The App Curator: More Problems With The Mac App Store That Apple Could Fix, But Won’t

Apple appears to be caught between a rock and a hard spot when it comes to the Mac App Store. The Mac maker needs app developers, encourages app developers to create apps for the Mac, but doesn’t want to appear to play favorites.

How else can you explain the flimsy, anemic search and sorting options on the Mac App Store app?

Categories can only be sorted by app Name or app release date, and not by downloads or ratings. That’s not an oversight on Apple’s part. It’s by design. Apple would prefer to promote new or recently updated apps at the expense of user reviews. In other words, users are being forced to see new or recently updated apps instead of the most popular or most downloaded apps in a category.

Ratings are a problem, too. Not that ratings are bad, or not reflective of an app’s popularity. Ratings for new and recently updated apps are almost non-existent in the Mac App Store.

Click on the Categories tab. Then click on any Category. Utilities is a good example. The Mac App Store will display the most recent apps with an option to See All. Click See All and apps are sorted by Release Date with an option for sorting by Name. Therein lies the problem.

Not only is there not an option to sort app Categories by downloads or rating popularity, there are hardly any reviews at all for most apps on the first few pages of any category listing. Out of over 150 apps on a page, only a half dozen had any user reviews at all.

Why?

It could be that many are newer apps which haven’t yet been downloaded a sufficient number of times to garner reviews. After all, the default sort for a category is Release Date, which favors new or frequently updated apps.

This could also be a case of user fatigue with apps. How many apps does a Mac user need, or need to try out? Or, there are just too many new apps for the limited Mac user base.

Whatever it is the problem hasn’t been addressed by Apple which still prefers to limit customer’s search and filter options in the Mac App Store. Obviously, as much as Apple likes to talk about the user experience with their products, the iTunes App Store and Mac App Store are not included in Apple’s efforts to create a better user experience.

Running Out Of Ideas?

Gene Steinberg, who should know better than to toss up link bait, posits Apple’s lack of ideas for iOS and OS X.

If you have a cynical bent, you might suggest that Apple deliberately holds back features in order to have something to promote, and sell, for the next release. Perhaps that’s partly true, although it’s probably true that features earmarked for a specific OS version just aren’t ready to make the cut, although some will claim that Apple doesn’t let that stop them.

I love it when tech writers are so definitive.

Apple will confront the inevitable dilemma of having to come up with 100 to 200 new features to tout, while at the same time not confusing existing customers with far too many changes. But don’t forget that iPhone and iPad users managed to get accustomed to a totally new OS without a long learning curve. It can be done, as Apple has demonstrated over and over again.

How is it again that Apple is running out of ideas?

The Death of Game Consoles?

Life hasn’t been too good for game console makers since the iPhone debuted. Killian Bell in CofA:

Spending on Android and iOS combined surpassed spending on handhelds during Q4 2012, which includes the lucrative holiday period. But in Q1 2013, things got even more worrying for Sony and Nintendo as spending on handhelds plummeted.

For the vast majority of game console players, iPhone and Android games are more inviting, more convenient, and more affordable.

Dogfooding: It’s How Apple Makes Products You Want To Buy And Love To Use

Much has been written about Facebook Home’s failures, but the whole saga points out an important aspect of what Apple does differently than most competitors.

Dogfooding.

The simple definition of dogfooding is this:

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company (usually, a computer software company) uses its own product to demonstrate the quality and capabilities of the product.

Simply put, a company that uses what it makes usually makes better products, though it helps to be brutally honest about how a product works.

Does anyone honest believe that Apple employees do not use a Mac, iPhone, or iPad? Of course not. Even better than just using a particular product is the passion that goes into making a product that the designers, developers, and engineers actually want to use.

That’s dogfooding.

Those Apple employees engaged in the design, development, and building of Mac, iPhone, iPad or OS X or iOS, or any of the company’s great applications already know the value of their passion to create what they themselves want to use.

Going back to early versions of OS X for the Mac, we can see the excitement generated by a product that drove customers to stand in line at Apple stores for the latest version. That same zeal has grown as Apple’s product line has grown. New iPhones are met with lines of eager customers at every launch.

So, dogfooding isn’t just an issue of using what you make. Microsoft’s employees certainly use Windows, but what prevents Windows users from having the same passion about what’s running on their PCs?

