The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.
It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.
I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.
I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.
Undermining the power of software vendors is an institutional imperative at Apple. There is a memory of the days when they were dependent on Adobe and Microsoft for their hardware to be viable. When they design App stores they make the rules and game the system with this in mind.
It's not just that the stores are open to everyone-- shovelware and all. Steam does that but because they care about the ecosystem they protect pricing for premium products. They make reviews and recommendations relevant. Try to get your terrible knock off of a hit game come up in a search-- they are on to that.
It's notable that other attempts to develop game app stores for non-console platforms have fallen flat. If Microsoft has gotten any traction at all for game distribution on Windows it's because of the really different GAME PASS model. Blizzard, EA and such have apps to download their own games but don't challenge Steam for third parties, Good Old Games with it's anti-DRM stance is the only real competitor.
Steam is a model of integrity and it's a good thing that it's not for sale because it would be an obvious acquisition for irrelevant players like Gamestop who want be relevant today, it would have been a better acquisition for Microsoft than Activision but any acquirer would kill it one way or the other by violating its integrity.
And to that note, Apple testified a 75% profit margin on these fees due to what the judge in the Epic case called out as limited investment in the review process or tools to improve it. Or as Phil Schiller called out years before that, "is anyone watching the store?!".
Still remember that marketplace from Openai, the gpt store for Chatgpt? They had zero quality control for the apps. They had millions of gpt "apps", 99.99% of them complete garbage. Vibe coding Apps has become so easy nowadays that every idiot and first grader can prompt its way through a store release. Pure spam. I would love to see a marketplace that rejects at least half of all app submissions. Google got lots of backlash on HN for requiring a DUNS number from now on to keep your app on their store - but how do you want to keep those sweatshops and idiots from spamming your store?
Apple already rejects a lot of apps. Half of my submissions are rejected for bullshit reasons (eg. I submitted an app that shows data from health kit, and it was initially rejected for unnecessarily using health kit)
The problem is that they don't do any curation. They should allow all apps on the store, but make a proper search engine. That surfaces good apps and hides shovelware.
No kidding. I just wanted to find out what apps are compatible with CarPlay. You’d think that would be a simple filter. If it’s there, I sure can’t find it.
I don't think it's an unsolved problem. The fact that Steam and doesn't overwhelm you with 100 low-effort ripoffs when you're searching for AAA game means it's possible, at the very least, to get that bare minimum done.
I feel this is particularly egregious with the Mac App store, since Apple requires manual reviews for all apps. It's just that that the things Apple seem to care about in these review don't really seem to improve user-facing quality very much compared to app store with a more lenient review process.
Yes! It's so glaring the difference between how they position App Review in court or in marketing materials, which is always about quality and safety, and how it is used in practice 99% of the time, which is "Does it pose any threat to an Apple business model?" (e.g. Spotify isn't a threat as long as it's hobbled by paying 30% App Store tax that Apple Music doesn't have to). XBOX Game Pass was a threat because they don't want games being sold where nobody has paid Apple a cut for each game.
"You wouldn't want finding apps to be as much of a minefield as downloading programs off the Web used to be, would you?" they say. "Our curation is the only reason you are safe from malware on an iPhone!"
It only takes a search or two on either "App Store" to see that they have no problem with apps whose business models could not possibly succeed without deception, such as simple calculators or wallpaper image catalogs with $19.99 weekly subscriptions after free trial.
It's interesting to me that Apple have been pioneers in two separate areas:
1. sandboxing and permissions, which arguably they have done a B+ job at. Not as fine-grained as Android in most ways, but better at what it does do than anything else for consumers.
2. App Store gatekeeping.
They want us to believe their platforms are only secure because of #2 but I think they're pretty darn secure just because of #1 and #2 has basically no relevance due to how lax they are about the things that I care about, which is basically scams and knock-offs.
The App Store is just one of the most egregious examples but this is behavior that is embedded in everything they do.
We say companies are "legal person" and I actually think Apple embeds the character flaws of both Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook, as if it were a person.
Not so sure about that. I am not into searching for it, but I read, somewhere, that abandoned apps are being stolen, or brought for pennies, then resold (sometimes, with some “extra spice”).
This is an active choice of such marketplaces. They could choose to be more strict if they wanted to. Yes they'd probably have a moderately hard time getting rid of all the existing spam, but once they start banning vendors and raising verification requirements, the volume decreases.
I'm permanently banned from publishing on the Google Play Store because the name of my app was too similar to another. So they do have the ability to enforce things strictly when they want to.
The RDF means that Apple still has the "sideloading needs to be blocked, because Apple keeps the garbage that infests Android off my grandma's iPhone, and we like it that way".
No, there's plenty of absolute garbage and problematic things in the App Store.
An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS. It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
For years I had a machine on which the metadata database for the store would get corrupted within a month or so between a major update. I’d argue with Microsoft support to provide a recipe to reset this database (obviously possible because the update would fix it temporarily) but I was always told to make a new account —- but why am I going to mess up my installations of a lot of software that I use every day for the sake of some software I don’t use?
At work we have managed Windows desktops, since I’m a dev they did something so I can be an administrator, I can do everything but (1) edit group policies, and (2) use the Microsoft store. The only thing on the store I want is WSL2 but hey I can always ask Copilot how to do anything I know how to do in bash using Powershell.
> It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
That's good, there's a 30 year legacy of Windows software being downloadable online through a website and people clicking setup.exe to get it done. The App Store nonsense is MS clumsily following in the footsteps of Apple's "users are too stupid to be trusted" philosophy.
Also people who develop apps for Windows know how to make money in that environment so they don't feel like migrating to an environment where they don't know how to make money.
It has the exact same problem complained about here. It's full of shovelware copies. Google play, orinically gives a better answer on the web, but on phones it has the same problem as the Apple App store.
When I use a phone app store I am always looking for a specific app by name and often having to avoid copycat apps, which often buy ads so they appear above the real app. One thing you notice about phone app stores is that they don't put the search box in a prominent place but hide it out of the way because they want you to click on chum links to chum apps. I'd never browse the app store for entertainment or go looking for "an app for that" because I know I'd just be disappointed.
Google play store has a search button that's even reachable with only one hand. It's just not obvious that you can tap the search label in the bottom tab bar a second time to focus the search text field.
I recently noticed the Spotify app does this as well. Ever since I've just been trying it, and have been coming across a surprising amount of apps that have the same behaviour.
It's barely a search engine with no discoverability or filtering to speak of, same as Google Play. It's impossible to search for an app by purpose rather than its exact name (which will still be listed below the SEO spam)
I've sold downloadable software for Windows and Mac for 20 years and I have never used any of the app stores. I just can't be arsed with jumping through their endlessly changing hoops, only to give a large chunk of the sales to the store.
I heard that when the MS Store started they started off paying a bounty to every developer who added an app, so they could populate the store. Consequently they ended up with loads of reskinned open source apps and their store was garbage from day one.
Its unfortunately common when it comes to Windows troubleshooting. "Just create a new user," "Just reinstall the OS," etc. There's an entire suite of tools made by a third party for migrating user profiles between accounts and machines because it is so common.
I spent the first half of my career as a windows admin and I'm glad to be out, working entirely on macOS and Linux now. macOS has its own warts, but I'll take it any day over Windows.
Why is it that only App Store apps are sandboxed? I would like to sandbox most of the apps I’m running. No app needs a blanket slate to access my files. Sure there’s some of the permissions, but they aren’t granular enough.
They can be, but the app itself has to opt in. You can see whether an app is sandboxed in Activity Monitor (it’s a hidden-by-default column named Sandbox).
I wish I could install more apps outside the App Store. There's a few apps I came to rely on that are only available via the App Store, and when I switched jobs to a company that locks down App Store access, I could no longer use them and had to find alternatives.
One possible exception is Microsoft Office. I prefer the update process through the Mac App Store over the Microsoft updater. It's the same suite just different update process.
> An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS
So you're saying that you're an old. I recently watched a gen-z go to the app store to download a desktop app instead of going to the website to download directly. They were actually confused that it wasn't available in the app store. The number of people comfortable using a desktop is lowering with more and more only having a mobile device as their only compute device. Not everyone is techy which is something that gets lost in the echo chamber that is HN
First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.
This is actually part of the reason why people complain about the approvals process.
Your entirely legitimate app will get rejected for some confusing, badly described reason you have to guess at, meanwhile an obvious rip off with terrible functionality slides through without comment.
First, a skewed distribution of "wheat" and "chaff" apps. I would bet there are at least 10x as many "chaff" submissions as "wheat" submissions. Passing that distribution through a classifier with 90% precision and 90% recall will result in "only" a 50:50 mix of wheat and chaff apps in the app store.
Actually, I could easily see the skew being 100x simply because nothing really stops a malicious actor from hiring 100 different mules to create 100 different developer accounts and submitting the same malicious app until it randomly passes review. Having only a 50:50 mix of apps now requires 99% precision and recall.
Second, the principal-agent problem. I would bet the amount of app store reviewers who are receiving bribes is not zero, and further that bribing app store reviewers is probably among the highest marketing ROI spend that fraudsters do. Apple/Google can randomize who reviews which app, but how many reviewers do they have? If I bribe one reviewer, how many copies of my malicious app (see previous paragraph) do I need to submit before one of them is routed to "my" reviewer? Probably not many.
