“Tim Cook just handed the keys to the Apple App Store to Senior VP Phill Schiller. Will Schiller bring order and intelligibility to Apple’s app jungle?” By Jean-Louis Gassée asks for Monday Note.
“Ministration of third-party iOS, watchOS, tvOS and OS X apps [have] been transferred from Eddy Cue’s portfolio into Schiller’s expanded bailiwick,” Gassée writes. “Cook didn’t appoint Schiller because the App Store worked too well and made developers and customers too happy.”
“Apple developers have incessantly complained about the Store’s ills, from the capricious enforcement of opaque rules and pricing, to missing promotional features such as trial periods and returns, and on to unreliable user reviews and ratings. Recently, Mac developers’ complaints have grown louder, with some slamming the App Store’s door and going back to the open market,” Gassée writes. “I have no idea what Phil Schiller’s expanded responsibilities will bring us, nor do we know when we can expect a change — only in myths can the Augean Stables be cleaned in a day — but I join the crowd of Apple developers and customers who wish him success.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Goog luck, Phil!
I sure hope so.
As with all online stores that contain multitudes of titles, discovery is the biggest issue.
The Mac app store is the worse for me. Limited offerings and hard to find stuff. Demo versions would be a useful addition – that has been successful in the iOS world.
It’s time somebody sorted the app stores out. Apple proudly boast the GINORMOUS number of apps they host, but finding what you want can be next to impossible. And that’s equally true of the iTunes store, the iBooks store, the Apple U resources…
…and that’s to say nothing of the dumbed down Apple apps like the current versions of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Mail, Safari etc.—they’ve become bad enough on MacOS, but on iOS they’re close to useless. Nobody in the Enterprise market could take them seriously, even if they are (as dear Sir Johnny says) ‘the most beautiful app you’ve ever seen’!
ps. I speak as an aficionado of Apple hardware and software, going right back to the Apple II, in the pre-Macintosh era of the early ’80s.