Dogfooding implies more, and with Apple it contains an element of passion about what a product does, how it’s used, and the delight a user takes in a product that’s been carefully designed and crafted to create an emotional bond.

Does Windows have an emotional bond with users? Yes, but not for the same reasons. Those emotions are mostly negative, perhaps fearful, and often frustrating.

It is said that Facebook’s Home development team mostly used iPhones, although Home was launched on an Android OS smartphone made by HTC (and the Home experience was available for other smartphones). I don’t think that’s why Facebook Home failed. Home’s failure is a direct result of Facebook’s executives to not recognize what users want, and instead force fed users what they did not want– an all encompassing Facebook experience which overshadowed everything else on a smartphone.

Can those at Facebook involved in creating Home actually say they prefer to use Home, or prefer to be able to customize their smartphone however they wish. If it’s the former, I’ll be surprised. If it’s the latter, it’s also a good example of how brutally honest dogfooding results in true innovation, and a bond between product and customer.

Legal Tender

Interesting perspective from Richard Saintvilus:

Apple’s recent struggles in the realm of mobile devices may be temporary.

What struggles?

The competition from Samsung phones powered by Google’s Android may have hurt Apple’s profile as a tech power, but the next area for Apple to dominate could be your wallet.

How is it that Apple is hurt?

Apple’s $145 billion cash hoard is constantly brought up in bear arguments. But imagine if Apple used its cash to turn its iPhone into currency — a true mobile wallet.

Yours truly on Mac360 this week.

Here’s one that makes some sense for Apple and the numbers are stunningly huge. Banking. Money. Finance. Or, put more simply, iWallet. Apple has enough cash on hand to fund the mother of all finance groups so that anyone can buy a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

And, Apple as banker:

Another big number is the number of credit card numbers and accounts Apple has on hand for iTunes, iTunes App Store, Mac App Store– to the tune of about 500-million. Certainly Apple would like those customers to be able to use their Apple account for transactions outside of the App Store.

More from Saintvilus:

Apple should look to acquire a company like Square, which offers a pocket-sized credit card reader that plugs into your device’s audio jack. Square makes it easy for small businesses to accept credit cards without installing a high-fee terminal. Today, the company is estimated to process close to $5 million worth of daily mobile transactions, which makes Square a direct rival to PayPal.

That works for me.

Google’s New Phone

Google just announced that its latest pure-Android smartphone would be… drum roll, please… the Samsung Galaxy S4. Josh Miller with details:

The device will remain largely the same, but will deliver a skinless Nexus experience. It will also feature 4G LTE, 16GB of storage space, and will be available on T-Mobile and AT&T for $649.

Is innovation dead at Google? Is this the beginning of the end for Google made-by-Motorola devices?

The Smartphone Malware Explosion

Lengthy piece by Daniel Eran Dilger on mobile device malware, 91-percent on Android devices.

Those types of attacks are not possible on iOS, where Apple doesn’t give third party developers the ability to ask users for obscure permissions or install the their own backdoors to read users’ SMS messages. This foils the “commodity malware” business of creating exploit packages that can be sold, a market that is thriving on Android.

Apple VP Phil Schiller tweeted, ‘Be safe out there.’ Android is the new Windows.

A Few Words About An Easier, Faster, Better Way To Use Calendar On Your iPhone Or iPad

When it comes to iOS apps that are used by the masses, there’s Mail, Safari, Maps, Camera, Photos, Music, and Calendar, though not necessarily in that order. Each of those apps have third party counterparts, too. Google Maps, for example, And there are hundreds of camera apps.

The app that makes my day, literally, is Calendar, made even better by stable synchronization to Calendar on the Mac and iPad. Calendar is used by many but could be better. That’s where Fantastical comes in. It’s Calendar but more efficient.

On iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, Fantastical takes dictation to enter event details. The DayTicker is a more efficient way to view your schedule than Calendar.

Fantastical

Fantastical’s list makes it easier to find daily events, and a single tap is all you need to display or edit an event’s details.

More Fantastical

Moving events around on the calendar is equally straightforward. Tap the event, hold the tap, and then move.

Fantastical isn’t limited to iOS’s Calendar data, either. It can view and manage Facebook events, does Google Calendar, and Exchange, so it plays nice nice with the business world.