Even with honest reviewers, I'm sure reviewers have some kind of daily quota they have to meet. If you're behind quota, are you going to carefully review an app, or reject it for tenuously-applicable reasons? That annoys app developers, but does the reviewer care? No, they hit quota, which is all that matters to them.
I'm sure someone will reply "well, Apple/Google should just ____". I hear you, but your proposal is either going to be much more expensive, much slower, or result in more bad apps being approved. In other words, it's likely that the current system is (nearly) pareto-optimal.
The review process from my POV is totally capricious, one can have the shittiest B2B Ionic website-wrapper app that management pushed an intern to do and they will not even login and just slap a LGTM. Have seen dozens of those go through when working with consultants.
The only thing they seem to care about is funnelling money to ApplePay and not having references to the competitor we shall not name.
Exactly-- they don't care about the product, only a process they designed to weed out vendors for obscure technical reasons. You can have a store that prizes quality (as defined by users) but Apple doesn't care about that. Instead they emphasize things like the use of whatever new SDK feature they created.
Or the shovelware vendors are just more willing to jump the hoops. In once case we (our legit app) just stopped jumping - because it wasn't strictly necessary to our revenue stream. Perhaps the shovelware-clones have different view of the payoff-function for the work. And so jump all the hoops, or have lots of practice navigating that minefield.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
It's actually both.
The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them. They learn how to game the system, because that's their business model.
I don't usually have problems, when my apps get rejected by the Apple App Store Review. I get the thing fixed after one or two back-and-forths, but it's still a big fat pain.
I do think that the scammers have figured out how to ram through a lot of crap, though, and Apple needs to look at this.
First, though, they need to consider it to be a problem. If each of the shovelware apps makes them a bit of money, they will be more willing to "look the other way," than for free apps (like the ones that I do). I believe that I am held to a higher standard than scammers.
> The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them.
It’s a cost of doing business for both of them. Surely any remotely serious developer will have at least as many resources to deal with app review as Fast Eddie’s Shovelware Emporium. It’s not really that big a deal: Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit. The developers who have trouble with this are often the ones who try to argue with the reviewer or escalate/appeal (I believe this because I worked for a company that would insist on fighting Apple’s reviewers instead of just fixing the problem).
Yes, dealing with app review is an annoying cost, but the burden is pretty uniformly spread across all app developers.
> Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit.
Such as, elsewhere in this thread, app for viewing HealthKit data “unnecessarily using HealthKit”?
App Store rejections are arbitrary bullshit most of the time. We stopped shipping through MAS because of that and went direct-only, the 30% wasn’t even part of the decision; the bullshit and broken sandbox were.
Both can be true. I've done mostly web, but I now work for a company that ships both iOS and Android apps and the cost of dealing with both Apple and Google app store compliance/review is not negligible.
At the same time, I'm sure they're both getting blasted with knockoff apps that find ways to stay just within the letter of the law, if not the spirit of it.
> I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved.
It would not, as the primary purpose of this entire enterprise is to maintain total control of all aspects of the market, including discoverability.
This is squarely on Apple. Everyone knows the mark of a trustworthy store is that they will direct you to their competitors when they don't have what you're looking for.
The web doesn't have a approval process at all and yet when I search "AI Chat" I don't get a bunch of borderline trademark violations on the first page of results. I get the real ChatGPT and Claude and Character.ai and Poe and some other startups that don't exist just to fool people. And I get links to the app store when appropriate. Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people.
It's both? They have a ridiculous approvals process considering the approvals process doesn't even work. They say they have to block all these legitimate apps as an accident of having tight security, but then they don't actually have tight security. Half the time it seems like the criteria for approving an app is how much ad revenue it brings the app store owner. Everyone who makes a legitimate app has stories of having updates denied after 3-4 weeks for no reason or a stupid reason, then resubmitting, and having it approved after another 3-4 weeks. And then they claim they need a 30% cut of all your income in order to pay for this process there's no possible way to eliminate even though it doesn't achieve its stated goals at all. Their stock price says they're not spending very much of it on that process.
I bet Apple's and Google's own apps don't have to wait 6-8 weeks. Maybe it's purely anticompetitive.
Edit: Oh, and the fact they get away telling such obvious lies without constantly being called out 24/7 by millions of people speaks to the power dynamic in play.
Apple and Google and any app store provider have the ideal goal of zero friction for real, valuable apps and infinite friction for bad, scam apps. They can never hit that ideal, but when you're getting rage from both ends it's likely that you are in a place on the continuum that is far below ideal—you make it a huge pain for real, valuable apps and too easy for bad, scam apps. This appears to be where the Apple store is, at least, and it's an unfortunate place to be. They may be doing their best, but it sounds like their best has some pretty significant room to improve.
It's a well known security problem. An attacker in this kind of environment is spending very little money per app, and gets a payoff for breaking through: The application process is their business. Someone actually building an app is focusing on the quality of their app themselves, and not getting through an approval gauntlet. The ratio of applications that are crap or scams vs apps that are trying their best and have reasonably good quality is abysmal.
If you catch 99.999% of scam apps, and incorrectly slow down 1% of honest developers, you end up with an app store that is full of scams, and the developers are unhappy.
It is that the quality of the app store itself sucks. I noticed this a long time ago when they had over 100k apps.
This is like the company cafeteria, or the food vendors at the stadium/etc. The quality doesn't have to be good if you're the only game (allowed) in town. Your choice is to get in line like everyone else.
How many company cafeterias or stadium bars could survive downtown where people can actually pick and choose based on the quality of the food and service?
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.
For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.
And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.
It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.
This is a deep misunderstanding, on multiple levels, not the least of which being: Mac App Store submissions, as far as I'm aware and have experienced, go through the same horrible approval process that iOS App Store submissions go through. The reason why no one complains about the Mac App Store process is because the only people who regularly submit apps to it are scammers and low-effort vibe-coders.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
At best a walled garden is collective bargaining -- a group of users (buyers) lock into requiring vendors to negotiate with their representative, and because their business is collectively valuable vendors have to meet higher privacy standards or whatever the users care about, which they couldn't extract if negotiating individually with huge companies like Facebook.
So, Apple will get yelled at whenever it fails to be a good agent in collective bargaining -- either by excluding quality vendors and driving up their costs, or by including low-quality vendors. Either one gives up the benefits to users of the walled garden.
An index of reliable apps is, you know, fine. An index with a business structure that ensures better collective bargaining gets interesting.
I think the principal-agent / collective bargaining framework is correct, but I would dispute that the principals (the users, not app developers) are upset by how it works.
Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.
> Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.
Yea, whether we like it or not, app developers (as a general group, not you, the individual good guy) have proven themselves to be generally bad actors and unfortunately need to be treated as attackers. The more I hear developers complain about a platform not letting them do this or that, the more at ease I am about running software on that platform.
It could be both. Black box systems that reject useful tools without explanation "because they don't want to be gamed" but also don't reject shovelware because they didn't break an unspoken rule, isn't exclusive.
I think the answer is better curation and ranking. And perhaps some sort of reputation system (eg. This app is by OpenAI vs “This app is by some unknown spot”)
They must be doing at least a little bit of that right now. Thus I assume review scammers with smartphone farms are doing their best to improve their rankings on the daily.
i like to compare this to linux distributions. the package repositories are curated by a large group of volunteers. i don't se why a company like microsoft would not replicate that.
in particular it could disallow multiple apps with similar names and an online search for the app name should reveal the correct page the first hit.
You cannot pay anyone enough to get on the debian stable repository. Microsoft would have to pay it's curators. They'd pay less than what they should to stave off corruption.
The odd thing about the Mac App Store is how needlessly embarrassing this is for Apple. The Mac App Store doesn't need to exist, but because it does Apple is lending its authority to these apps, and every day its customers, who come to Apple expecting a level of safety and authenticity, are fooled by them.
How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".
Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.
Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.
Apple doesn't care. The iOS app store is just as full of crummy shovelware and ads. They are a "software and services" company after all.
The embarassment should be felt by the commentariat that rushes to defend Apple's store sharecropping tax by repeating ancient canards about how a fee is necessary for Apple to maintain its rigorous app review process that differentiates it from the street markets of Android, F-Droid, and whoever else.
> Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store.
The current App Store is already the result of Apple-quality curation. Do you use Apple's own software? Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock. I don't think I can name a single app that "just works" anymore. Maybe upsell subscription apps work as expected?
> Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock.
Relative to what? E.g., which GUI apps are better than these? I'd list all of those apps (except Music, and maybe Clock, which I don't use enough to judge) as some of the strongest GUI apps I use today (although Notes, Logic Pro, and Final Cut would be my top three apps Apple makes today, in that order). Note that doesn't mean those apps are without flaws, but I'd be hard pressed to name anything definitively better. Ableton Live/MaxMSP is probably the only non-Apple ecosystem GUI app I can think of that I'd consider first rate (I might add Sublime Text/Sublime Merge, but I haven't used those enough to say definitively). Acorn, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, NetNewsWire, Transmit, Things, BBEdit, are all Apple ecosystem apps I use regularly that I'd consider great, but I don't think any of those are definitively better than Apple's first-party apps. So curious what software you're comparing Apple's apps to that you'd consider definitively better than them?
