As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules.

"And there are all these stupid requirements. I need at least X screenshots, and they have to be this exact resolution blah blah blah. On top of that, it took so long to get approved. My ADHD brain really suffered waiting for the gratification."

I would hate to browse a store where the products didn't have at least X screenshots with at least X resolution, etc etc. The process for getting into the store shouldn't be easy and the quality bar should be high. I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary.

> As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules.

I have seen this view lot from apple users. And I really feel sad that no body gives the enough credit to dev community because of whom you're getting these apps in first place, not from Apple directly (And I am sure, if they do, heck they will charge you like hell).

Please understand it is mutual platform for apple/google, devs and consumers. Now days, Apple and consumers has not much to lose as they have enough apps but dev's life is becoming difficult day by day - apple/google account charges, huge margin-cut over in-app-payments, rejection without any proper reason, no immediate support, bad apis and documentation. I am happy I quit professional mobile app making for good.

> I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary.

I wish you could pay devs instead of Apple to held this bar high.

People give plenty of credit to devs. Apps that meet the quality bar to stay in the App Store make way more from iOS users than Android.

There are thousands and thousands of apps to sift through. It’s good that iOS helps filter out the shit where devs can’t be bothered to do basic user friendly things like providing screenshots, etc.

Do they make more from iOS users than from the subset of Android users that have phones priced similarly to iPhone?

Since they make more from iOS users overall, they definitely make more than from a small subset of Android users.

My point is app developers rightly care about their total income, not about the per-capita income from a tiny slice of the userbase.

> Since they make more from iOS users overall*

* In the United States of America

Many American app makers hit a ceiling when they try to expand internationally and they discover that for the rest of the world, Android is both dominant, and more profitable.

Globally the apple App Store is about 2x revenue. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/05/app-store-earns-7...

And ex-US?

Per user, duh.

> I wish you could pay devs instead of Apple to held this bar high.

Let’s be honest, the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart. At the dawn of the app stores you could find a ton of free apps and games from hobbyists, but now it’s all about squeezing money. And the guy in the article didn’t have to publish the app in the first place, could have uploaded the app to the phone directly through the dev tools.

> Let’s be honest, the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart.

Apple/Google take 30 % of that fart, so you guess what they get at end.

> At the dawn of the app stores you could find a ton of free apps and games from hobbyists, it’s all about squeezing money.

Well apple charge you $100 per year to upload app, are you kidding ? Plus they don't let you have another store. Everything should must go thr' their wall, so no chance to avoid charge.

> And the guy in the article didn’t have to publish the app in the first place, could have uploaded the app to the phone directly through the dev tools.

How many phones he can upload it honestly ?

Anyway, the point I am tring to say is, Apple/Google are not valuing dev community as they used to and devs are taken granted for. They should care devs as they care for consumers PR as it is mutual platform

> Well apple charge you $100 per year to upload app, are you kidding ?

IIRC Apple charged you 100$ as early as in 2013, that's when I bought a subscription myself for the first time. But the app landscape was much different back then and it didn't stop hobby developers from publishing.

Sure, it did. When I first got an ipod touch over a decade ago, I was excited to have something customizable. After all, all the marketing was focused on how wide a selection of apps existed, and the general vibe was that it was a good platform to develop for. I'd have loved to have made small utility apps for myself.

But, part of writing things for myself is wanting to share them with friends should they ask. And that requires either a $100 fee, or walking each friend through the process of requesting a developer license in order to run an unpublished app. The fee is a pittance for anybody doing large development, but was far more than college-me wanted to spend on an entrance fee to a language.

> Apple/Google are not valuing dev community as they used to and devs are taken granted for

I mean, it's about making money, App Store is not a public good. If developers feel there's a better opportunity they can pursue other platform, but it seems like Google and Apple succeed at making the money-making developers happy. What else should matter to a public company?

> Apple/Google take 30 % of that fart, so you guess what they get at end.

Typically 15% now.

> Typically 15% now.

Only because of the (still ongoing) anti-trust lawsuit against them.

That 30% is also the industry standard. (Microsoft, Google, Sony, Nintendo, Epic etc). Which has only recently started to shift.

Didn’t Apple basically set the standard? Seems like a weird way to justify it.

What did you expect? The process to get an app on the store is complicated, time consuming and you even need to pay for it. Hobbyists are just publishing web apps instead nowadays and couldn't be bothered to publish on the app store. It's simpler, more accessible and you're guaranteed it will work. Only companies or people who don't really have any other choice do that.