I like the voice dictation and single tap event moving, but I’d like to see dictation work to change event times and dates. Otherwise it’s well worth the few bucks you’ll spend to become more efficient at managing your Calendar events.

‘How did it feel to kill a man?’

Jon Swartz interviews legend John McAfee:

McAfee acknowledges that he and Faull argued over McAfee’s dogs, several of which had been mysteriously poisoned. Faull was later found with a gunshot wound to the head. McAfee has denied any involvement.

McAfee’s response:

People ask me, ‘How did it feel to kill a man?’ And I can honestly tell them I wouldn’t know, because I never have. I am not a mad man. I am eccentric, gracious, attentive, kind, humorous. We humans are funny creatures.

I see a movie in the making.

The Windows Effect

Good review here of Nokia Lumia 925 running Windows Phone.

With its new metal parts, the Nokia Lumia 925 is a sleek and attractive addition to the Windows Phone 8 range. Does it excite, though? No. It shares most of its key specs with the older Lumia 920 which doesn’t really stack up well against the elite competition such as the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4.

What’s interesting here is that it’s essentially a hardware review. Tech media seems fixated on hardware and yet users actually use software, which is seldom dissected in reviews.

How Apple Could Get Into The Content Business And Why That Won’t Happen

Apple should design and build a car. If they did, it would probably be called a Tesla Model S. Consumer Reports says it’s close to being the best car ever. And it wasn’t designed and built by Apple.

Why not? That’s not how Apple rolls. You’ve probably noticed that Apple doesn’t jump into every opportunity, though the company could easily afford to do just about anything it wants. Like purchase Dell, and then shut it down. Or, do the same with France.

What many of us in the Apple watching business want to see is content on demand. Any TV show, any movie, any music or video, on demand– streamed straight to Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iGlasses and iWatch. Apple has the money to do it but it’s not going to happen.

Why not?

It’s that famed Apple discipline. Historically, at least under Steve Jobs, the company goes into markets with products that make a difference, products that leverage other products or services. This strategy is apparent going back to the Mac. The first iPod was Mac only. iTunes was Mac only. iPhone and iPad share a great ecosystem together with a somewhat anemic cloud service but the world’s largest online media store, and the best app stores.

Apple loves to leverage a new product against current products. And, importantly, Apple loves to make money. The company’s forte’ is well designed products– hardware and software– which work well together, and thrive in the ecosystem.

It makes sense that Apple could do to media what it did to music, apps, and the smartphone and tablet industries, however, it’s beginning to look as though the content business may be coming to Apple. Despite what you read about Netflix or Amazon, Apple’s iTunes Store– just TV shows, movies, rentals, etc.– is much larger and more profitable on a worldwide basis.

The latest trend is that content makers– television networks– are distributing their wares through apps. In the internet future, TV channels will be apps. Whatever you want to watch will be available online– through an app.

Unfortunately, this dramatic shift from cable TV to internet is not likely to happen overnight as there are many players that must be fed. Still, Apple has the money and in Steve Jobs had the discriminating taste to seed development of content that is distributed through App Store apps to Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iWatch and iGlasses. With Jobs gone, who is Apple’s standard-bearer for taste?

Average iTunes Users Spend $40 A Year

From Horace Dediu at ASYMCO, a great chart on how much the average iTunes user spends each year on music, movies, and apps.

Quarterly revenues topped $4 billion (a new high) and the company suggests that this rate is maintainable by stating it has a “$16 billion annual run rate”.

Nobody else has a business that lucrative or growing that fast.

Apple’s Next Insanely Great Thing

Yours truly on Mac360 on Apple’s next big thing.

Here’s one that makes some sense for Apple and the numbers are stunningly huge. Banking. Money. Finance. Or, put more simply, iWallet. Apple has enough cash on hand to fund the mother of all finance groups so that anyone can buy a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

I’m surprised Apple doesn’t make products easier to buy. How many banks have the assets Apple has?

Maybe Apple’s next insanely great thing isn’t a product at all. It could be a service. iWallet. iPay. iCash. iBuy. They all have the ring of some very big numbers.

iWallet. I like it.