(Regarding Mail and Calendar, curious if you're using those with Gmail or Exchange. Mail/Calendar only work ok with those services.)
> Relative to what? E.g., which GUI apps are better than these?
Relative to the same apps 5+ years ago. I'm not claiming there are better GUI apps. I'm saying that the quality of the native apps has decayed, with prominent bugs or poor designs that have been around for years.
I do feel that one of the interesting things to happen to software in recent years is how most super-popular native applications (most of those developed by Apple) have nosedived in quality, while web applications have done a tremendous job maintaining their quality. Many web experiences are now superior to native experiences, certainly due to nosediving native quality, but also I suspect because the web has always standardized on one stack, HTML/CSS/JS, and we get to reap the benefits of 30+ years of startlingly stable infrastructural consistency.
This is what happens when the same hyper-smart people get to chip away at n% annual performance gains in V8 for 20 years. Apple, on the other hand, pushes major UI system refactors every ~10 years, disrupting all the hard-fought stability and optimizations that have been made to that point. Microsoft pushes new ways to build UIs, it seems, even more often.
I do think web apps have become much better indeed.
I believe there is a few reasons:
- the reliance on clouds for many people, so it becomes more convenient to load your data in a browser window than fetch it locally
- the mixing of UI elements and data makes for more flexible software because the boundaries are not strong for many applications, data can be UI as well
- the inherent lock in and facilitation of licence management for the developer. A web software can't be pirate in any meaningful way to it's easier to require people to pay
- the large improvements in computing power that makes lower performance of the web software almost a non-issue for an increasingly large amount of applications
- and of course the major optimisations the stack has received, enabling better software overtime
Apple is still pushing the local first with native UI software in the name of privacy but at the same time they are also pushing cloud stuff and are not very competitive cost wise.
There is still some use cases where local first is necessary, like video editing and its large files, that Apple target quite well. But it's not clear how long that is going to last. Even resident fiber connections have increased speed quite a lot and if you can ingest a remote server fast enough, it won't matter that much if it's local. The UI just has to stream the data view in real time fast enough, which is already fine with most fiber connections.
The major issue is latency but that is becoming much better with router upgrade and data center placed at key geographical places to serve most people well.
I would root for the "Apple way" if they would keep the personal computer that you fully control philosophy but instead, they are pushing "services" stuff for revenue just like the others. You end up paying more for not many benefits.
This is the problem with the iPhone as well, because in theory you could use it without iCloud but in practice many of the features rely heavily on it and they have made zero investment in local first use case. This can be seen in the absolutely abysmal transfer speed of a wired iPhone (still USB 2 for most models, like WTF) and just generally terrible syncing if you don't use iCloud. We are very far from the iLife promise of Steve Jobs and it just doesn't make any sense to overpay for them to hold all the control.
> I do feel that one of the interesting things to happen to software in recent years is how most super-popular native applications (most of those developed by Apple) have nosedived in quality, while web applications have done a tremendous job maintaining their quality. Many web experiences are now superior to native experiences, certainly due to nosediving native quality, but also I suspect because the web has always standardized on one stack, HTML/CSS/JS, and we get to reap the benefits of 30+ years of startlingly stable infrastructural consistency.
I'd be curious which apps you'd consider the best examples of this high quality experience? The only web app I even think is worth commenting on is Figma, which is easily the best web app I've ever used, but an app I'd only rank as mid-tier overall. VS Code is the closest analogy, VS Code is clearly a great app overall, in that it solves it's need very effectively, but its not an app I exudes quality the way the apps listed here do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252567 (as an example of how VS Code doesn't exude quality, note how when VS Code loads it's UI elements for the first time, each element pops in separately, instead of the entire UI displaying instantly and simultaneously, this creates the impression of the app struggling to display its textual UI). I think Figma is slightly worse than VS Code, mainly because it's a web app, which presents all sorts of problems inherent to the platform, e.g.:
- Conflicts between keyboard shortcuts with the browser/web app split
- Bizarre tacked-on native-app affordances (e.g., breaking the back button and high-jacking the right-click contextual menu, both to essentially disguise the fact it's a web app?)
- Poor fit with the URL overall as a UI element (e.g., what does the URL mean when you're knee-deep in a single component in a larger document?)
In summary, the web's core UI elements just don't seem fit well with desktop use cases. I can understand web apps being a nice compromise, e.g., collaborating on Google Docs/Figma is a good practical fit (the web helps with a lot of the challenge of collaborating on the same doc). But they never feel pleasant or high quality to me.
There's some truth to the software getting worse, but it's also a different world (e.g., I see the decline as being a result of supporting different devices [and especially syncing between them]). But my point is more that still making the best GUI software around is pretty good for a company of Apple's size and complex priorities! (I don't think Apple makes software that's better than everyone else, but I do think most of their core apps are on par with the best.)
No one is making any money on the Mac App Store. Its likely that even Apple's internal accounting positions the Mac App Store as an unprofitable product offering, given the engineering and support it requires to run, let alone as a product to turn revenue for third party developers.
Strictly speaking, this can't be true because I have purchased apps (that have been around for years and are still supported) on the Mac App Store that are not available any other way.
Yeah, I guess what I mean is, as a percentage of revenue, the Mac App Store is a rounding error for most developers. There's a small number of bespoke, $5-$15 apps, possibly distributed only through the Mac App Store, strongly reminiscent of the early days of Mac indie development; but this is fractions of a penny relative to the ~11 figures of revenue the iOS App Store drives every year.
It's not just the Mac App store, it's pretty much ALL app stores that have this issue. Not just for "AI Chat" apps, but ANY (popular) app.
At work, one of my coworkers was running out of disk space on their computer and someone on my team went to help. I suggested a program called "WizTree" (not an endorsement, just what I use) but they wanted to use "WinDirStat".
Anyway, searching the Microsoft app store for "WinDirStat" popped up TONS of fake/bootleg pieces of software, none of which I would ever trust or install. I tried to explain this, but one of those apps was selected and while it did show what the large files were, I assume we'll have to now run a virus scan on that PC.
Yep, that's the "official" link, but my team member insisted on using the Microsoft Store. WinDirStat is not in the store, but tons of forks/knockoffs are.
but for both, the first instruction is just plain download. i think the average user can handle that. the others are alternatives for users that are familiar with them. i don't see the problem.
what could be changed is to add a message like: "if you don't know which one is right for you, you probably want this one:" followed by a link to the win-x64 version
To be clear the problem isn't WinDirStat's fault really. The problem is that users won't find that site (nor the GitHub one) because they're trained to go directly to the App Store and look for whatever app they need. And WinDirStat isn't in there, while numerous ripoffs are.
Before I used GitHub and got used to its interface I felt that the majority of repositories used as public-facing websites were the most confusing way to get releases. Why is the source code that seems to need some sort of tool or program to use sitting next to the installation program? Do I need all that extra stuff or can I just use the exe/app? Why is there not a page with a “download here” button that’s as plain and simple as other closed-source programs?
Most people from the unix world use repos (the correct model for software curation basically). When you go for the sources, it's mostly for fringe stuff or library.
I have a somewhat popular (yet still niche) app in the store, when I first launched it it was the only result. There are now a number of copycats. Report filed with Apple, nothing was done.
I’m considering spending the $1k or so to file a trademark on the name, maybe it’ll actually make them do something? The app isn’t making crazy amounts by far, but enough that $1k could be justifiable. If anyone has been through this I’d love to hear their thoughts.
For what it’s worth I know my product is clearly better - my users tell me - but it’s infuriating to see a knockoff show up before my app in the search results when I tell someone to look up the app in the store.
I’m considering spending the $1k or so to file a trademark on the name
Before you do that, try filing a state-level trademark. I've done it in some states for as little as $75. That might be enough to get Apple's attention, and save you $925.
Check with your state's Secretary of State web site.
From: Philip Schiller
Subject: Urgent: Temple Jump !!!!
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:23:15 - 0800
What the hell is this????
Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low
ratings?
Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of
stores in quality of service?
How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the
store?
Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any
anyone see an app that is cheating the system?
Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the
store?
This is insane!!!!!!
- - -
Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.
Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?
Many apps can be PWAs, these can be installed without any approvals.
It is used even for some quite demanding apps like low-latency game streaming by Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, etc. They don't use native apps because Apple rules are ridiculous.
This is what a failed App Store looks like. Everybody complains about the 30% cut that seems to be the norm on the steam, iOS App Store and the likes.
But getting an App Store to take off is incredibly hard, and the Mac app store is the proof of that. It should be successful; everything points to it. Despite that; absolutely no one uses it, so big apps aren't on it; and fake / low quality apps are thus more visible, which lowers the trust even more. And then you have a chicken and egg problem.
If this is your metric for a "failed app store", then the iOS app store also qualifies, since it has just as many such listings.
As far as Mac app store, even ignoring Apple's first-party apps, just to name a few, it has MS Office, WhatsApp, Telegram, Kindle, Facebook, Slack, Parallels, LibreOffice, VLC. I use Mac as my primary desktop, and I'd say that about half of the apps I use daily are from the store. As far as I can tell, the ones that are missing, are mostly missing because they can't do what they need to do within the sandbox.
