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Four Years of App Store: Developers Weigh In On Search, Discovery, and Curation

“The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days”. That’s how Apple co-founder and late CEO Steve Jobs saluted the launch of the company’s new storefront for iOS (née iPhone OS) applications on July 14, 2008. Almost four years and over 25 billion downloads later, the App Store has evolved into a brand that spans two platforms (iOS and OS X), three different iOS devices (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad), a variety of Macs, and that hosts over 600,000 apps from more than 200,000 registered developers. Albeit minimal in terms of revenue for a company that makes billions off iPhones and iPads, the App Store created a new economy that nurtures an ecosystem ultimately aimed at selling more devices, as well as showing consumers that, nowadays, software is revolutionizing the way they approach work, entertainment, and other personal tasks. In spite of its tremendous growth, however, little has been done to improve a basic premise of the App Store: finding new apps.

“Discovery and search has been a huge concern of mine for a long time”, said Craig Hockenberry, Principal at design and development studio The Iconfactory. Hockenberry and his team were among the first developers to support the App Store in 2008 with Twitterrific, a Twitter client for iPhone that has expanded to the iPad and Mac, with different versions available on the App Store and Mac App Store. In 2009, a year after the App Store launched, Hockenberry offered a series of suggestions to Apple in order to improve certain aspects of the App Store – namely, following early discussions with developers that decided to sell software on the “iTunes App Store”, he noted how there was “still much room for improvement” to turn the App Store into a viable and reliable business platform for developers who weren’t simply interested in experimenting with it.

Hockenberry’s “Year two” post still rings true today, in spite of the functionalities that Apple fixed, improved, or brought to the App Store in the past four years. For instance, Apple created a “New and Noteworthy” section on the homepage of the App Store that is refreshed on a weekly basis to showcase apps Apple deems worthy of attention; promotional codes, which Hockenberry listed as one of the tools that had helped them sell more products, were made available internationally in late 2010; either on print, its website, or YouTube, Apple has kept pushing ad campaigns to educate iOS and Mac users on the importance and convenience of the App Store.

The very motto that started the app revolution, however, didn’t meet an equal amount of attention by Apple in terms of improvements for the infrastructure behind it. As Hockenberry wrote in 2009, “it’s incredibly hard to find the “that” in “there’s an app for that.” Between keyword spamming and the sheer volume of choices in each category, customers can’t find what they want”.

Read more

Flipboard’s Move From “Social Magazine” To “Internet Magazine”

Last night, Flipboard released a 1.9 update for its iPhone and iPad app that, among various fixes and new features, introduces one important addition to the social magazine: audio. As the company writes on their blog:

Our Content Guide is now chock-full of some of the best sounds we could find. We’ve launched new partnerships with NPR and PRI and scoured SoundCloud’s massive community of sound creators to bring you some of our favorites—artists like Snoop Dogg and Diplo; music labels like Atlantic Records and Ninja Tune; podcasts from The New Yorker and Slate; and segments from shows like Radiolab and Science Friday.

Right now, support for audio content is mainly implemented through SoundCloud, which received a new login option in the app’s settings, and NPR and PRI, which have agreed on a partnership with Flipboard to make content available in the app’s content guide, properly reformatted to fit Flipboard’s unique style and interactions. In Flipboard 1.9, support for audio means you can start playing a podcast featured in the content guide (such as TWiT or TNW Daily Dose) or any content available in your SoundCloud account, and go back to browsing links and photos as Flipboard can keep playing audio while you’re reading something else. The app will show up as an audio source in the iOS multitasking tray, and you can control audio playback from within the app itself too with a “note” icon in the upper toolbar (on iPhone) that will display a folder-like animation for viewing and pausing audio.

Looking back at Flipboard’s evolution over the past months, I think support for audio in version 1.9 is yet another example of how the company has been gradually and relentlessly drifting away from a system that simply aggregates “your social links” to embrace a broader vision that’s turning Flipboard into “an Internet magazine”, whether it’s social or not.

Flipboard started off as a neat app to give a magazine-like layout to links shared on Twitter and Facebook. Then came Google Reader, Flickr, and Instagram with more content types and visual previews. The company started announcing partnerships with publishers to display their content beautifully inside Flipboard, and with more content came an explosive growth that led to a re-imagined version 1.5, focused on showcasing “popular stories” and making more great content available to users through a content guide that wasn’t necessarily social – rather, it was aimed at letting users know that more content was available on Flipboard beyond their existing social accounts. After that, Flipboard released the long-awaited iPhone app, unifying accounts with over-the-air sync and bringing Cover Stories – a dedicated view for interesting and popular stories – over to the iPad app.