What Goes Around, Comes Around. Now It’s Microsoft That Wants Apple To Make Apps For Windows

When Steve Jobs took over at Apple in 1997 his agenda was simple. Shore up the Mac, conserve money, trim down the product line, get to profitability, and focus on the future. Oh, and make sure Microsoft continued to develop Office for the Mac.

Microsoft, haunted by the government for monopoly abuse, wanted to keep Apple alive, if only on life support, so Bill Gates agreed to a five year Office development deal, and tossed in a $150-million investment to sweeten the deal, and keep the feds at bay.

That was then and this is now. Today, the Mac is profitable beyond belief, Microsoft is beleaguered, and Apple has crushed Windows in smartphones and tablets.

Quick, without naming email, browser, or office suite, can you name one of the most used pieces of software on planet earth?

Apple’s iTunes.

Guess what? There’s no iTunes on Windows Phone or Windows RT, and Apple isn’t as likely to be as helpful to Microsoft as Microsoft was to Apple back in 1997.

Why not? Why should Apple help out Microsoft during this time of need? Apple was beleaguered back in the day, and Microsoft helped out? Why doesn’t Apple help Microsoft today?

Because Apple was in dire straights and needed a helping hand, even if one from an enemy. Microsoft remains cash rich because of Windows and Office, but has stumbled badly in mobile devices, relegated to a niche player as Apple and Samsung sew up the profits.

Microsoft could easily help itself by building a better phone, or a better tablet. Instead, mediocrity rules at Microsoft and Apple has little incentive or a compelling reason to help out their former enemy and investor in this time of need.

Paraphrasing the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, there’s ‘no iTunes for you‘, Microsoft.

Facebook ‘Owes Me Billions Of Dollars”

Vin Diesel wants to cash in on his Facebook status:

So, when I had started my page, the only person that had a million fans was Barack Obama. Because it was first-quarter 2009, and he’d just got elected as President, because of social media. So, when I started talking to the fans, I became the No. 1 page in the world. Over Coca-Cola, over huge companies. And it was only because I said: ‘Hi, guys, I love you.’

Diesel’s Facebook page has over 41-million likes. I think they like his abs.

Moms At Walmart

From Eric Schaal in Wall Street Cheat Sheet, the story of Charlene Flether, mom and Walmart employee.

Fletcher earns above the California minimum wage of $8 per hour, her $9.40/hr lands her squarely in the category of working poor (she earns less than $1,500 monthly after taxes). Stacked up against CEO Michael Duke’s annual take of $35 million a year, the moms working at Walmart this Mother’s Day have a reason to be disgruntled.

You cannot live on minimum wage. Besides a board of directors filled with loons, what does Duke do that deserves $35-million a year? Walmart’s stock is up a modest 29-percent since 2003.

What’s wrong when the world’s largest retailer cannot pay employees enough money to live?

Facebook’s 99-cent Black Eye, Or, Why Apple Doesn’t Bother Following The Latest Fads

It wasn’t all that long ago when tech media pundits were falling all over themselves about Facebook Home and the HTC First smartphone. “Apple is doomed,” they cried. The handwriting was on the wall, they said, “Apple needs Facebook Home to survive the coming onslaught of Facebook users moving to a Facebook-centric smartphone.”

Remember the PC netbook? Apple and the Mac were supposedly doomed to niche status because the inexpensive netbook would rule the PC world. Try finding a netbook in any store, or someone carrying around a netbook. Apple avoided the temptation to get all trendy and join the fad and the result is that Apple’s Mac division is more profitable than the next five Windows PC makers. Combined.

So it is with Facebook Home. AT&T just cut the price of the first Facebook Home phone, the HTC First, from $99.99 to a plain old 99 cents.

That’s 99-cents. As in a penny less than a dollar. A single dollar.

Reuters has all the details, but the handwriting on the wall could not be more obvious. Facebook Home has been met with a big yawn by Facebook’s supposedly one billion users.

To be fair about this, cutting the price of a new smartphone isn’t all that unusual, even for AT&T, and even for an Android OS-based smartphone. Doing so a few weeks after launch should raise a few eyebrows, however, even Apple dropped the iPhone’s original price a few months after launch as demand began to match supply.

This is yet another black eye for Facebook and Google’s Android as it represents the failure of yet another marketing gimmick to topple the iPhone from the profitability perch.