Everybody complains about the lack of alternative. Apple could charge a 99% cut for all I care, but they have to compete with other iOS app providers to prove their cut is worthwhile.
> the Mac app store is the proof of that. It should be successful
The Mac App Store shouldn't be successful. It's the exact same situation as the iOS App Store, but with professional software and competitive third-party storefronts. The Mac is the closest thing Apple has to a healthy software ecosystem.
I don't know if the iOS App Store is much better. The killer for me is paid-for placements for competing apps when I search for something - a clear cut case of putting revenue over user experience.
Before the Internet and print-on-demand, it was hard for any rando to write a piece of text and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You had to at least commit to spending a chunk of cash on a press run. That meant that the average quality of a randomly selected piece of text was relatively high. Then the web and print-on-demand democratized that. If you read a random web page, or a randomly selected post or comment on some social media site/app, odds are it will be near nonsense. Likewise a randomly selected self-published work. (Though the quality tends to be a bit higher there because the pressure to write a work of a significant enough length tends to filter somewhat.)
You don't notice this as much because you almost never encounter a truly randomly selected text work. You're reading only comments that get upvotes, and blog posts that get reshared, and self-published works with a lot of reviews and sales. Crowdsourced sorting has helped make the giant mass of garbage less visible.
Likewise, before digital cameras and cheap web hosting, it was hard for any rando to take a photo and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You have to pay for film, pay to develop it, pay to make enlargements. That meant most photos you saw where either snapshots with personal relevance that gave them quality, or actually decent photography. Then digital cameras and cheap hosting democratized that. If you look at a randomly selected image posted (and not re-posted) to Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, etc., odds are it will be blurry poorly-lit trash.
Again, you don't notice this because Instagram and company use crowdsourcing, AI, and algorithms to ruthlessly filter out the garbage.
The same story is true for a lot of music coming out these days, though that one still have a few structural gatekeepers in many places.
If AI really does radically lower the bar to shipping, an app, we should expect to see the same thing play out there too. An enormous sea of worthless shovelware with a handful of decent apps mixed in. It will become even more important for app stores to filter and curate these collections so that users can find what they want.
To be fair, I think this is partly because ChatGPT went viral long before they had an official app. I remember thinking, "Why the heck haven't they made an app yet?" And it was notable when it was finally released. So many people had already been using unofficial apps by that point.
GPT-3 came out in June 2020, that's when a lot of developers started talking about it and early implementations using its API started to appear. The ChatGPT web UI came out in November, 2022, at which point it quickly went mainstream. By January, 2023, they had one hundred million users. They still had no app at this point. GPT-4 came out in March, 2023. Still no app. It wasn't until May, 2023 that they released an iOS app, followed by Android in July, 2023. It was a whole extra year until they released a Mac app in June, 2024. So many developers beat them to the punch on making a UI for their own product in the meantime.
The names of the app on the App Store doesn't even match the name of the downloaded app. They need to change that first. Otherwise the name is just another SEO opportunity.
With some practice I bet you could. You could find certain unique features to look for in each of their faces. Faces are more complex than a black and white icon. So maybe you’re just underestimating yourself.
What was even worse than there being dupe ChatGPT apps in the Mac app store was that Perplexity and Gemini both recommended installing chatgpt dot macupdate dot com as if it was the official app.
It's this sort of thing that demonstrates rather plainly how the vendors of these “walled garden” app stores are lying through their teeth when they advertise said stores as being “more secure” than allowing sideloading or third-party app stores. There's no curation happening here. There's barely any actual security checks going on here. They're really gonna claim with a straight face that this is somehow better than the likes of F-Droid or Cydia or Flathub or what have you?
When i saw the "flea market" i genuinely though someone actually made a way to resell "used" apps (that you don't use anymore) for a cheaper price, like you could do in CD/DVD times.
This is a consequence of the fact that nobody actualy searches through a desktop appstore for an option to solve their software needs. If you do find new software it's not by searching the appstore. You go there to find a specific app which you discovered elsewhere at best. Sadly, Apple's barriers to entry have failed in the case of ChatBPP.
I get what you're saying but anyone who falls for that one is beyond help. There are many red flags. I know that some people out there are not 'savvy' but this one is really obvious. The developer name is a strong red flag. If I was going to get LastPass I'd go on their website direct and click their appstore link from there.
Even if I do find the exact tool for the job on Mac App Store and even if it is 99c I won’t buy it.
Essentially everything I’ve bought or installed for free from there eventually got abandoned or was a pain to upgrade (numbered versions to paywall updates etc).
Just last week all googling was leading me to one 99c MAS app as the solution but I spent 15 more mins googling and adding “GitHub” to the query and found an open source solution and I’m glad I did.
The experience and ecosystem around it just sucks.
Remind me why we're forced to give Apple a commission to host this flee market, when we'd be better off hosting our own domains and serving our own products?
One of the reasons I value SetApp so much for Mac apps is that it's curated and I don't have to worry about filtering a bunch of shady or low-quality apps.
I despised apples app model as soon as i tried to develop an app (game) and discovered they literally priced my broke college ass out of the market by forcing me to use their hardware, software, and most egregiously pay a 100usd fee to even get started. Not to submit the app to them, but just to start developing it. That DX is so awful i vowed never to release a single thing on their platform. The game was already built and doing well on androids store.
there used to be a time when i would delight in looking through the app store and exploring what was possible. these days, the search is broken, editor curation is non existent and there is no way to filter away the copycat, micro transaction-ridden cruft
When you let anyone submit an app with little to no criteria other than “no using private framework abi’s” this is what you get. No curation. No quality control. No remorse.
This the race to the bottom, first it was the apps. Now it’s the shopping experience. Be glad someone sold you something you ungrateful clod.
Tiny bit of curation? I’ve seen complaints about this Apple App Store policy:
4.3 Spam (b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.
It's infuriating how slowly we're moving towards more open platforms on mobile, when you can just look at the desktop to see how much freedom has been lost.
I always think of Steam as a well done digital store. Apple meanwhile is absolutely disinterested in providing anything beyond the most basic features. Whishlists, shopping carts, curators (which could in theory provide actual quality suggestions, like real stores), more granular review data and so on would improve the experience immensely. The App Store can vote soon, but developers can't even offer paid upgrades to their apps, or do sales.
Apple always says they are necessary to ensure the safety of their users. But the App Store right now keeps app quality down and makes it as intransparent as possible.
This is pretty awful.
The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.
It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.
I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.
I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.
Undermining the power of software vendors is an institutional imperative at Apple. There is a memory of the days when they were dependent on Adobe and Microsoft for their hardware to be viable. When they design App stores they make the rules and game the system with this in mind.
It's not just that the stores are open to everyone-- shovelware and all. Steam does that but because they care about the ecosystem they protect pricing for premium products. They make reviews and recommendations relevant. Try to get your terrible knock off of a hit game come up in a search-- they are on to that.
It's notable that other attempts to develop game app stores for non-console platforms have fallen flat. If Microsoft has gotten any traction at all for game distribution on Windows it's because of the really different GAME PASS model. Blizzard, EA and such have apps to download their own games but don't challenge Steam for third parties, Good Old Games with it's anti-DRM stance is the only real competitor.
Steam is a model of integrity and it's a good thing that it's not for sale because it would be an obvious acquisition for irrelevant players like Gamestop who want be relevant today, it would have been a better acquisition for Microsoft than Activision but any acquirer would kill it one way or the other by violating its integrity.
Integrity is always what makes curation relevant.
And to that note, Apple testified a 75% profit margin on these fees due to what the judge in the Epic case called out as limited investment in the review process or tools to improve it. Or as Phil Schiller called out years before that, "is anyone watching the store?!".
Still remember that marketplace from Openai, the gpt store for Chatgpt? They had zero quality control for the apps. They had millions of gpt "apps", 99.99% of them complete garbage. Vibe coding Apps has become so easy nowadays that every idiot and first grader can prompt its way through a store release. Pure spam. I would love to see a marketplace that rejects at least half of all app submissions. Google got lots of backlash on HN for requiring a DUNS number from now on to keep your app on their store - but how do you want to keep those sweatshops and idiots from spamming your store?
Apple already rejects a lot of apps. Half of my submissions are rejected for bullshit reasons (eg. I submitted an app that shows data from health kit, and it was initially rejected for unnecessarily using health kit)
The problem is that they don't do any curation. They should allow all apps on the store, but make a proper search engine. That surfaces good apps and hides shovelware.
But unfortunately they suck at it.
I had one app that was not super original pass first go and another which was pretty original get rejected 8 times before it passed. It is all a game.
It is a terrible mystery why search and filtering are so utterly bad in the app store.
No kidding. I just wanted to find out what apps are compatible with CarPlay. You’d think that would be a simple filter. If it’s there, I sure can’t find it.
> The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores;
They have been for at least a decade, maybe forever.
Content discovery and selection is still unsolved problem. Steam might be doing the best job but still imperfect.
I don't think it's an unsolved problem. The fact that Steam and doesn't overwhelm you with 100 low-effort ripoffs when you're searching for AAA game means it's possible, at the very least, to get that bare minimum done.
