It’s 2021 and App Store discovery is still so awful I want to cry
I mean, really. Personal recommendations based on all the app download data Apple has? Check. A complete and total revamp of the App Store? That too. Make it all about content? Sure. Still, it’s as hard as it’s ever been to find a new game or app, just by browsing.
Here are my 99 cents (get it? Because of app pricing? Ok I’ll go sit in the corner now) about everything wrong with discovery in the App Store.
1. Too much paid content
I don’t have exact numbers but they hardly matter. What matters is the feeling I get when I have a look at the magazine that the App Store had become. A lot of the ”articles” are just very aggressive marketing for an app, sometimes so aggressive it just happens to appear in a new article every week or two.
2. It’s not real content
I am hardly the content expert, mind you. But I am definitely in the target audience, and most or all articles feel like someone had a quota of words to fill, so they just went on and on. It reminds me of high school literature tests: you have a good two-sentence answer, but the question requires that you elaborate (and so does your teacher), so you ”elaborate” the same idea in different words until you run out of ways of saying the same thing. It’s arguably creative, but very much the opposite of an interesting read. I’m sure they try to keep them interesting but it needs work. Surely Apple has the cash to create something real there.
3. New isn’t new
Many times I’d see a list of new apps with really old apps in them. I’m sure there’s son excuse to make this technically not a lie, like a recent app update or something similarly irrelevant, but that hardly builds up credibility, does it?
4. Suggestions don’t seem to change over time
Perhaps that’s because I didn’t change much. But still, is expect the logic behind the recommendation engine to try and expose me to different apps from time to time. If I already downloaded that game a year ago, had it for a while then deleted it, what would be the point of recommending it to me? Either they are trying to push certain apps so these aren’t sincere recommendations, or they’re genuine, but just not that smart. Both options are disappointing.
Here’s hoping the next iteration of the App Store has real, interesting content and smarter suggestions, and perhaps that paid content will be held to the same standards of the rest of the stories: if it’s or genuinely interesting, it stays out.
How do you discover new games and apps?