That's also what came to my mind after reading the article: why didn't he simply write a web app? His girlfriend might even have used that because it was only browsing to a URL instead of installing an app on the phones of all guests.

PWA are crippled on apple phones.

That's not a surprise because it would make a dent into Apple's profits but did he need a PWA for picking a movie to watch? Share a URL to friends or place a QR code in the living room and that's it.

> What did you expect?

Many years ago, I got excited when I got a Nokia phone which supported Java ME. Finally, here was my chance to put some useful stuff on _MY_ phone I thought. Then I learned what I needed to get a single copy of something on a single phone (after signing up for the dev program). I don't remember the details, but, clearly, the point was you needed to be a part of an international conglomerate if you wanted to be able to ship awful clones of 80s 8-bit games.

The messed up nightmare "mobile computing" was going to devolve into became apparent to me then. Nothing one can do about it. You either use the stuff everyone else is using or your are "out". Still, I had expected to be able to attach a cable and copy a blob from _MY_ computer to _MY_ phone.

I know this is about app stores. Well, in this case, I expect to be able to put a blob somewhere and point people to it for them to install if they so choose.

And, no, web pages that try to act like apps don't really count.

> the majority of the apps charge in-app for every fart.

Honestly, if I find an app that I'd like to pay for, I do a quick google search to find their web app. If they have one, I pay for it there and use it on my phone.

If it's a game I actually enjoy, I might make a single in-app purchase for what I think the game is worth, usually around $5-10.

It would be nice if you could install apps without the app store, right now you can't choose anything else w/o jailbreaking.

> As a user, I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules.

Presumably you're speaking from the Apple side of things, because the Play Store is a fragmented wasteland of low-effort/sometimes-malicious shovelware that barely functions.

To me that means that the hoops Google makes one jump through for app publishing are accomplishing next to nothing with regards to app quality.

> the Play Store is a fragmented wasteland of low-effort shovelware

Wait how does this differ from the appstore?

If you think that AppStore is a wasteland, don’t even look at Play Store unless you want a PTSD.

They're both quite awful but one thing that really irks me is that on the Apple Store, every search for something first shows a result from a competitor product.

Search for WhatsApp? First result is an ad for Twitter and WhatsApp is the second result, half hidden (on an iPhone SE). Search for my bank? First result is another bank. Firefox? First result is Chrome. Doctolib (the app for taking covid vaccination appointments in France, and the main doctors appointment service in general)? Another one that's probably more or less a scam. Google Maps? You get an ad for Coyote.

It wouldn't be so bad if the ads didn't look almost exactly like real search results, and if the actual results were not hidden below the bottom of the screen.

The general quality of apps on the Google Play Store might be worse, but this behaviour never happens there. When you look for an app name, you get that app and not one of their competitors that paid more.

Having used both, they're both pretty evenly awful.

The Windows App Store has entered the game...

The thing about the windows app store is that there is quality, I kid you not, on that store, but the curation and search are both so abysmal you would never know. I have found quality apps on social media for the windows store for surface devices, and then when I search the exact title in the store windows can't find anything so it shows me a catalouge of decade old b movies.

Agree - both app stores seem to have their fair share of junky apps.

There's still a dozen different Bonzi Buddy clones on the Mac App Store.

Why would you care about applications that you wouldn't use or even know that they exist though? Do you also care about web pages you don't know about? The store just wouldn't put such "non-conforming" apps at the top of search results.

This is how I feel. Regardless of whether or not my app has images or not, nobody is going to come across it.

I don't think I've ever just gone "App Window Shopping"

Maybe other people do, though. I don't know.

I do app window shopping, but only on F-Droid. I rarely install any of the apps I see, but occasionally I stumble across an open-source tool I didn't know I wanted. E.g. recently I found Pocket Paint, a neat little drawing app. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/ I mostly use it for quickly annotating screenshots, which it's much better suited for than my previous solution of just using the stock image viewer's editing capabilities. Especially Pocket Paint's layer support is quite handy for quickly hiding/showing annotations.

I window shop for apps - mostly games, honestly. One of the great things about a phone is that some things, like waiting in a waiting room or spending time on the toilet, are simply less boring because of games. And while I have a few that stay on my phone/tablet, sometimes I Just want new adventures.

Playing bad games is now part of my life experience, kinda like trying out bad movies.