I feel this is particularly egregious with the Mac App store, since Apple requires manual reviews for all apps. It's just that that the things Apple seem to care about in these review don't really seem to improve user-facing quality very much compared to app store with a more lenient review process.
> things Apple seem to care about in these review
Yes! It's so glaring the difference between how they position App Review in court or in marketing materials, which is always about quality and safety, and how it is used in practice 99% of the time, which is "Does it pose any threat to an Apple business model?" (e.g. Spotify isn't a threat as long as it's hobbled by paying 30% App Store tax that Apple Music doesn't have to). XBOX Game Pass was a threat because they don't want games being sold where nobody has paid Apple a cut for each game.
"You wouldn't want finding apps to be as much of a minefield as downloading programs off the Web used to be, would you?" they say. "Our curation is the only reason you are safe from malware on an iPhone!"
It only takes a search or two on either "App Store" to see that they have no problem with apps whose business models could not possibly succeed without deception, such as simple calculators or wallpaper image catalogs with $19.99 weekly subscriptions after free trial.
It's interesting to me that Apple have been pioneers in two separate areas:
1. sandboxing and permissions, which arguably they have done a B+ job at. Not as fine-grained as Android in most ways, but better at what it does do than anything else for consumers.
2. App Store gatekeeping.
They want us to believe their platforms are only secure because of #2 but I think they're pretty darn secure just because of #1 and #2 has basically no relevance due to how lax they are about the things that I care about, which is basically scams and knock-offs.
Apple is duplicitous and always has been.
The App Store is just one of the most egregious examples but this is behavior that is embedded in everything they do. We say companies are "legal person" and I actually think Apple embeds the character flaws of both Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook, as if it were a person.
> It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
At least the junk apps are not stolen from someone and being resold in the app store as a fence.
There are plenty of apps that are plain ripoffs, and lifting assets from the apps they imitate.
I think we're willfully ignoring the actual point here though
I think his comparison was apt and your 'at least' is a false dichotomy.
Or just disagreeing with it
Not so sure about that. I am not into searching for it, but I read, somewhere, that abandoned apps are being stolen, or brought for pennies, then resold (sometimes, with some “extra spice”).
I am fine with this. I don't see why Apple or anyone should go around policing what people install on their phones, malware or not.
There is a reliable way to find the ChatGPT app. That is by going to the actual first party website, and following appropriate links.
This is an active choice of such marketplaces. They could choose to be more strict if they wanted to. Yes they'd probably have a moderately hard time getting rid of all the existing spam, but once they start banning vendors and raising verification requirements, the volume decreases.
I'm permanently banned from publishing on the Google Play Store because the name of my app was too similar to another. So they do have the ability to enforce things strictly when they want to.
The RDF means that Apple still has the "sideloading needs to be blocked, because Apple keeps the garbage that infests Android off my grandma's iPhone, and we like it that way".
No, there's plenty of absolute garbage and problematic things in the App Store.
An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS. It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
For years I had a machine on which the metadata database for the store would get corrupted within a month or so between a major update. I’d argue with Microsoft support to provide a recipe to reset this database (obviously possible because the update would fix it temporarily) but I was always told to make a new account —- but why am I going to mess up my installations of a lot of software that I use every day for the sake of some software I don’t use?
At work we have managed Windows desktops, since I’m a dev they did something so I can be an administrator, I can do everything but (1) edit group policies, and (2) use the Microsoft store. The only thing on the store I want is WSL2 but hey I can always ask Copilot how to do anything I know how to do in bash using Powershell.
> It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
That's good, there's a 30 year legacy of Windows software being downloadable online through a website and people clicking setup.exe to get it done. The App Store nonsense is MS clumsily following in the footsteps of Apple's "users are too stupid to be trusted" philosophy.
Also people who develop apps for Windows know how to make money in that environment so they don't feel like migrating to an environment where they don't know how to make money.
Phone app stores have the same problem. Here is the link:
https://www.apple.com/us/search/ChatGPT?src=globalnav
It has the exact same problem complained about here. It's full of shovelware copies. Google play, orinically gives a better answer on the web, but on phones it has the same problem as the Apple App store.
When I use a phone app store I am always looking for a specific app by name and often having to avoid copycat apps, which often buy ads so they appear above the real app. One thing you notice about phone app stores is that they don't put the search box in a prominent place but hide it out of the way because they want you to click on chum links to chum apps. I'd never browse the app store for entertainment or go looking for "an app for that" because I know I'd just be disappointed.
Google play store has a search button that's even reachable with only one hand. It's just not obvious that you can tap the search label in the bottom tab bar a second time to focus the search text field.
I recently noticed the Spotify app does this as well. Ever since I've just been trying it, and have been coming across a surprising amount of apps that have the same behaviour.
The iOS App Store has a big “search” icon with label on the bottom right that’s always there. Hardly tucked out of sight.
It's barely a search engine with no discoverability or filtering to speak of, same as Google Play. It's impossible to search for an app by purpose rather than its exact name (which will still be listed below the SEO spam)
I'm not saying the search is any good, I'm saying GGP's conspiracy theory about it being hidden doesn't hold up.
Browsing an app store is the only thing I feel is worse than browsing a Netflix or other streaming platform.
I've sold downloadable software for Windows and Mac for 20 years and I have never used any of the app stores. I just can't be arsed with jumping through their endlessly changing hoops, only to give a large chunk of the sales to the store.
I heard that when the MS Store started they started off paying a bounty to every developer who added an app, so they could populate the store. Consequently they ended up with loads of reskinned open source apps and their store was garbage from day one.
That whole “just create a new user account” response is peak support theater
Its unfortunately common when it comes to Windows troubleshooting. "Just create a new user," "Just reinstall the OS," etc. There's an entire suite of tools made by a third party for migrating user profiles between accounts and machines because it is so common.
I spent the first half of my career as a windows admin and I'm glad to be out, working entirely on macOS and Linux now. macOS has its own warts, but I'll take it any day over Windows.
> An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS
Are macOS app in the app store ensured to have stricter sandboxing? That would be reason enough.
Why is it that only App Store apps are sandboxed? I would like to sandbox most of the apps I’m running. No app needs a blanket slate to access my files. Sure there’s some of the permissions, but they aren’t granular enough.
They can be, but the app itself has to opt in. You can see whether an app is sandboxed in Activity Monitor (it’s a hidden-by-default column named Sandbox).
I wish I could install more apps outside the App Store. There's a few apps I came to rely on that are only available via the App Store, and when I switched jobs to a company that locks down App Store access, I could no longer use them and had to find alternatives.
One possible exception is Microsoft Office. I prefer the update process through the Mac App Store over the Microsoft updater. It's the same suite just different update process.
> An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS
So you're saying that you're an old. I recently watched a gen-z go to the app store to download a desktop app instead of going to the website to download directly. They were actually confused that it wasn't available in the app store. The number of people comfortable using a desktop is lowering with more and more only having a mobile device as their only compute device. Not everyone is techy which is something that gets lost in the echo chamber that is HN
First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.
This is actually part of the reason why people complain about the approvals process.
Your entirely legitimate app will get rejected for some confusing, badly described reason you have to guess at, meanwhile an obvious rip off with terrible functionality slides through without comment.
I think there are two problems here:
First, a skewed distribution of "wheat" and "chaff" apps. I would bet there are at least 10x as many "chaff" submissions as "wheat" submissions. Passing that distribution through a classifier with 90% precision and 90% recall will result in "only" a 50:50 mix of wheat and chaff apps in the app store.
Actually, I could easily see the skew being 100x simply because nothing really stops a malicious actor from hiring 100 different mules to create 100 different developer accounts and submitting the same malicious app until it randomly passes review. Having only a 50:50 mix of apps now requires 99% precision and recall.
Second, the principal-agent problem. I would bet the amount of app store reviewers who are receiving bribes is not zero, and further that bribing app store reviewers is probably among the highest marketing ROI spend that fraudsters do. Apple/Google can randomize who reviews which app, but how many reviewers do they have? If I bribe one reviewer, how many copies of my malicious app (see previous paragraph) do I need to submit before one of them is routed to "my" reviewer? Probably not many.
Even with honest reviewers, I'm sure reviewers have some kind of daily quota they have to meet. If you're behind quota, are you going to carefully review an app, or reject it for tenuously-applicable reasons? That annoys app developers, but does the reviewer care? No, they hit quota, which is all that matters to them.
I'm sure someone will reply "well, Apple/Google should just ____". I hear you, but your proposal is either going to be much more expensive, much slower, or result in more bad apps being approved. In other words, it's likely that the current system is (nearly) pareto-optimal.
Do you really need to bribe?
The review process from my POV is totally capricious, one can have the shittiest B2B Ionic website-wrapper app that management pushed an intern to do and they will not even login and just slap a LGTM. Have seen dozens of those go through when working with consultants.
The only thing they seem to care about is funnelling money to ApplePay and not having references to the competitor we shall not name.
Exactly-- they don't care about the product, only a process they designed to weed out vendors for obscure technical reasons. You can have a store that prizes quality (as defined by users) but Apple doesn't care about that. Instead they emphasize things like the use of whatever new SDK feature they created.
