I think about this all of the time. My old partner and I released an app a few years back that made substantially more when it was spotlighted by Apple. Other apps that never made it "above the fold" so to speak, never made much more than $1 a day.
A single app store can’t keep up with exponential growth in the number of apps. It really needs to work more like Netflix, where there is no single top sellers list, but instead recommendations are made per user. Apple appears to be hesitant to innovate here and it’s understandable, since I imagine it takes a lot of resources to keep up with new apps and their updates. But the way they do it now is unsustainable, and was showing its limitations within a few months of the app store opening.
I’m thinking that the future of the app store is probably to act as a point of sale system. But the real action is going to take place outside of it on a site like Amazon, that better organizes and finds the sort of semantic relationships between software that people are interested in. Apple will probably make it as far as using their iTunes Radio algorithm in the app store, but I don’t expect them to really “get it” and build something revolutionary. Ironically this helps early apps rank well, which creates a feedback loop because Apple makes a cut of their sales and doesn’t want to disrupt that. I would so love to be wrong about this though.
A single app store can’t keep up with exponential growth in the number of apps. It really needs to work more like Netflix, where there is no single top sellers list, but instead recommendations are made per user. Apple appears to be hesitant to innovate here and it’s understandable, since I imagine it takes a lot of resources to keep up with new apps and their updates. But the way they do it now is unsustainable, and was showing its limitations within a few months of the app store opening.
I’m thinking that the future of the app store is probably to act as a point of sale system. But the real action is going to take place outside of it on a site like Amazon, that better organizes and finds the sort of semantic relationships between software that people are interested in. Apple will probably make it as far as using their iTunes Radio algorithm in the app store, but I don’t expect them to really “get it” and build something revolutionary. Ironically this helps early apps rank well, which creates a feedback loop because Apple makes a cut of their sales and doesn’t want to disrupt that. I would so love to be wrong about this though.