60% of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded, not even a single time. Which points out the big problem with the App Store Model, a centralized command structure of the App Store process closes up everything and turns us back to time that pre-dates the modern internet. 1/2 a century at least.
According a breaking report that was just published earlier today
From the article:
The sad thing about this is that it goes against the hopes and dreams of a number of small developers who read about the success that major developers are having. It’s easy to see a game like Angry Birds take off, make a ton of moola, and think that this money tree can be easily planted. The reality is that it takes money for promotion and a whole lot of luck. Adeven CEO Henschel says that without a proper search mechanism in the App Store, the only way to get noticed is through the lists showing the top titles.
This is absolutely the truth. The immediate problem with the current app store setup (that means Google play as well) is that that you really can’t search properly though the hundreds of thousands of apps. You can’t SEO your app properly, you can’t do anything with it to any large extent based on it’s current setup.
This means that only the most popular apps get displayed, and are then enforced with a positive reinforcement cycle (more downloads, more popular, more view time at the expense of newer apps that get a negative reinforcement cycle, less display time , less downloads).
It’s reached the point where the top 25 or so downloaded apps dominate the entire cell phone industry… when potentially #26 is the best app there, it never displayed so no one knows it exists and is caught in the negative reinforcement cycle rather than positive one.
But alas, the positive / negative reinforcement cycle means that only a handful of app stores items will be displayed.
But that’s the only immediate problem the bigger problem is the App Stores themselves. It’s 1950 and there are only 3 channels on the TV. ABC, NBC and CBS. 2012 there are only really 2 App Stores, Apple and Google.
This flies in the face of the whole reason the internet took off.
You can’t use standard web based tools (html, php , mysql, get a domain name and build an app). Yes, technically you can make a webapp… but the only apps that really should exist are webapps.
The store model is broken.
If you build an HTML app, now you have to build an iPhone app, now you have to build an Android App… you now are tripling your effort.. for no real reason other than Apple and Google have dictated to you that you must do such.
It’s a mess, and this needs to stop in order to increase innovation. You can’t have two guys (one at Apple and other one at Google) dictating what the whole direction of the mobile industry… because currently that’s where we are at.
Buy your ads at NBC or ABC … we don’t even have a CBS.