While still prominently “social” in the way it puts the focus on accounts and supported services, Flipboard has become perfectly usable and enjoyable even without necessarily configuring a Twitter or Facebook account. The company has put great effort on building a content guide that spans different countries, themes, content types, and publishers. Flipboard aggregates top content shared by Pocket, it collects the best things found on the Internet under the “Cool Curators” section, and, alongside the usual Tech and Business news, displays popular videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and even Colbert Report in a Video category. With version 1.9, audio has been brought into the mix.

The social component of Flipboard is still strong (version 1.9 also brings “related sections” for social networks, such as “tweets mentioning you”), but it hasn’t been the only way to enjoy Flipboard for quite some time, and this is more visible than ever in the latest update. Flipboard doesn’t simply create a personalized magazine out of content “being shared with me” anymore – it still does that, but at the same time, it allows me to find other great content that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

More than a “social magazine”, the “Internet magazine” aggregates and reformats content that is also social, but not strictly so. Curation and APIs are keys here. Flipboard was already rumored to be considering support for movies and TV shows last year. Would it be too absurd to think the app will someday gain compatibility with Rdio and Spotify to let you find the best music from your favorite streaming service? How about YouTube and Vimeo, to let users also find videos that are bring shared in those social accounts? According to TechCrunch, “Flipboard will look into other ways it can do more with video”.

With social accounts, APIs, search, and curation, Flipboard has become more than a social magazine: it is restructuring Internet content for the screens of mobile devices with the help of a strong social counterpart.

The iPad Is The Future Of Education

For the past years, Apple has been showcasing the educational advantages of devices like Macs, iPhones and iPods on its Apple in Education website. Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, however, the company has been making an effort to position the device as the best tool now available to teachers and students to improve the quality of education and level of engagement. The dedicated iPad in Education webpage showcases recent moves by Apple such as iBooks Textbooks and the iTunes U iOS app.

While we have covered schools and educational institutions adopting iPads in the past, the latest profile posted by Apple today on their UK website is quite possibly the best example of iPad in education to date. Those of you who have been following the progress of iPad deployment in schools may remember Fraser Speirs’ iPad Project, which made headlines throughout 2011 as it was the first one-to-one iPad deployment to every people in a school. Speirs documented the process of giving an iPad to every teacher and student at Cedars School of Excellence (Scotland) on his personal website, and today Apple has posted a video profile showing how “Cedars students boost learning with iPad”.

The full video is available here, and it shows teachers and kids using the iPad as a modern, regular tool in their daily lives that has improved the way they create and share content of any kind. One particular segment towards the end of the video struck a chord with me:

I don’t think we could ever go back from where we are right now with the iPad. The only way’s really forward – to more access to knowledge, more empowerment, more creativity…all these things in the classroom”.

As I wrote before, Apple’s education strategy will be interesting to follow. Actually seeing kids and teachers who have been using the iPad as a real substitute for and enhancement over old learning tools for over a year now, however, reminds me that, no matter Apple’s strategy as a company, software is the future of education, and the iPad is giving our kids a bit of that future today.

Detractors of the iPad as a learning tool point at the management required by connected devices to ensure that, in the classroom, the possibilities offered by the Internet don’t get in the way of teachers’ requirements and students’ attention. Fortunately, this is something Apple has been addressing since day one, and that has recently improved with more tools.

Every major change in our society and culture will be awarded an equal amount of optimism and skepticism. As someone who’s been lucky enough to find his dream job in the possibilities offered by the Internet and software, I tend to see skepticism as a challenge, rather than a roadblock. People like Fraser Speirs are proving that, beyond analysts and blog posts, a better education for our kids is possible, today, every day, with a device that’s making kids eager to learn.

Free of the constraints of paper and old, disconnected learning material, the iPad brings new challenges and practical issues to overcome. With time, patience, and willingness to look past rules established in societies different than ours, we must make sure these devices we have built and ecosystems we have nurtured won’t be remembered for Angry Birds, because among other things, our kids deserve a better, modern education. And we have to start building it today.

