Right now the AppStore is brand new, and everyone’s trying to figure out how to use it correctly. We’re all experimenting, and I’m sure Apple is too – trying to figure out the policies that’ll result in maximum growth of the AppStore, maximum growth of the developer community, and maximum respect for the user experience. I suspect here the iPhone application ecosystem and the Facebook application ecosystem share some similarities – minimal policies at first, tightened over time to prevent the inevitably-emerging abuses.
This morning I noticed at least two behaviors that are clearly ‘commons dilemmas’ – when one individual takes advantage of them, they make rational, economic sense for that individual, but when everybody does it, the end result is a classic tragedy of the commons. In other words, short-term interests conflict with both long-term interests and the common good.
First, it’s possible to name (or rename) an application whatever you want, and the ‘all’ and ‘free’ lists are sorted alphabetically. It’s always better to be at the start of a list than the end of a list, which is probably why one company recently prefixed ‘#1 Rated’ to the start of their games. Clever, but this sort of behavior, once adopted by everybody, inevitably results in names like ‘####!!!!111AAA A A A Solitaire’. Remember paper copies of the Yellow Pages? Exactly the same behavior. In addition, claims in the title that may or may not be true make me hesitate. Would a brand new game called ‘Most Popular Solitaire’ or ‘Most Downloaded Sudoku’ be acceptable?
Second, updating your application refreshes the ‘released’ time, which is interesting, because the ‘all’ and ‘free’ lists have a ’sort by release date’ option. This morning both the Mobile News Network and New York Times applications were near the top of these lists. Perfectly fine if the application’s actually being updated – which, of course, the Mobile News Network and New York Times applications were. But if the sort-bump and placement on the ‘new’ list results in more downloads, tweaking your application for the sake of updating becomes tempting for the unscrupulous. There’s no direct financial incentive to preserve the bandwidth and respect the not-always-unlimited data plans of the current installed userbase, because they’ve already paid. I know I’d be more comfortable if ‘released’ and ‘updated’ were two separate dates, with separate filters (’recently released’ vs. ‘recently updated’).
Does anyone else see any ‘commons dilemmas’ or other questionable practices in the AppStore? I’m sure Apple’s going to have to deal with all of these issues in time – along with review-stuffing and companies purchasing their own applications to get on the ‘hot’ list (hey, you get 70% of your money back) and a host of other things not yet anticipated.
For those of you looking for numbers – there’s now 713 applications in the AppStore this morning (around 8:30 AM PDT), 61 more than the last time I checked. If my count is right, 553 (78%) are paid, 160 (22%) are free. The numbers are skewed somewhat by AppEngine’s $0.99 books, of which there are currently 114, 16% of the total applications in the store. Why do I suspect Apple will be adding a books category shortly?
You raise some very interesting questions. I’m interested to see how these play out.
Is this turning into a cluster problem already? Do you guys think this will become similar to facebook apps or will it straighten out?
Shawn – I think that without a healthy respect for the user experience, a Facebook-like situation is possible.
However, Apple has been quite responsive to complaints so far, which works in both the users’ and the developers’ favor. For instance, the above issue is fixed.