Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

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For those not willing to launch iTunes, the review breakdown is as follows:

  ★★★★★ [============= ] 354
    ★★★★ [==            ] 26
      ★★★ [=             ] 12
       ★★ [=             ] 10
        ★ [==============] 384

And the "most helpful" review (15 of 17 people said it was helpful) looks like this:

  Great App ★★★★★
  by Bondfan200
  Great App!! Let's you be more creative with your iPhone.

You are probably capable of imagining what the rest of the first-page reviews are.

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Now would probably be a good time to complain about how horrible the App Store is. There are good things on it, but it's horrendous - finding good ones is hard, there's no way to demo paid apps (why not?! they control the whole system, they could enforce rules!), no way to review without paying, and no way to view or rate "+/- helpful" from the iPod/Phone (don't know about ipad). That last one in particular seems the greatest oversight for preventing this kind of thing.

It's almost an ideal system for exploitation. I simply can't comprehend why it has stood this way for this long. Has Jobs even looked at this thing? I would think he'd be livid, it's total crap.

The app store has changed in many ways since its inception.

Originally people were putting non-letter characters in the beginning of the apps name so they appeared at the top if alphabetical lists. They would also release updates all the time because that would put them at the top of the "new" list. It's evolving and I hope they find a solution.

And I'm sure it will change more in the future. But it's not nearly as bad and you're implying.

Now tell me about your favourite app store and how it has solved your discovered problems...

Oh, it's simple: I haven't found a single one. Amazon, however, does a much better job with their store. Even Ebay does alright, with seller ratings (no developer ratings in the app store? wtf, just keep scamming!).

That non-letter characters would put things at the beginning of alphabetical lists should have been forseen and accounted for (or ignored) from the very earliest planning stages, the instant they decided to have an alphabetical listing somewhere. That constantly releasing updates would keep them at the top of the "new" list should have been seen the instant they decided to have a "new" list in the first place, and an app's position weighed against the frequency of its release. That borderline-shady developers would continue to produce borderline-shady applications should have been seen the instant they decided to allow a developer / company to submit more than one application, and steps taken to help either Apple or consumers identify potential problems.

Meanwhile, we have this.

They have left gaping holes to exploit the system, and they've existed for three years in the largest app store out there by a massive margin. There's no way to get around that being shameful.

> demo paid apps

As a developer I so miss this possibility. "Lite" apps and in app purchases are not the same as old school trial versions.

It's even worse for the Mac app store as trial versions have been around for decades on the computer.

Not sure why you couldn't set up a trial version using in app purchases and a server that records device ID and trial dates.

Seems like all the parts are already there and it would not be difficult to implement.

You rely on a server for trial functionality, but in the end you have much more control of the system...

What happens when your user attempts to use the app without an Internet connection and it can't phone home to verify it's within the trial period or paid?

Only the first use would need remote access. Assuming that the user just downloaded from the app store, that should be fairly safe assumption.

After the initial connection is made and the trial started, the trial end date can be verified via remote connection but fallback to internal clock for the current timestamp.

yeah, if only apple would be cool with that. (and lodsys)

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