10 Ideas for iCloud.com Notifications

As noted by MacRumors earlier today, Apple appears to be testing a new browser-based notification system for iCloud.com. Judging from the screenshot that clearly shows a testing environment being accidentally brought to a user’s attention, the system appears to be similar in terms of design to what Apple introduced with iOS 5 last year.

While it’s not clear whether Apple may be planning to revamp iCloud.com completely to include notifications or if today’s spotted banner is the sign of something else, with WWDC ‘12 approaching I thought it might be interesting to run down some possible implementations.

iCloud.com is an option, and not a central part of the experience Apple is envisioning with iCloud and devices going forward. Mobile devices and computers are integrated with iCloud in a way that iCloud itself becomes the operating system. The browser-based, neatly-designed iCloud.com is a way to access some of iCloud’s content through the open web (as long as you have a modern browser). While not fundamental to the experience, I believe there are some additions Apple could make to improve iCloud.com and turn it into a viable substitute to native iCloud interfaces. Specifically, web notifications could play very well in various scenarios.

iMessage on the web: The first beta of Messages for OS X left many disappointed, and an iMessage web app could obviate the need of a unified iChat/iMessage desktop app, while providing a great solution for browser notifications.

Email and calendar alerts: An obvious one, yet a possibly great system to receive notifications while browsing other sections of iCloud.com.

App-free notifications: Assuming Apple is really testing notifications for iCloud.com, I’d be interested in knowing whether their idea is to display notifications exclusively on iCloud.com while open. In fact, while I always forget to visit iCloud.com on my Mac, a notification system for (not from) iCloud.com would be perfect to remind me to visit and use the web app. I don’t think this is going to happen, as I see such system being more a way to simply display alerts inside iCloud.com.

Jump-to-section: And if such system is being built to notify users of changes while on iCloud.com, I would expect to be able to click on a notification, and have iCloud automatically open the associated section of the site.

Document changes: Right now, we don’t know why Apple is building a notification system for iCloud.com. We don’t even know whether the “leaked” banner could be linked to a future public feature, or an internal use-only functionality. However, it would be nice if a notification system for iCloud.com could inform users of changes to documents stored on iCloud.com. This plays well with the next point…

Sharing and collaborative features: Apple is discontinuing iWork.com, and the company hasn’t announced any plans for a possible revamped sharing system for documents. iCloud.com notifications could inform users of changes to a document edited by someone else, and they wouldn’t necessarily require a web-based editing interface to go with (though a Google Docs-like solution for iCloud users would be an amazing addition to my workflow).

Find My iPhone and Find My Friends: Notifications could tell users about a found device, or a family member nearby, though I assume those would only be a nice extra compared to the functionality already enabled in the respective native apps.

Game Center: Apple’s social gaming service is getting a dedicated app with Mountain Lion, but for the sake of options, iCloud.com could gain a web counterpart – with notifications to stay on top of friend requests and more.

Twitter: on iOS 5, users can configure their Twitter accounts at a system level to tweet and log into other apps. On Mountain Lion, desktop users will enjoy support for Twitter notifications directly into Notification Center. It would be nice if everyone else got nice little banners for Twitter replies and DMs on iCloud.com – clicking on them could take you directly to Twitter’s website, and it would offer a way to stay on top of Twitter even when using iCloud.com.

Presence: I have written about this idea in my iOS 6 wish list. If Apple is extending notifications to iCloud.com, the issue of notification overload could potentially increase again. Regardless of what kind of notifications for iCloud.com Apple is working on, there should be a way for iCloud to understand whether you are actively using an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or web browser.

Wildcard: App updates: This is my wildcard, and I do hope Apple will consider such functionality someday. Right now, I use AppShopper to get notifications for updates to the apps I already own. With complete access to my purchase history and iTunes on the desktop, Apple could easily notify my iCloud account of updates available on the App Store, and provide an easy way to click through and start a download.

Once again when it comes to iCloud, I’m just speculating on the direction Apple may be taking with its cloud service, admittedly the most promising platform the company is building for the next decade. Having thrown my two cents at this other side of the discussion, I look forward to seeing whether today’s alleged notification system will materialize in a finished product on June 11.

