After months of blogging drought, Marco Arment publishes another great article, Developer relations. I kept nodding all the way through, and this passage inspired me to chime in based on personal experience as a power user / informed customer:

Apple further extends the value argument, and defends their justification for forced commissions, by claiming responsibility for and ownership of the customer relationship between all iOS users and each app they choose to use.

This argument only makes sense — and even then, only somewhat — when apps are installed by a customer browsing the App Store, finding an app they hadn’t previously heard of, and choosing to install it based on App Store influence alone.

But in the common case — and for most app installations, the much more common case — of searching for a specific app by name or following a link or ad based on its developer’s own marketing or reputation, Apple has served no meaningful role in the customer acquisition and “deserves” nothing more from the transaction than what a CDN and commodity credit-card processor would charge.

The idea that the App Store is responsible for most customers of any reasonably well-known app is a fantasy. 

I’ve purchased or downloaded apps from the App Store since the beginning, and I can confirm everything Arment says. 

Let’s start with iOS. Since 2008, I’ve accumulated about 250 apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch. It’s not an incredibly high number, and it includes apps that are now no longer available on the Store. Of course, the first years of the App Store were the most active for me as a customer: lots of new and interesting applications, lots of exploring. Those were exciting times indeed. As I tweeted recently, the sum of the apps I’ve purchased over the past four years doesn’t even reach the number of apps I purchased in 2010 alone. Then over the years things started to settle, and I started getting more and more selective. The bulk of the apps I still use today on all my iOS devices are apps I purchased around the 2009–2015 era.

But how did I find all those apps, anyway? Here’s a (surely incomplete) list:

• Personal recommendations from friends
• Recommendations on social networks
• Recommendations on personal tech blogs I follow via RSS
• News from app developers I was already following
• Marketing efforts by the app developers themselves
• Reviews from websites and portals that have been app-review-oriented from the beginning. Sites like Beautiful Pixels, and the now sadly defunct AppStorm Network in particular.

A unique resource worth mentioning is AppShopper, which has been both a website and an iOS app itself. Sadly it doesn’t work anymore, but when it did, I remember thinking that is how Apple’s App Store app should have worked. The app was efficient and well-designed, and it favoured discoverability by doing what Apple’s been trying to do since the major redesign of the App Store app a few iOS versions ago. At least 45% of the apps I have on my iOS devices were discovered thanks to AppShopper alone.

On the other hand, if I had to approximate a number to tell you how many apps I have discovered simply by accessing the App Store app and — without actively searching anything in particular — just finding an interesting app out of sheer exploration, then I’d say no more than ten apps in total. In the whole history of the App Store.

What’s remarkable is actually how many ‘misses’ I’ve got thanks to the App Store, especially in the case of Mac software. By ‘misses’ I mean when you realise you’d like to have an app for a specific task, you don’t find any recommendations via the usual channels, you resort to exploring the App Store in the hope you’ll find something useful, and you end up downloading one or more apps to try out and see if there’s a viable candidate. Apps that in most cases turn out to be underwhelming at best, or don’t really do what you wanted the way you wanted, or are just terribly-put-together pieces of software. 

Search has always been one of the App Store’s weak spots. As someone still using several vintage iOS devices, it would be nice to be able to search for apps that are still on the App Store but have lower system requirements. Instead I have to resort to launching a browser and perform a search like this:

site:itunes.apple.com/us "requires iOS 5"

Given the sheer quantity and varying quality of apps it offers, a place like the App Store — both on iOS and Mac OS — should have some kind of Advanced Search facility, a way of filtering or otherwise fine-tuning your searches. Instead it’s still a mess, and even when you know the name of the app you’re seeking or the name of its developer, often it doesn’t appear among the first search results. To be fair, the situation has improved over the years, but the way sponsored apps and ads are given precedence still messes up search results a bit.

It’s a pity that app review portals like AppStorm have disappeared today. Its format was great: there was a staff made of curators who really cared, offering well-written reviews that were not too long, not too brief, with a final rating from 0 to 10. There were app round-ups, so you could have an idea of, say, which were the seven most notable productivity apps of the month. There were news and opinion pieces. 

Even with the recent restructuring and redesign of both the Mac and iOS App Stores, even with the undoubtedly useful Today section, I’ve had a hard time finding new apps ‘blind’, just relying on the search & discover features of the App Stores themselves. Marco Arment is entirely right — the App Store has been little more than a conduit for purchasing and installing apps. In my personal experience, after 13 years purchasing apps, the App Store itself has had next to zero influence over my decision whether to buy an app or not. In the sheer majority of cases, I already knew what I was looking for, and I already knew it was going to be a good-quality app.