That happened in the very first few years of the app stores. People were paying ridiculous amounts of money for them, especially on the App Store. Then the stores were snowed under with apps, undiscoverability prevailed, lately complemented by the fear of installing badly vetted malicious apps.

I didn't install any game on my last two phones. I install only mandated apps (banking, car sharing, etc) and open source apps after I checked that they actually have a repository and they are not abandoned. I'm rather using F-Droid than the Play Store now.

Oddly enough I was just thinking the same thing. From what I can remember every ( Android) app that I've ever installed has come from a recommendation from somewhere else. I can't see how you'd ever get any traction if you mainly relied on the app store search results.

It is annoying when you are looking for an app and have to go through 1000 of similar sounding apps. Then you filter it to 300 that seem like someone put effort into and the can find the one that is actually working only after trying 20.

I'd like to filter out the ones that demand access to my contacts list or network access. Why can't we filter on permissions yet?

I want to filter based on price and whether an app has IAP. I’m specifically never looking for “freemium” anything and always have to scroll through a mountain of junk to find anything.

Informing the user vs. imposing upon the user.

For the discerning app downloader such as yourself, Play Store could have a tier of approval levels for apps. Toy apps and ones for friends like this could be rated lowest tier, and buyer beware.

Imagine if a website had to prove its value and CSS quality before getting a domain name.

The hurdles are high but if you’ve been doing mobile releases for a while, they aren’t that bad. There are more asset requirements now but I think dealing with iTunes Connect back in the day and all of its friction was harder.

They really aren't that high. I had to create a listing for my test apps at work one day and I was able to create everything I needed in like 30 minutes, tops. And that was without actually knowing what I'd need ahead of time.

shrug some people struggle with it after also forking over the payments. App Store asset and meta wrangling is a skill in of itself.

I think you misunderstood what the poster wrote. The complaint was:

> and they have to be this exact resolution

And your comment was:

> screenshots with at least X resolution

The problem isn't that Apple forces you to have a high quality screenshot, they require a handful of very specific pixel dimensions, don't tell you what device that corresponds to, so you have to spend way to much time trying to make screen shots on different devices with the simulator and it's annoying, especially if you don't do it often.

Also, they don't actually check if the screenshot is a real screenshot or of good quality. One time I just gave up and resized the screenshots to the required pixel dimensions and they accepted it.

How do I unlock that mythical high quality app experience? 99% of the stuff is crap adware and copypasted apps, letting some indie in it is not going to significantly move the average.

Step one is becoming an Apple shareholder. The next step is posting about how great they are on the internet.

Not sure if joking but I search for apps on /r/androidapps.

Tired of this take. Why would removing these rules suddenly cause all apps to goto shit?

You can't stop shitty apps by imposing more and more rules anyway.

The affect here is that everyone writing apps for fun or passion (or just to share a quick solution to a personal problem) gets filtered out while the scammers who pay freelancers some fraction of minimum wage fill the store with garbage.

I really wish Apple and Google had a Beta/Alpha Store. Folks like you can use the Primary Privileged Store. The less expensive, cheap/free and not ship-shape-to-AppGoog standards can be in the Alpha-Beta Cheapskate Store.

I won't be surprised if this store actually became more popular than the Primary one.

> I'm very happy the stores impose stringent rules.

That is assuming those rules are fair to a degree, not Anti Competitive and they do impose it for the quality and security as they say they do. All of which I will strongly support. But they dont. ScreenShots isn't even the tip of the Iceberg.

Also, the screenshots and such aren't required if you just want to use TestFlight to share with a few friends. Of course, each build only lasts 90 days, so that could get tedious in the long run.

I can't speak from a position of knowledge as I don't handle the Apple side of things at all but we've had our builds removed from testflight for petty reasons like that and it was up for significantly less than 90 days.

Great, I am with you. The app store should have strict standards so you know what you're getting if you purchase from there. Fantastic service for people who want that.

Now, please just let me publish an app not using the store. Me and other people like me prefer lower burden and lower quality. We won't mess up your perfect store, you don't even need to know we exist. Just let us enjoy our little world.

The app-stores are filled with millions of garbage apps despite the ridiculous restrictions.

At least you can see screenshots of what those ‘garbage apps’ are.

You mean the arbitrary process that lets through absolute garbage clone apps everywhere, but blocks extremely high quality open source software because it can't control and monetize it?

Yeah, no thanks.

