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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps? It’s the app developers responsibility to gain an audience and market themselves. It’s that way on any platform or the “open web”.

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I think the point is that they claim they deserve their 30% because they promote you, but if they aren't actually doing that, why do they deserve their 30%?

If you have to market the whole thing on your own and find your own audience, what value are they providing? Hosting the infrastructure? Fine, let me pay a per download price or a monthly hosting fee. Or better yet, let me host it on my own infrastructure.

Verifying the security of the app? The customers should be paying for that, not the developers.

That's the issue here. They want you to pay a ransom but they don't actually provide any value for that ransom.

How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?

> How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps?

I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.

> Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access.

From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find."

> Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?

They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.

Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front.

But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/distribute/

I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.

So what platform has 4.5 million products and can showcase them all?

They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.

So some products get showcased and some languish in obscurity. Apple also showcases a few apps....

And those products that get showcased on the end cap pay extra. You can also (sadly) pay extra to run search based ads in the App Store.

You keep saying the same irrelevant thing. It doesn’t matter how hard it is to showcase 5M apps, /if you’re taking 30% of the cut from all of them, in exchange for promoting them/.

Fraud at scale is still fraud. This isn’t a difficult concept.

So does that mean retail stores that take more than a 30% cut are also committing fraud?

They aren't taking a 30% cut to "promote" you. They are taking the cut and providing billing services like credit card processing. They also provide access to your app and apis for you to connect and use phone features. They also host your app binary and provide update services. But the main reason they charge 30% is because they can. If they offered no value for that 30%, then no one would pay for it.

I agree it's too much. But they do offer something for that 30%.

I don't expect them to promote anything, back in the day a good app could get some initial traction, make it to the top 1000 apps in a category and move up the charts based on usage and good reviews.

That's not possible anymore. It's a known fact that the only way to make it on the app store these days is to blow half a million dollars on a burst ad campaign to get a large initial volume of downloads. Other option is to have the number of "App Store Managers", who decide what gets featured, and that option is only really available to top VC firms and large companies.

Again there is an existence proof that isn’t true. Marco Arment and David “Underscore” Smith are well known indie developers who are often featured on the App Store.

Do they claim to promote you? Honest question, I don't know.

I'd expect Apple to provide three things in exchange for the 30%:

Access to a huge audience, payment processing, and the administrative/technical stuff like download servers and bandwidth.

They could go back to the way it used to be, when you could open up the app store, see all of the categories than be able to see the top few hundred apps in each category, ranked by popularity. Now they have a manually curated feed of 1-2 apps per day, mostly pushing large companies like Nike or UNO. If they want to curate they should at least personalize the recommendations to each user, their current suggestions are full of apps for kids.

Back in the day if I wanted to find a good navigation app I could open up the app store, press on the navigation category and get a list of top navigation apps, determined by usage. Now it's:

open app > press "Apps" tab > scroll 10 pages worth of content down to "Top Categories" > press a small blue text button "See All" > select "Navigation" > scroll past hiking, charging and bike sharing recommended sections > find "Top Free" section > press "See All" > browse top apps

From talking to a lot of users of my app I guarantee you that 90% of people never make it past the hand picked suggestions that Apple decides to show everyone. To make things worse their search is completely broken, I just searched "maps" and got:

0. Paid Ad for Google Maps

1. Apple Maps

2. "Brainstorm and Mind-Map Your Ideas" ("Story")

3. Google Maps

4. Google Photos

5. Facebook Messenger

6. Gmail

7. Waze

A new mapping app has no shot at getting discovered the way Waze did back in the day unless it raises millions of dollars and blows all of it on Apple, Google and Facebook ads.

Now they have a manually curated feed of 1-2 apps per day, mostly pushing large companies like Nike or UNO

Marco Arment is a one man shop who saw success with both InstaPaper before he sold it and now Overcast. Overcast is often featured in the App Store.

David “Underscore” Smith is another indie Mac developer who is frequently featured in the iOS App Store and the Watch App Store. Not to mention apps like Carrot Weather and Dark Skies.

On another note what shot does an indie musician have to being successful?

>developer who is frequently featured

m_ke's point is that you shouldn't have to be hand-picked by Apple like that to be successful. Apps that people rate highly and download more should have the benefit of being on the front page.

You are.

Apps-> Most popular.

Maybe you and m_ke are using different versions of iOS.

I’m on iOS 13.3

Open App Store. This is what the screen looks like.

  Apps
  Watch With Family
  Disney+
  Stream Pixar’s Latest hit
  [ Screen shot of Onward]
  Popular Apps. [See All]

  Today | Games | Apps | Arcade | Search

If you click on Games you see “essential game picks”.

If you click on Apps, you see “Popular Apps”.

The entire issue with “popular free apps” is that it never gives other apps the opportunity to gain exposure and the same apps stay popular for years at a time. Apps like Facebook would get exposure forever.

>So exactly how should Apple make it easy to find your app over the other 5 million apps

I mean at least make App Store Search works would be a great place to start 11 years after App Store was introduced?

Part of me just want Apple to give me a dump of all the Apps Information to shove it inside Elastic Search and see if I get better results by default than the current App Store searching. That is how bad it is. ( To add insult to injury they decided to add top placement bids to App Store )

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