Playing Devil’s Advocate, Arguing Apple Should Change Their IAP Policy

There’s been a lot of discussion in the past few days over Apple, its In-App Purchase (IAP) policy, and Dropbox after it rejected a few apps that employed Dropbox functionality because they offered links to the Dropbox website for signing up and logging in. At issue was that the option to buy a higher level of storage was also visible, and this contravened one of the App Store Review Guidelines. Some viewed this as Apple trying to kill (or at the very least, target) Dropbox – but as Federico explained, this was just Apple enforcing one of their existing policies.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the position that perhaps that policy isn’t the right one. So I decided to play the devil’s advocate, and try to argue the case for Apple adjusting their policy. Specifically my argument focuses on Apple’s policy going something like:

Apps may use external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in an app, but only when those purchase mechanisms are undertaken in a web view within the app.

That could probably be further clarified in more simplistic language, but you get the general idea of what I’m proposing. The current policy prohibits any link to purchases or subscriptions that are undertaken through external mechanisms (ie. not IAP); I suggest that this should be allowed. So let’s quickly go through the benefits of the current policy and arguments for relaxing the policy. Read more

Reading Manga On The Retina iPad

Last month, I asked on Twitter if there was an easy and legal way to purchase manga digitally on the iPad. Unfortunately, while American comics are seeing a nice digital resurgence thanks to apps like Comixology, the situation is profoundly different and inherently worse with Japanese manga. There is no Comixology for manga – where by manga I basically mean Shonen Jump content – and the few services that do have some manga available (like VIZ) have terrible apps that don’t take advantage of the latest iOS technologies and come with risible offers on multi-volume purchases.

I have no idea why Shonen or its international publishers – like Panini Comics and Star Comics in Italy – aren’t realizing the huge potential for legal, convenient, digital editions of their manga on mobile devices. It is kind of ironic that, as of today, pirating manga you already own physically gets you better, higher quality results from some shady Internet forum than going the proper, legitimate way. Because that way doesn’t exist. It’s the same problem of old media all over again.

As I was listening to T.Rex on Spotify yesterday for my review of the app, I connected Marc Bolan’s song to Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, and I felt the need of finding a solution to begin reading the series again. It turns out, provided you have scans for your manga ready to go (I prefer PDF and CBR, but there are several options out there), there are two interesting options right now on iOS.

Assuming you want to read manga on your iPad, Bookman is a $2.99 iPad app that’s been updated for the Retina display and that comes with fast caching of pages, great performance, and a good selection of browsing and optimization settings. Its rendering has been very good for my copies of 20th Century Boys, and I like how you can easily import content through a built-in FTP server (I transfer files with Transmit) or Dropbox. You can organize manga in bookshelves, and the app comes with various settings for tap areas, thumbnail previews, appearance, and zoom. It’s even got page resume and multiple page turning effects. $1.99 on the App Store gets you the separate iPhone app (I wish they were universal). Right now, I’m reading manga with Bookman.

The other option is Comic Zeal, which is universal, but that I haven’t tried yet as it doesn’t have support for the Retina iPad. Technically, the app displays manga in Retina resolution if higher-res images are available, but interface elements haven’t been updated for the new display. According to the developers, an update with new graphics and “other goodies” has been submitted to Apple. Comic Zeal is $4.99 on the App Store.

Here’s to hoping publishers will consider the market for digital manga someday.

MacStories Interviews: Manton Reece

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I recently had the chance to talk with Manton Reece, the founder of Riverfold Software and developer of Wii Transfer, Tweet Library, and Tweet Marker. When he’s not developing new features for his apps, Manton writes at manton.org. You can follow him on Twitter as @manton.

The interview below was conducted between January 18 and May 2, 2012.

MacStories: Hey Manton! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t tried any of your apps before?

Manton Reece: Sure, my name is Manton Reece and I’m a Mac and iOS developer from Austin, Texas. I build e-textbook software for VitalSource and in 2006 I founded Riverfold Software with my first indie Mac app, Wii Transfer. My two main products are Clipstart, for managing videos on the Mac, and Tweet Library, an iOS app for archiving and collecting tweets. Most recently I launched Tweet Marker, a syncing web service for Twitter apps.

MCSTR: What are the circumstances that led you to start your own company? When, and how, did you decide you wanted to become an independent developer?

MR: It was almost an accident that I started Riverfold. I’ve always worked on side projects, though often it’s just to build something I need for myself, or a small tool released as freeware. But in 2006 the Nintendo Wii had just been released, and over a few weekends I built this app to make it easier to convert movies to a format that could play on the new console. At the last minute, I decided to charge for it, and I reused the domain name from a previous, unfinished web project of mine.