It would be great if the stringent rules filtered out the garbage apps (the fraudulent apps, the ad-heavy apps, the apps with overtly fake reviews, etc) which feature prominently in app store search results. As such, these “stringent rules” feel like quality theater.

> the apps with overtly fake reviews

View the app reviews in another region. The amount of spam is significantly lower (~0%) and it's mostly people complaining.

I keep hearing how App store is stringent on rules. There are plenty of terrible apps either don't do they advertise or totally trying to scam users. I have reported to Apple before, and they just say you can uninstall them and get a refund but they won't do anything about them.

"I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary. "

I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high!

I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used.

This logic is not working.

Apple, and ABC corp, and any other companies can have app stores.

If you want to shop at the 'absurdly high standards store' that's totally fine, but otherwise it's anti-competitive.

There's no reason 'Person A' can't send an app to 'Person B' if they want.

It works on Mac, Windows, Android, Linux and everywhere else.

> I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high! > I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I live there is a tax-funded Safety and Chemicals Agency whose job is to keep dangerous and malicious physical products out of the market. There is no equivalent for software.

Well, now that I think of it, CERT is kind of similar.

The problem is that CERT can only react to problems after they have happened. For physical products, you first have to meet CE standards to even get to the market. You can give the the label to your own product if you want to take the risk, but unlike software there is an official barrier to entry. I'm not sure if it's even possible to develop similar standards for software.

Sure there is, its called a package repository. See Debian or Arch for some good examples.

They're specific to Linux distribution families, so they don't really apply to those who are running Android or iOS. Also, getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store (see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#How_do_I_get_a_spon...) and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app.

> getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store ... and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app.

Good. That's why the quality is so high.

Pro monopolist app store people are like Chinese citizens so happy with the CCP 'because stability'. It's bizarre.

Android, Mac, Windows, Linux are reasonably safe platforms, there's zero reason why people can't chose to download the software they want.

Apple's 'it's the security' line is the most obvious giant lie, it's there to protect their control over the platform and that's that.

The difference is that you can buy a PinePhone and run whatever you want on it, but CCP doesn't offer a similar choice.

I thought the original subject was that there's too much gatekeeping. Or is there just double standard, so that gatekeeping is good for Linux distros and bad for commercial app stores?

Apps are not a risk to your health.

Can we not have random inappropriate and uninformed comments about ADHD, please? Whether intended or not, this comment plays into old, tired stereotyped thinking that really, all ADHD people need is to have more self-control. Thinking that ADHD is about self-control and not wanting to delay gratification shows a complete lack of understanding of what the disorder actually entails (in particular, ADHD qualifies as neurodiversity, and shares many genetic indicators and symptoms with autism spectrum conditions).

On top of that, it's completely unnecessary for the point you are trying to make.

The ADHD bit was in the OP. Don’t scold your parent poster

I was directly quoting the article...

I don't think comparing Google (Play Store) and Apple (App store) really compare here. Google does let you just publish your app, Apple doesn't

1. The author could have offered an .apk outside the play store. Yes, friends would have had to enable side loading so that sucks but once enabled it's trivial to install .apks. This is no different than MacOS or Windows at some level. No similar option exist on iOS

2. The author could have used Progressive Web Apps and just skipped the store entirely on Android and send friends a link. Again, no similar option really exists on iOS.

The situation to me is, Google provides one app store of many. A quick search for "Android App Stores" brings articles listing 10 or more alternate stores. The fact that the "Play Store" won't take your product is no different than your local supermarket not taking your product. As long as you can still reach your users directly or make your own store then it's all good from my POV. Google has made Android so all of that is possible. Same as Windows/Linux/MacOS

Apple on the other hand, it's the App store or GTFO.

> The author could have used Progressive Web Apps and just skipped the store entirely on Android and send friends a link. Again, no similar option really exists on iOS.

I don't understand this. iOS has a browser, you can use web apps.

iOS has a crippled browser which purposefully does not support PWAs, with notifications and such.

iOS does support PWA. Notifications are not supported, but PWA is more than notifications.

Internet Explorer 9 does support HTML5. <Missing feature name> are not supported, but HTML5 is more than <missing feature name>.

Let's not mince words now. Apple purposefully cripples Safari to make native apps more competitive because they get a cut of every sale and it boosts their claims about the AppStore too.

Mincing words is claiming that iOS does not support PWAs. That's false. iOS support for PWAs is worse than Android, that's true. Whether that's because of AppStore or not, one can only speculate, but it might be true. Still there are plenty of useful APIs supported on Safari, there is dedicated support for PWAs, there's dedicated support for creating home screen icons. That's enough for many web apps.

