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This is a major app store problem that a lot of developers, particularly indie developers, have complained about, but Apple has seemingly ignored so far. It'd be quite amusing if the answer turned out to be "just plug Pinterest's engine into the app store"... if it was that simple.
Then again, it's hardly a hard problem - it's just one that Apple has done almost nothing significant about over the years. Practically any solution is better for developers (and users) than the current status quo.
Then again, it's hardly a hard problem
Funny you should say that ! I came across these images less than a day ago.
Here is an image of what looks like a worker in China manipulating App store rankings using an array of some hundred 5Cs.
http://i.imgur.com/EWyVh0X.jpg
And here is an image purportedly showing the prices for a Top 10 spot in Apple's App Store, achieved through ranking manipulation.
http://i.imgur.com/TZuf1iP.jpg
[1] This disturbing image of a Chinese worker with close to 100 iPhones reveals how App Store rankings can be manipulated
http://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-stor...
Couldn't that be automated with jailbroken devices?
My totally uninformed guess is - it probably was, and then Apple/Google decided to implement human-detecting measures like monitoring tapping patterns, and the market switched to employing real humans.
They probably only affect the Chinese App Store. The stores are separate, and the Chinese one is censored.
I very much doubt those iOS devices are hooked up to Chinese credit cards. In fact, I bet that they are set up to cycle through a series of credit cards.
They can just proxy through to the US and use US app store accounts.
It is brutally hard, because competition is intense, but I'd struggle to say it's in any way unfair. When complaining about the discovery problem generally the developer believes they deserve special attention, but so does everyone else.
Back when we used to sell stuff via operator (carriers) portals people would still use tricks like starting game names with the letter A to appear at the top of the lists, so attempts to game any system are not a new phenomenon.
Ultimately you have to play the game you find yourself in.
Besides an Android, I also own an iPad and an older iPhone.
As a user, compared to Google Play, the iTunes App Store really sucks. Besides the discoverability issue, the Apple's store isn't even showing me reviews because Apple is limiting those reviews to reviews of locals only and in my country there aren't that many iPhone users that would be interested in the apps that I am interested in or that care to contribute reviews. And basically I end up installing junk in the hope that it's any good, or do searches on Google for recommendations - oh, the irony.
It is no different from any other market.
In any shop I go to, there are endless equivalent products to choose from.
The one I end up buying depends on price, marketing, visibility in media, word of mouth and so on.
Selling stuff is hard.
A bit OT, but is it at all possible to browse pinterest.com from an iPad? All I get is a full-screen non-dismissible overlay forcing me to install their app. Any ways around this?
No, there is no way around it. It's a verrrry annoying strategy and I'm not sure it's worth the aggravation it causes to people like me with only a casual interest in pinterest.
Isn't there a "Continue in browser" button right under the "Continue in App" button?
Would you look at that! It wasn't there when I posted the original comment.
Not much better now though. Now the bottom half of the screen is covered by "continue/login" overlay and the top third is covered by fixed toolbars, leaving a sliver of peephole for the actual content. They really go out of their way to annoy the hell out of anyone without an account, don't they? You'd think they'd learn a thing or two from Quora's ill-fated experiments.
Hey that's new, or perhaps I didn't see it before, but in that case I'm not the only one. It doesn't make any difference though. The first thing displayed is a login screen, and I'm not about to create a login just to browse some pictures.
In the bottom right I get a plaintext unstyled link that says "Continue in browser"
Looking for relevant apps in the Apple App Store is a growing problem. This should be a feature built within the App Store. Why can't Apple do the same? Why do they need another application/service to do the "app discovery" for them?
Worse. There have been startups working on the discovery problem. Better filtering, (social) recommendations, social network around app reviews. Apple banned those apps in 2013 but at the same time hasn't provided any alternative. One example:
"Applications that include filtering, bookmarking, searching or sharing recommendations are not considered significantly different from the App Store, therefore they cannot be approved by Apple." http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/11/appidemia-shutting-down-aft...
The App Store search is ( and has ) always been a farce. I don't think I've ever not not used Google to search for the relevant app and then jump to the Store to "Get" it.
I never see analysts charging Apple with sheer negligence in these things.
It's not for the lack of resources. They have warchests both here and offshore. Why they don't get behind these pesky problems beats me. I mean these are elementary things. Using your competitor to search for apps in your store has to be downright cringe-worthy.
The only explanation for this has to be that Apple is shoring up every last nickel for something much much larger. In the years to come we shall likely see Apple heading into complete virgin product territories.
Apps, phones and tablets must seem like a distraction - a sideshow if you will - to the people in the know at Apple. A distraction from the real mother lode of things they have been working on.
If proven true, this has to be the greatest execution of strategy secrecy and misleading of onlookers and industry watchers alike, every seen at a corporation.
Nothing else explains why such scant attention is paid to basic things like search, voice recognition (Siri which is again a laggard compared to Google Now / Cortana) or maps or any other facets of the Apple ecosytem.
Ha.
I wasn't even too far off when I predicted this. Looks like Apple has hundreds working on the car,per WSJ.[1]
[1] Apple Has Hundreds Working On An Electric Car Design, Says WSJ
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/13/apple-car/
[2] Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-titan-car-project-to-chal...