Or the shovelware vendors are just more willing to jump the hoops. In once case we (our legit app) just stopped jumping - because it wasn't strictly necessary to our revenue stream. Perhaps the shovelware-clones have different view of the payoff-function for the work. And so jump all the hoops, or have lots of practice navigating that minefield.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
It's actually both.
The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them. They learn how to game the system, because that's their business model.
I don't usually have problems, when my apps get rejected by the Apple App Store Review. I get the thing fixed after one or two back-and-forths, but it's still a big fat pain.
I do think that the scammers have figured out how to ram through a lot of crap, though, and Apple needs to look at this.
First, though, they need to consider it to be a problem. If each of the shovelware apps makes them a bit of money, they will be more willing to "look the other way," than for free apps (like the ones that I do). I believe that I am held to a higher standard than scammers.
> The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them.
It’s a cost of doing business for both of them. Surely any remotely serious developer will have at least as many resources to deal with app review as Fast Eddie’s Shovelware Emporium. It’s not really that big a deal: Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit. The developers who have trouble with this are often the ones who try to argue with the reviewer or escalate/appeal (I believe this because I worked for a company that would insist on fighting Apple’s reviewers instead of just fixing the problem).
Yes, dealing with app review is an annoying cost, but the burden is pretty uniformly spread across all app developers.
> Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit.
Such as, elsewhere in this thread, app for viewing HealthKit data “unnecessarily using HealthKit”?
App Store rejections are arbitrary bullshit most of the time. We stopped shipping through MAS because of that and went direct-only, the 30% wasn’t even part of the decision; the bullshit and broken sandbox were.
Both can be true. I've done mostly web, but I now work for a company that ships both iOS and Android apps and the cost of dealing with both Apple and Google app store compliance/review is not negligible.
At the same time, I'm sure they're both getting blasted with knockoff apps that find ways to stay just within the letter of the law, if not the spirit of it.
> I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved.
It would not, as the primary purpose of this entire enterprise is to maintain total control of all aspects of the market, including discoverability.
This is squarely on Apple. Everyone knows the mark of a trustworthy store is that they will direct you to their competitors when they don't have what you're looking for.
The web doesn't have a approval process at all and yet when I search "AI Chat" I don't get a bunch of borderline trademark violations on the first page of results. I get the real ChatGPT and Claude and Character.ai and Poe and some other startups that don't exist just to fool people. And I get links to the app store when appropriate. Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people.
It's both? They have a ridiculous approvals process considering the approvals process doesn't even work. They say they have to block all these legitimate apps as an accident of having tight security, but then they don't actually have tight security. Half the time it seems like the criteria for approving an app is how much ad revenue it brings the app store owner. Everyone who makes a legitimate app has stories of having updates denied after 3-4 weeks for no reason or a stupid reason, then resubmitting, and having it approved after another 3-4 weeks. And then they claim they need a 30% cut of all your income in order to pay for this process there's no possible way to eliminate even though it doesn't achieve its stated goals at all. Their stock price says they're not spending very much of it on that process.
I bet Apple's and Google's own apps don't have to wait 6-8 weeks. Maybe it's purely anticompetitive.
Edit: Oh, and the fact they get away telling such obvious lies without constantly being called out 24/7 by millions of people speaks to the power dynamic in play.
Apple and Google and any app store provider have the ideal goal of zero friction for real, valuable apps and infinite friction for bad, scam apps. They can never hit that ideal, but when you're getting rage from both ends it's likely that you are in a place on the continuum that is far below ideal—you make it a huge pain for real, valuable apps and too easy for bad, scam apps. This appears to be where the Apple store is, at least, and it's an unfortunate place to be. They may be doing their best, but it sounds like their best has some pretty significant room to improve.
It's a well known security problem. An attacker in this kind of environment is spending very little money per app, and gets a payoff for breaking through: The application process is their business. Someone actually building an app is focusing on the quality of their app themselves, and not getting through an approval gauntlet. The ratio of applications that are crap or scams vs apps that are trying their best and have reasonably good quality is abysmal.
If you catch 99.999% of scam apps, and incorrectly slow down 1% of honest developers, you end up with an app store that is full of scams, and the developers are unhappy.
> What’s it going to be?
It is that the quality of the app store itself sucks. I noticed this a long time ago when they had over 100k apps.
This is like the company cafeteria, or the food vendors at the stadium/etc. The quality doesn't have to be good if you're the only game (allowed) in town. Your choice is to get in line like everyone else.
How many company cafeterias or stadium bars could survive downtown where people can actually pick and choose based on the quality of the food and service?
the answer is obviously, competition.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.
For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.
And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.
It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.
This is a deep misunderstanding, on multiple levels, not the least of which being: Mac App Store submissions, as far as I'm aware and have experienced, go through the same horrible approval process that iOS App Store submissions go through. The reason why no one complains about the Mac App Store process is because the only people who regularly submit apps to it are scammers and low-effort vibe-coders.
If you talk to Mac devs they all complain about it. It sucks.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
At best a walled garden is collective bargaining -- a group of users (buyers) lock into requiring vendors to negotiate with their representative, and because their business is collectively valuable vendors have to meet higher privacy standards or whatever the users care about, which they couldn't extract if negotiating individually with huge companies like Facebook.
So, Apple will get yelled at whenever it fails to be a good agent in collective bargaining -- either by excluding quality vendors and driving up their costs, or by including low-quality vendors. Either one gives up the benefits to users of the walled garden.
An index of reliable apps is, you know, fine. An index with a business structure that ensures better collective bargaining gets interesting.
Sounds obvious now that you said it.
Anyone dispute the agent/collective bargaining framing before I internalize it forever? :)
I think the principal-agent / collective bargaining framework is correct, but I would dispute that the principals (the users, not app developers) are upset by how it works.
Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.
> Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.
Yea, whether we like it or not, app developers (as a general group, not you, the individual good guy) have proven themselves to be generally bad actors and unfortunately need to be treated as attackers. The more I hear developers complain about a platform not letting them do this or that, the more at ease I am about running software on that platform.
> What’s it going to be?
It could be both. Black box systems that reject useful tools without explanation "because they don't want to be gamed" but also don't reject shovelware because they didn't break an unspoken rule, isn't exclusive.
I think the answer is better curation and ranking. And perhaps some sort of reputation system (eg. This app is by OpenAI vs “This app is by some unknown spot”)
They must be doing at least a little bit of that right now. Thus I assume review scammers with smartphone farms are doing their best to improve their rankings on the daily.
i like to compare this to linux distributions. the package repositories are curated by a large group of volunteers. i don't se why a company like microsoft would not replicate that.
in particular it could disallow multiple apps with similar names and an online search for the app name should reveal the correct page the first hit.
You cannot pay anyone enough to get on the debian stable repository. Microsoft would have to pay it's curators. They'd pay less than what they should to stave off corruption.
Microsoft already does that model with Xbox.
It's like they built an iron gate but forgot to install a doorbell
We could have the worst of both options. A process that lets shovelware through but at the same time gives lots of trouble to legitimate app creators
People can complain about false positives and also about false negatives.
It's going to be that it was always all about the bottom line, and only the bottom line.
Approvals never stopped shovelware, that always seemed to get free rein.
The odd thing about the Mac App Store is how needlessly embarrassing this is for Apple. The Mac App Store doesn't need to exist, but because it does Apple is lending its authority to these apps, and every day its customers, who come to Apple expecting a level of safety and authenticity, are fooled by them.
How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".
Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.
Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.
Apple doesn't care. The iOS app store is just as full of crummy shovelware and ads. They are a "software and services" company after all.
The embarassment should be felt by the commentariat that rushes to defend Apple's store sharecropping tax by repeating ancient canards about how a fee is necessary for Apple to maintain its rigorous app review process that differentiates it from the street markets of Android, F-Droid, and whoever else.
> Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store.
The current App Store is already the result of Apple-quality curation. Do you use Apple's own software? Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock. I don't think I can name a single app that "just works" anymore. Maybe upsell subscription apps work as expected?
> Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock.
Relative to what? E.g., which GUI apps are better than these? I'd list all of those apps (except Music, and maybe Clock, which I don't use enough to judge) as some of the strongest GUI apps I use today (although Notes, Logic Pro, and Final Cut would be my top three apps Apple makes today, in that order). Note that doesn't mean those apps are without flaws, but I'd be hard pressed to name anything definitively better. Ableton Live/MaxMSP is probably the only non-Apple ecosystem GUI app I can think of that I'd consider first rate (I might add Sublime Text/Sublime Merge, but I haven't used those enough to say definitively). Acorn, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, NetNewsWire, Transmit, Things, BBEdit, are all Apple ecosystem apps I use regularly that I'd consider great, but I don't think any of those are definitively better than Apple's first-party apps. So curious what software you're comparing Apple's apps to that you'd consider definitively better than them?
(Regarding Mail and Calendar, curious if you're using those with Gmail or Exchange. Mail/Calendar only work ok with those services.)
> Relative to what? E.g., which GUI apps are better than these?
Relative to the same apps 5+ years ago. I'm not claiming there are better GUI apps. I'm saying that the quality of the native apps has decayed, with prominent bugs or poor designs that have been around for years.