Only the Play Store can update apps in the background without requiring user confirmation every time. Other stores are no real alternatives, Google remains a monopoly.

Exactly. It is bundled even tighter than Internet Explorer was with Windows. At least there you could install another browser and have full functionality. With the Play Store, no other marketplace is allowed to replicate the full functionality it has.

Wont making it as a PWA circumvent the app store restrictions?

Yep. It just wouldn't work offline because offline PWAs are a PITA.

I do wonder though why fully static client side only PWAs need to be so complex to make.

I expect a lot of it is Apple purposely crippling Safari's offline capabilities so developers will have no alternative to making an app.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53439379/ios-12-does-not...

Whereas all my native apps are positively dreamy without internet connection...

Thanks :) I appreciate it.

I also meant this to be a learning experience/just for my friends, so I totally feel that frustration!

Android allows side loading apps, no need to pay for Google's store and the service it provides.

Same here. Published 2 apps over the time. Both got removed within less than 12 months despite running well on most devices and requiring less permissions than any concurrent app.

I simply decided its not worth my time.

agreed! publishing is the hardest part.

I’m still confused why people think that publishing apps to the App Store is a right and not a privilege.

Because iPhones are general-purpose computers, not video game consoles. And they are the property of their owners, not of Apple. Independent developers have not just a right but a God-given right to write code for general-purpose user-owned computers without interference from Apple, and the fact that they cannot do so means Apple is violating that right and they (Apple) should receive the pointy end of a stick until they change their ways or be legislated out of existence.

The distinction you’re trying to make between an iPhone and a game console isn’t very clear.

Developers have been conditioned to know they cannot develop games for consoles without the manufacturer's permission, but we expect to be able to develop applications for general-purpose computers freely. And the iPhone is clearly in the latter category regardless of what Apple calls it, because of the range of things it can do.

Agreed; all of them should be general-purpose computers, neither should be subsidized by software sales and neither should be locked down.

> Because iPhones are general-purpose computers, not video game consoles.

You just pulled that of a thin air. I mean, a latest Samsung fridge is a general-purpose computer as well, so...

> And they are the property of their owners, not of Apple. You know what you're buying, so just stop buying it. Pinephone ships in April.

A Samsung fridge ought to be user-programmable too. And I do plan to buy an unencumbered phone when one of them becomes stable enough for daily use.

Iphones try very hard to look like general purpose computers; that's why everyone was so pissed when they pushed that U2 album, it pierced the veil.

Apple explicitly markets that the iPhone is locked down.

How is that ‘trying hard’ to look like a general purpose computer?

Broadly speaking, a general purpose computer is one that can do anything (like an Apple IIe) and the opposite is one that is constrained to do a few specific things (like an ATM). Whether an iphone (or a wintel computer with UEFI, or an Android phone locked by the hardware manufacturer, or etc etc) qualifies is a matter of semantics, and not interesting to argue about; I elided this distinction because (I imagined) the kind of people posting here would be familiar with it and know what I meant.

A more nitpick-proof way to phrase my point would be that an iphone is a general purpose computer controlled by Apple, and it tries very hard to look like a general purpose computer controlled by the person that bought it. The customers want to have their cake and eat it too; they want the power of a general purpose computer, and the security of a locked-down appliance. You can't have both, but Apple's size and popularity is a testament to how close they have managed to get.

In my opinion they're not trying very hard. It's called "phone", not "computer" to start with.

Because these people literally pay for that? There is a 30% some cut even on the revenue apart from the yearly pay the dev needs to pay to the platform.

Imagine if you pay for your coffee and while you're drinking it the waiter decides to take it back with no explanations given. Just randomly barging in on the service you paid for!

When did anyone say that? Apple and Google offer a service to app developers to host their app, and some developers are complaining it's too difficult to use.

> some developers are complaining it's too difficult to use

The guy in the article is complaining it's hard to publish an app since you need to upload enough high-res screenshots. I mean, yeah? Try "publishing" your backend on AWS, it's not a walk in the part either.

Because the App Store is a requirement to get software to run on their family's bought and owned hardware, in this case?

You can pay for developer account and connect your devices. Then you can easily install your builds. It's $100/year, but Apple hardware is not cheap anyway, consider it like iOS "pro".

Don't buy it, there're plenty of alternatives.