functionallity. This leads to two problems with the App Store: on one hand, lite versions that expire aren't allowed. But then, once you've charged a user for an app, you cannot charge them again for an update (even though Apple does so with iPod touch updates...). So you have to build a lite version that is both interesting enough to download but reduced enough for users to buy the premium one. And then you have to carefully price the premium app, not to discourage users from getting it, but taking into account that the price must cover any further developing costs...

In addition to this, the App Store has recently changed its policy on app's keywords, limiting them to 100 characters that cannot be later updated - nor can app names. And what's more, when searching for apps, their description field won't be taken into account. Ok, this may reduce the amount of spam, but it also severely cuts down the visibility of the apps, so after all these burdens, your app may still get unnoticed in the App Store.

3. Finding apps
This way, the search problem affects both developers and users. It's almost impossible to find a non-game app in the featured rankings, and there aren't almost any filtering options for a pool of more than 65,000 apps. And the suggested apps could be MUCH improved - c'mon, Amazon has been around for many years by now...


So I hope Apple is upgrading and improving its app store, specially when, apart form Android market, Samsung and Windows may be launching their own app stores...