People bought the app, but the most surprising thing to me – and what really opened my eyes about the business of software development – is that sales were fairly consistent over those first few months. I could tell that the Mac had a very healthy software market for independent developers.

And there’s nothing like feedback from paying customers to get you excited about building and improving apps. I don’t think I would have been nearly as inspired to do anything after that if I hadn’t decided to make it a paid app at that initial release. Read more

Spotify for iPad: A UI Analysis with A Rdio Perspective

Spotify for iPad, released this morning, is a beautiful app. It’s solid, providing fast and reliable access to Spotify’s huge catalogue of songs and artists, and it presents content inside a great-looking package that, as I’ve already written, reminds me of Reeder’s sepia tones.

What follows is a brief examination of the app’s interface and functionalities. I have been using Rdio to completely fill my music listening needs for the past six months, but I was looking forward to trying Spotify for iPad to give it a fair shot. Read more

11.13 and The Dropbox SDK

Apparently, Apple has been rejecting some iOS apps with Dropbox integration lately (at least during the past week) for linking to the Dropbox website through the login/sign up process. The Next Web has a rundown of the “issue”.

Apps that integrate with Dropbox, in fact, can either authenticate through the installed Dropbox app, or, if not installed, open a web view to let users log in with the browser. The alleged problem with Apple is that the Dropbox mobile login page contains a link to go back to Dropbox’s main website/account creation page, and possibly purchase a subscription bypassing Apple’s App Store (and thus 70/30 revenue split).

Of course, this isn’t new. In its App Store Review Guidelines, Apple has been enforcing for years a policy that doesn’t allow developers to visibly link to external websites that contain links to subscriptions sold outside of iTunes

Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a “buy” button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected.

In the past, a number of developers and services that included buttons/links to external websites containing subscription options were forced to update their apps to remove such functionalities. The most notable example to date has probably been the official Kindle app, which removed a button that linked to Amazon’s Kindle Store (where books can be purchased with an Amazon login, and saved into Amazon’s cloud locker). The list goes on, and the core issue at hand seems to be just how visibly developers are linking to external websites featuring “external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions”. There doesn’t seem to be a “visible” link to purchase additional Drive storage on Google.com, but you get the possible irony of this scenario. In the past few days, if these forum posters are to be believed, Apple decided to reject some apps that offered “an external link to Safari to create a Dropbox account”.

Before we march to Infinite Loop with our community pitchforks and torches, there are some necessary notes to be made about these rejections. First, the latest public version of the Dropbox iOS SDK is 1.2.1, available here, and I know at least two apps – Ultimate Password Manager and Drafts – that use it, and were approved today. Dropbox integration isn’t a central feature in these two apps, but they do have the Dropbox SDK built-in. On the forums – thus, not on the public developer page – the Dropbox team has already released a “beta” version of the 1.2.2 SDK, which removes the option to create an account on Dropbox.com. The beta SDK was seeded a few hours ago, and there’s the possibility Apple will reverse its decision on those rejections once they see the removal of the incriminated links. Right now, we don’t know.

Perhaps more interestingly, Dustin Curtis notes how some developers had also trouble linking to Rdio content inside their apps. It’s interesting, because Rdio came up with its own way to comply with Apple’s terms without losing money: they are offering subscriptions at a higher price through in-app purchase. But then again, the issue isn’t that Rdio does offer IAPs in its iOS app (the restriction on different prices was relaxed last year): it’s that the Rdio website still displays links to subscriptions users may potentially purchase through Safari (or any iOS web view).

As iOS apps become increasingly connected with third-party services and APIs, it’s going to be difficult for developers to keep track of websites and login pages that may or may not contain purchase mechanisms Apple doesn’t like. Sometimes, these mechanisms go unnoticed for months; other times, Apple decides to take action, such as in the (reportedly few) cases of Dropbox rejections this week.

Does this signal a change in Apple’s stance on Dropbox-enabled apps? We don’t know, though developers are naturally asking for clarifications and expressing their doubts. It may well be that Apple decided to simply start enforcing its old existing rule, and that they will be perfectly fine with the new SDK for newly-submitted apps. More importantly, while these few rejections are being talked about now, it’s important to note how, this week, other apps with the old Dropbox SDK have been approved.

Apple’s 11.13 rule isn’t new, and before we dabble in speculation about Apple wanting to “kill Dropbox”, I suggest we wait.