I do feel that one of the interesting things to happen to software in recent years is how most super-popular native applications (most of those developed by Apple) have nosedived in quality, while web applications have done a tremendous job maintaining their quality. Many web experiences are now superior to native experiences, certainly due to nosediving native quality, but also I suspect because the web has always standardized on one stack, HTML/CSS/JS, and we get to reap the benefits of 30+ years of startlingly stable infrastructural consistency.
This is what happens when the same hyper-smart people get to chip away at n% annual performance gains in V8 for 20 years. Apple, on the other hand, pushes major UI system refactors every ~10 years, disrupting all the hard-fought stability and optimizations that have been made to that point. Microsoft pushes new ways to build UIs, it seems, even more often.
I do think web apps have become much better indeed.
I believe there is a few reasons:
- the reliance on clouds for many people, so it becomes more convenient to load your data in a browser window than fetch it locally
- the mixing of UI elements and data makes for more flexible software because the boundaries are not strong for many applications, data can be UI as well
- the inherent lock in and facilitation of licence management for the developer. A web software can't be pirate in any meaningful way to it's easier to require people to pay
- the large improvements in computing power that makes lower performance of the web software almost a non-issue for an increasingly large amount of applications
- and of course the major optimisations the stack has received, enabling better software overtime
Apple is still pushing the local first with native UI software in the name of privacy but at the same time they are also pushing cloud stuff and are not very competitive cost wise.
There is still some use cases where local first is necessary, like video editing and its large files, that Apple target quite well. But it's not clear how long that is going to last. Even resident fiber connections have increased speed quite a lot and if you can ingest a remote server fast enough, it won't matter that much if it's local. The UI just has to stream the data view in real time fast enough, which is already fine with most fiber connections. The major issue is latency but that is becoming much better with router upgrade and data center placed at key geographical places to serve most people well.
I would root for the "Apple way" if they would keep the personal computer that you fully control philosophy but instead, they are pushing "services" stuff for revenue just like the others. You end up paying more for not many benefits.
This is the problem with the iPhone as well, because in theory you could use it without iCloud but in practice many of the features rely heavily on it and they have made zero investment in local first use case. This can be seen in the absolutely abysmal transfer speed of a wired iPhone (still USB 2 for most models, like WTF) and just generally terrible syncing if you don't use iCloud. We are very far from the iLife promise of Steve Jobs and it just doesn't make any sense to overpay for them to hold all the control.
> I do feel that one of the interesting things to happen to software in recent years is how most super-popular native applications (most of those developed by Apple) have nosedived in quality, while web applications have done a tremendous job maintaining their quality. Many web experiences are now superior to native experiences, certainly due to nosediving native quality, but also I suspect because the web has always standardized on one stack, HTML/CSS/JS, and we get to reap the benefits of 30+ years of startlingly stable infrastructural consistency.
I'd be curious which apps you'd consider the best examples of this high quality experience? The only web app I even think is worth commenting on is Figma, which is easily the best web app I've ever used, but an app I'd only rank as mid-tier overall. VS Code is the closest analogy, VS Code is clearly a great app overall, in that it solves it's need very effectively, but its not an app I exudes quality the way the apps listed here do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252567 (as an example of how VS Code doesn't exude quality, note how when VS Code loads it's UI elements for the first time, each element pops in separately, instead of the entire UI displaying instantly and simultaneously, this creates the impression of the app struggling to display its textual UI). I think Figma is slightly worse than VS Code, mainly because it's a web app, which presents all sorts of problems inherent to the platform, e.g.:
- Conflicts between keyboard shortcuts with the browser/web app split
- Bizarre tacked-on native-app affordances (e.g., breaking the back button and high-jacking the right-click contextual menu, both to essentially disguise the fact it's a web app?)
- Poor fit with the URL overall as a UI element (e.g., what does the URL mean when you're knee-deep in a single component in a larger document?)
In summary, the web's core UI elements just don't seem fit well with desktop use cases. I can understand web apps being a nice compromise, e.g., collaborating on Google Docs/Figma is a good practical fit (the web helps with a lot of the challenge of collaborating on the same doc). But they never feel pleasant or high quality to me.
There's some truth to the software getting worse, but it's also a different world (e.g., I see the decline as being a result of supporting different devices [and especially syncing between them]). But my point is more that still making the best GUI software around is pretty good for a company of Apple's size and complex priorities! (I don't think Apple makes software that's better than everyone else, but I do think most of their core apps are on par with the best.)
It also exists because it's a low friction way for app developers to generate revenue for their app.
On iOS it’s the only way an app can be installed at all, so it’s not like users or app developers have a choice.
No one is making any money on the Mac App Store. Its likely that even Apple's internal accounting positions the Mac App Store as an unprofitable product offering, given the engineering and support it requires to run, let alone as a product to turn revenue for third party developers.
Strictly speaking, this can't be true because I have purchased apps (that have been around for years and are still supported) on the Mac App Store that are not available any other way.
Yeah, I guess what I mean is, as a percentage of revenue, the Mac App Store is a rounding error for most developers. There's a small number of bespoke, $5-$15 apps, possibly distributed only through the Mac App Store, strongly reminiscent of the early days of Mac indie development; but this is fractions of a penny relative to the ~11 figures of revenue the iOS App Store drives every year.
It's not just the Mac App store, it's pretty much ALL app stores that have this issue. Not just for "AI Chat" apps, but ANY (popular) app.
At work, one of my coworkers was running out of disk space on their computer and someone on my team went to help. I suggested a program called "WizTree" (not an endorsement, just what I use) but they wanted to use "WinDirStat".
Anyway, searching the Microsoft app store for "WinDirStat" popped up TONS of fake/bootleg pieces of software, none of which I would ever trust or install. I tried to explain this, but one of those apps was selected and while it did show what the large files were, I assume we'll have to now run a virus scan on that PC.
> WinDirStat
https://github.com/windirstat/windirstat
Yep, that's the "official" link, but my team member insisted on using the Microsoft Store. WinDirStat is not in the store, but tons of forks/knockoffs are.
Adding "github" to the search query is a solid strategy for finding the right (and legit) software.
A perfect example.
> Install it by downloading the appropriate version for your system from the release page
> Install with winget install -e --id WinDirStat.WinDirStat (or use winget upgrade subsequently)
> Alternatively install with scoop install extras/windirstat (requires scoop bucket add extras)
The what what now? The average user is going to be able to do none of these things.
the average user should be here: https://windirstat.net/download.html
but for both, the first instruction is just plain download. i think the average user can handle that. the others are alternatives for users that are familiar with them. i don't see the problem.
what could be changed is to add a message like: "if you don't know which one is right for you, you probably want this one:" followed by a link to the win-x64 version
To be clear the problem isn't WinDirStat's fault really. The problem is that users won't find that site (nor the GitHub one) because they're trained to go directly to the App Store and look for whatever app they need. And WinDirStat isn't in there, while numerous ripoffs are.
Before I used GitHub and got used to its interface I felt that the majority of repositories used as public-facing websites were the most confusing way to get releases. Why is the source code that seems to need some sort of tool or program to use sitting next to the installation program? Do I need all that extra stuff or can I just use the exe/app? Why is there not a page with a “download here” button that’s as plain and simple as other closed-source programs?
Most people from the unix world use repos (the correct model for software curation basically). When you go for the sources, it's mostly for fringe stuff or library.
I have a somewhat popular (yet still niche) app in the store, when I first launched it it was the only result. There are now a number of copycats. Report filed with Apple, nothing was done.
I’m considering spending the $1k or so to file a trademark on the name, maybe it’ll actually make them do something? The app isn’t making crazy amounts by far, but enough that $1k could be justifiable. If anyone has been through this I’d love to hear their thoughts.
For what it’s worth I know my product is clearly better - my users tell me - but it’s infuriating to see a knockoff show up before my app in the search results when I tell someone to look up the app in the store.
I’m considering spending the $1k or so to file a trademark on the name
Before you do that, try filing a state-level trademark. I've done it in some states for as little as $75. That might be enough to get Apple's attention, and save you $925.
Check with your state's Secretary of State web site.
>it’s infuriating to see a knockoff show up before my app in the search results
Infuriating enough to pay for paid placement at top? :(
Sorry, that stinks, and hope someone can confirm the trademark approach. Disappointing support is not resourced/empowered to resolve this for you.
From: Philip Schiller Subject: Urgent: Temple Jump !!!! Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:23:15 - 0800
What the hell is this????
Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings?
Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of stores in quality of service?
How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the store?
Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any anyone see an app that is cheating the system?
Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the store?
This is insane!!!!!!
- - -
Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.
Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?
https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/app-store-rejections
There is no other way to publish on iOS, by design.
If you want to access the most lucrative smartphone market segment in the richest country, you have to play ball with Apple. There is no other choice.
Many apps can be PWAs, these can be installed without any approvals.
It is used even for some quite demanding apps like low-latency game streaming by Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, etc. They don't use native apps because Apple rules are ridiculous.
This is what a failed App Store looks like. Everybody complains about the 30% cut that seems to be the norm on the steam, iOS App Store and the likes.
But getting an App Store to take off is incredibly hard, and the Mac app store is the proof of that. It should be successful; everything points to it. Despite that; absolutely no one uses it, so big apps aren't on it; and fake / low quality apps are thus more visible, which lowers the trust even more. And then you have a chicken and egg problem.