What’s wrong with Facebook Home? Facebook Fatigue. Bernhard Warner in Bloomberg points out that teenagers are growing tired of Facebook.

A similar decline in Facebook usage has been reported in North America, Europe, and elsewhere.

Uh oh.

It may be too early to condemn Facebook as a fad, but Facebook Home clearly has yet to meet up with expectations, and represents yet another example of Apple’s famed discipline– avoiding the faddish trends.

That brings up an interesting point about phablets– tablet sized smartphones. While larger smartphones represent a small portion of all smartphones sold, they’ve become more visible in recent months. Is it a fad or the future? Will Apple succumb to the phenomenon or stay the course? Or, just eliminate it altogether by putting a phone in the iPad mini?

A Billion Dollars For Waze?

Facebook is reportedly in talks to buy Waze, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation service app. Should Apple enter the bidding?

Peter Cohan in Forbes:

Apple could come back to Waze but unless Tim Cook offers a much higher offer than Facebook — one it can certainly afford — a meeting of the minds is unlikely… Therefore, I see Waze leaning towards a deal with Facebook.

I like Waze. I use Waze. Waze is worthless in non-metropolitan areas. Could Apple roll their own traffic and navigation service app based on data from every iPhone running the latest iOS?

Who Can You Trust?

From Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Tim Culpan’s Bloomberg report of ‘falling iPad mini demand.’

First, the phrase about a decline in iPad mini revenue is not in quotation marks, suggesting that it came from the reporter, not the source.

Second, have you ever known an Apple supplier to say anything on the record about demand for any of Apple’s products? Not if he or she wants to keep doing business with Tim Cook.

In other words, the line ‘as iPad mini demand falls‘ is made up; titillating conjecture, but not fact.

Bloomberg’s response?

Crickets.

The Tablet Wars: Reading Between The Lines On Tablet Sales, Shipments, And Plain Old Guesses

Too much of my time is devoted to travel. It may sound glamorous, but once you’ve gone to 17 destinations in a few weeks, the travel bug can be declared dead and buried. As it turns out, I was traveling last week when I read a new IDC report about iPad’s market share dipping to 40-percent.

I know, I know. Apple is doomed, right?

Humans are interesting creatures. We keep track of details which are seldom important. What was the highest grossing movie of all time? Wouldn’t it be more telling to know which movie has been seen by the most number of people?

International Data Corporation tracks things, including PCs, smartphones, and now, tablets. Their latest report says Apple’s share of the worldwide tablet market has dropped to under 40-percent.

Oh, the humanity. How can Apple possibly survive?

Let’s read between IDC’s lines to get a clearer picture of what’s actually happening? Why? Because IDC says six out of every 10 tablets is not an iPad. Look around. Does that seem right? Have you seen anything that resembles that ratio?

No, of course not. Why not?

Because the numbers are not true, they’re not factual, therefore, they’re not accurate. First, IDC uses the term shipments. That’s not accurate, either. They don’t track shipments. IDC creates estimates based upon educated guesses.

With one exception, IDC does not count sales or shipments. They simply guess. What’s the exception? Apple provides actual sales numbers for iPad’s sold in any given quarter. Apple is the only company to do so.

When has Amazon ever released a specific number of Kindles sold? Where’s Google’s list of Android tablets sold? What about Microsoft’s Surface?

Crickets.

Samsung and other manufacturers don’t publish their sales numbers for obvious reasons. They don’t know, either. They ship tablets out the door, and IDC and others guess at the number, but it’s all wink wink, nod nod. For all anyone knows, 60-percent of the tablet market could still be sitting in warehouses.

That’s a dirty little secret which is exposed by other data which also requires a little reading between the lines. Other data? Yes, Apple’s iPhone and iPad get used by owners far more than all other mobile devices combined. A good example of real world data comes from NetMarketShare.

Their online tracking data shows iOS device users account for about 60-percent of all mobile device web usage. Android’s total is less than half of Apple’s, but BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and friends are far down the list into insignificant number territory.

My father once said that in war, information is the first casualty. Business can be like war, and accurate information is difficult to obtain and requires a little work. To make it easier, let’s do a simple test. Look around the rest of the day. Chances are very good you’ll see more iPhones than Android smartphones. And you’ll see more iPads than all other tablets combined.

Guesses are made up of numbers, but not all numbers are guesses.