Nothing else explains ... what about "culture"? "Services" is a bit of a curse-word at Apple. The cool kids at Apple are in product design & UI. If you are top-notch backend/services talent, who you gonna join? Google? Or Apple?
Knowing of Apple's review process for each app (and each update) and seeing the number 1.4 million made me wonder how many employee's Apple has reviewing.
My initial guess was that it must be quite high but a little research [0] turned up some interesting results. It turns out the app review team is pretty understaffed and has to deal with absolute trash all the time. It also clarified the pornography policy, which, according to the article, is a way to expedite the review process. I wonder if the strictness of the policy came about because of the clogged app review process or just happened to help alleviate that particular process after the fact.
Of course, this is relatively anecdotal, coming from one former employee, and published in 2012 but I found it interesting. I do respect Apple's unwillingness to compromise on quality here.
[0] - http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks-to-...
The 'ease of app discovery' was doing fine as long as apple didn't kill of every app that made app discovery easy.
Tangential, but: for a while I was wondering what the idea and use cases of Pinterest are like, and this article seems to offer a decent explanation. (I know I’m not alone in this as the question seems to regularly pop up among HN comments in related threads, so I thought it might be worth a note.)
> Pinterest’s philosophy is that it can help nudge people into doing things — be it buying a coffee maker or trying a new recipe — by letting the site’s 70 million estimated regular visitors search for and save for later the things that interest them. If I’m looking to buy a good espresso machine, for instance, I could head over to La Marzocco’s website and pin a link to the $7,000 GS/3 to my Pinterest board to buy it later.
People planning weddings or home decoration used to have scrapbooks where they pasted in cutouts from magazines showing ideas they liked.
Pinterest is the online version of that.
People still have scrapbooks, and for lots of reasons more than that, including simply as a hobby.
It's also very similar to vision boards (actually, I think the similarity is stronger, and may be where the "pin" metaphor comes from).
if you can install an app from google play store's website to your android phone then why can't apple provide the same feature?
I would imagine Apple's intent would be to potentially allow that on pinterest.com, or perhaps on any site which pays a hefty fee.
The closer we can get to selling apps directly on websites, the more the app store becomes irrelevant. You still have to go through review to get the file signatures, but perhaps you can pull the binaries from a different source.
That would be a really interesting vertical.
I think they were referring to the feature on the Play store which allows you to request an app be installed on another device from the web interface, rather than being able to download APKs from the internet.
I find it a really nice touch when I've been linked to an app from another site to be able to instantly get it installed on my mobile without having to fish it out of my pocket and do something silly like take a photo of a QR code.
I agree on its usefulness. On a couple of recent occasions I've read about an interesting Android app while at work, logged into my Google account, gone to the Play Store web interface and told it to install the apps on my tablet at home. When I got home the apps were already installed and there were notifications reminding me to try them.
I'm surprised that the App Store doesn't have a similar feature.
It does, you just have to do it from iTunes.
If you have to use iTunes, that doesn't sound similar at all. There's a huge gap between virtually any browser you're willing to log into and a computer that you can run iTunes on.
I agree with the sentiment in here that search in the app store sucks, but I don't think it matters much.
If I've heard or read about some specific app, I can find it by name pretty easily. For everything else, google and the web works just fine. Right, it's an extra click or two but I don't really think that qualifies as a "problem"..
The AppStore needs improvement desperately, but the idea that pinterest could help here is a joke almost as bad as the AppStore itself. Even if pinterest didn't suck like hell in its own right, using it would still break integration. Who would buy iOS apps from pinterest?
I don't understand how apps would get pinned in the first place. Is Apple going to create pins for every app that would show up in searches on Pinterest?
It probably will solve the app discovery problem for some users, but not for me, for the simple reason that I do not have it. I am an app junkie and over the years installed close to 500 of them, keep 200 of them on the phone, and regularly use maybe 50 of them, 10 most useful ones almost every day.
Between app store search, google searches for specific features or integrations, apps that come with devices like activity trackers, reviews in blogs, and occasional promo actions in Starbucks, I think I have it covered.
Hackers, What you say about this app discovery site - http://appcrawlr.com/ ?
We changed the url to that from http://blog.pinterest.com/post/110786995184/install-the-best... because it is more informative.
I develop apps for friends and family, and offer them on the app store for the curious. I have used Pinterest in the past to post screenshots, and a few customers have mentioned they saw it on Pinterest.
Despite the phenomenal FUD, no one ever says they can't find an app they want. They try out the top 5 and pick one. Or make their own if they are industrious.
Huge numbers of shovelware apps aren't really a problem, but realize its time to focus on marketing that mediocre app if you want it to sell better.
The market is dictating the success of all those mediocre app developers properly: relegation to 2nd class and app obscurity.
FUD? So you search for "twitter" and try the top five apps.
#1 is Twitter's official app. So they get a point for that.
#2 is Instagram. Close but no cigar.
#3 is TwiGrow which looks like some kind of scheme to get more followers.
#4 is Pic Jointer, an app to join photos together.
#5 is Happy Park, a theme park game.
It doesn't get any better after that. Waze, Flipboard, emoji keyboards. I don't know how far you have to get down the list to actually find another twitter client.
99% go with #1.
Its a twitter client, it works, why bother with anything else?