If this is your metric for a "failed app store", then the iOS app store also qualifies, since it has just as many such listings.
As far as Mac app store, even ignoring Apple's first-party apps, just to name a few, it has MS Office, WhatsApp, Telegram, Kindle, Facebook, Slack, Parallels, LibreOffice, VLC. I use Mac as my primary desktop, and I'd say that about half of the apps I use daily are from the store. As far as I can tell, the ones that are missing, are mostly missing because they can't do what they need to do within the sandbox.
> Everybody complains about the 30% cut
Everybody complains about the lack of alternative. Apple could charge a 99% cut for all I care, but they have to compete with other iOS app providers to prove their cut is worthwhile.
> the Mac app store is the proof of that. It should be successful
The Mac App Store shouldn't be successful. It's the exact same situation as the iOS App Store, but with professional software and competitive third-party storefronts. The Mac is the closest thing Apple has to a healthy software ecosystem.
I don't know if the iOS App Store is much better. The killer for me is paid-for placements for competing apps when I search for something - a clear cut case of putting revenue over user experience.
Before the Internet and print-on-demand, it was hard for any rando to write a piece of text and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You had to at least commit to spending a chunk of cash on a press run. That meant that the average quality of a randomly selected piece of text was relatively high. Then the web and print-on-demand democratized that. If you read a random web page, or a randomly selected post or comment on some social media site/app, odds are it will be near nonsense. Likewise a randomly selected self-published work. (Though the quality tends to be a bit higher there because the pressure to write a work of a significant enough length tends to filter somewhat.)
You don't notice this as much because you almost never encounter a truly randomly selected text work. You're reading only comments that get upvotes, and blog posts that get reshared, and self-published works with a lot of reviews and sales. Crowdsourced sorting has helped make the giant mass of garbage less visible.
Likewise, before digital cameras and cheap web hosting, it was hard for any rando to take a photo and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You have to pay for film, pay to develop it, pay to make enlargements. That meant most photos you saw where either snapshots with personal relevance that gave them quality, or actually decent photography. Then digital cameras and cheap hosting democratized that. If you look at a randomly selected image posted (and not re-posted) to Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, etc., odds are it will be blurry poorly-lit trash.
Again, you don't notice this because Instagram and company use crowdsourcing, AI, and algorithms to ruthlessly filter out the garbage.
The same story is true for a lot of music coming out these days, though that one still have a few structural gatekeepers in many places.
If AI really does radically lower the bar to shipping, an app, we should expect to see the same thing play out there too. An enormous sea of worthless shovelware with a handful of decent apps mixed in. It will become even more important for app stores to filter and curate these collections so that users can find what they want.
Obviously the 30% commission is not yet enough to fully protect users from knock off apps in the Apple AppStore!
Obviously you gotta also advertise and pay the remaining 70% in fees. You will then bask in the glory.
To be fair, I think this is partly because ChatGPT went viral long before they had an official app. I remember thinking, "Why the heck haven't they made an app yet?" And it was notable when it was finally released. So many people had already been using unofficial apps by that point.
GPT-3 came out in June 2020, that's when a lot of developers started talking about it and early implementations using its API started to appear. The ChatGPT web UI came out in November, 2022, at which point it quickly went mainstream. By January, 2023, they had one hundred million users. They still had no app at this point. GPT-4 came out in March, 2023. Still no app. It wasn't until May, 2023 that they released an iOS app, followed by Android in July, 2023. It was a whole extra year until they released a Mac app in June, 2024. So many developers beat them to the punch on making a UI for their own product in the meantime.
Perhaps app stores should have a minimum hamming distance requirement [0] on the names of apps, so that names could not be too similar by default.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance
The names of the app on the App Store doesn't even match the name of the downloaded app. They need to change that first. Otherwise the name is just another SEO opportunity.
TIL I can distinguish the OpenAI logo from the other logos.
But cannot distinguish Al Pacino and Robert De Niro by face alone.
Why do friends claim I have autism? That started two years ago, and 35 years long, nobody mentioned it.
With some practice I bet you could. You could find certain unique features to look for in each of their faces. Faces are more complex than a black and white icon. So maybe you’re just underestimating yourself.
They might not be related.
Correct, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are not related
I posted something similar to X yesterday: https://x.com/rarkins/status/1966785560556511489
What was even worse than there being dupe ChatGPT apps in the Mac app store was that Perplexity and Gemini both recommended installing chatgpt dot macupdate dot com as if it was the official app.
It's this sort of thing that demonstrates rather plainly how the vendors of these “walled garden” app stores are lying through their teeth when they advertise said stores as being “more secure” than allowing sideloading or third-party app stores. There's no curation happening here. There's barely any actual security checks going on here. They're really gonna claim with a straight face that this is somehow better than the likes of F-Droid or Cydia or Flathub or what have you?
When i saw the "flea market" i genuinely though someone actually made a way to resell "used" apps (that you don't use anymore) for a cheaper price, like you could do in CD/DVD times.
Yeah... i need another coffee.
This is a consequence of the fact that nobody actualy searches through a desktop appstore for an option to solve their software needs. If you do find new software it's not by searching the appstore. You go there to find a specific app which you discovered elsewhere at best. Sadly, Apple's barriers to entry have failed in the case of ChatBPP.
> Sadly, Apple's barriers to entry have failed in the case of ChatBPP.
That's putting it lightly, innit?
More accurately, Apple's barriers to entry have failed in spectacular ways prior to this: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
I get what you're saying but anyone who falls for that one is beyond help. There are many red flags. I know that some people out there are not 'savvy' but this one is really obvious. The developer name is a strong red flag. If I was going to get LastPass I'd go on their website direct and click their appstore link from there.
Even if I do find the exact tool for the job on Mac App Store and even if it is 99c I won’t buy it.
Essentially everything I’ve bought or installed for free from there eventually got abandoned or was a pain to upgrade (numbered versions to paywall updates etc).
Just last week all googling was leading me to one 99c MAS app as the solution but I spent 15 more mins googling and adding “GitHub” to the query and found an open source solution and I’m glad I did.
The experience and ecosystem around it just sucks.
Meanwhile, they are taking 10x the going rate for credit card processing for the privilege of being in this shovelware list.
I wish someone would bring the hammer down on them.
Who else had to lookup OpenAI logo to cleanse your memory of the barrage of lookalikes?
I'd rather look at real buttholes.
Claude was closest.
Remind me why we're forced to give Apple a commission to host this flee market, when we'd be better off hosting our own domains and serving our own products?
One of the reasons I value SetApp so much for Mac apps is that it's curated and I don't have to worry about filtering a bunch of shady or low-quality apps.
First time hearing about setapp
What is worth $33 a month there? Seems like a bunch of basic utilities
Looks like the subscription price went from $10 to $30+ yesterday!
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ngy8mz/setapp_pri...
The amount of keyword / typo squatting that goes on is impressive. There's a whole industry of people making derivative clones of anything popular.
I despised apples app model as soon as i tried to develop an app (game) and discovered they literally priced my broke college ass out of the market by forcing me to use their hardware, software, and most egregiously pay a 100usd fee to even get started. Not to submit the app to them, but just to start developing it. That DX is so awful i vowed never to release a single thing on their platform. The game was already built and doing well on androids store.
there used to be a time when i would delight in looking through the app store and exploring what was possible. these days, the search is broken, editor curation is non existent and there is no way to filter away the copycat, micro transaction-ridden cruft
It's a sad state of affairs.
When you let anyone submit an app with little to no criteria other than “no using private framework abi’s” this is what you get. No curation. No quality control. No remorse.
This the race to the bottom, first it was the apps. Now it’s the shopping experience. Be glad someone sold you something you ungrateful clod.
>No curation.
Tiny bit of curation? I’ve seen complaints about this Apple App Store policy:
4.3 Spam (b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.
They enforce it when it suits them, and turn their head the other way when it increases revenue.
I remember when Apple used to be insanely customer-focused. Now they’re just another big tech company with an industrial design ethos.
Exactly, it’s selective and has no order or reason.
the benefit of the web unlike these 'curated' app stores is that there's a voting mechanism. though those votes can be skewed by 'sponsorships'.
Yes, there's zero scammy shit on the web
It's infuriating how slowly we're moving towards more open platforms on mobile, when you can just look at the desktop to see how much freedom has been lost.
I always think of Steam as a well done digital store. Apple meanwhile is absolutely disinterested in providing anything beyond the most basic features. Whishlists, shopping carts, curators (which could in theory provide actual quality suggestions, like real stores), more granular review data and so on would improve the experience immensely. The App Store can vote soon, but developers can't even offer paid upgrades to their apps, or do sales.
Apple always says they are necessary to ensure the safety of their users. But the App Store right now keeps app quality down and makes it as intransparent as possible.
Its like sharingan patterns
Can a Mac App Flea market even exist?
I mean, can you sell your apps after you bought them?
I thought they were somehow linked to your AppleID directly after purchase.
Well, that’s what you get when all the advice you read online is “get into the AI industry at any cost”
Honestly, this feels like a UI/UX dark pattern at the app ecosystem level
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