Im not usually someone who posts negative stuff, but my god has the Appstore gone down the shitter.
For context, for the last ~3,5 years I wasn’t really actively using any iOS devices. I had an iPad but used it rarely and only really as a Video machine. But now I’m setting up a XS I got for a killer price used (<60€) and of course I looked into the Appstore what the hot new Apps are. And my god nearly everything either constantly asks you for a subscription to use basic shit, is slow af or full of ads.
For example the „Favorite of the week“ an App called iScanner in my case took 4 seconds (!) to show me anything, which an is abysmal launch time, then shows me the Google ad tracking dialog followed by a clicking the „next“ button 5 times to show me nonsense company propaganda, followed by dialog to subscribe for 4,99€ a month. For a fucking document scanning app. And Apple has the gull to put this garbage in their weekly curated recommendations! And this isn’t the only example. 80% of Apps I downloaded today were removed within 5 minutes.
I’m honestley smitten by how bad things seem to have gotten. Really the only saving grace is that Apples own built-in Apps have gotten really good, in most cases to the point where downloading something else seems unnecessary. But still things seem to have taken a nose dive over the last 3 years.
Also to more active Apple users whats your way to find high quality Apps?
One of the things you’re seeing these days are apps made with bloated frameworks, so they’re cross-platform and easy to develop. In theory it’s great that anyone can make an app for any device with little-to-no code required, but it results in apps with absurd load times, ad bloat, and usability problems. And that’s across the board (though FOSS seems to buck that trend a bit still).
As an example, my kid’s school uses an app called Seesaw. It’s straight-up garbage. It takes several seconds to open, the back button doesn’t work, etc. At least it’s not littered with ads, but it’s a small mercy.
The web is experiencing the same thing. 60MB of ad services being loaded with every click, ads taking up 90% of screen real estate, slow everything, etc. I use some older hardware, but even websites that are mostly text are unusable without a strict adblocker. Not just annoying to use, but completely unusable.
These big frameworks were developed for large, high-traffic sites like Facebook. In theory, they’ll work for your AI-generated blog, but they’ll suck to load if you host them with a $5/month hosting plan and load 300 ad-related things on each page.
The solution is to create native apps and websites, or at least use frameworks appropriate to the task. But that would require people to give a shit, so I don’t see that happening often outside of FOSS projects (which are often a labor of love).
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
This is a large reason why I dreaded Apple making iOS apps a priority for the Mac. Everything wrong about the mobile model becomes a first class citizen.
I think most people in here are overthinking things. The simple fact is all the low hanging fruit apps were created a long time ago. There just isn’t much left to do with apps anymore, particularly from an independent developer perspective. So what you have now is a bunch of new developers recreating the wheel trying to make a buck with ads or tricking people into subscriptions after a free trial.
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The ushering of the $1 price point did it. Most apps aren’t worth even that, so the developers struggle to make ends meet, resorting to subs and ads to make it work. Even the ‘legitimate’ app developers suffer because a $60 app looks ridiculous in a sea of $1s, so they have to swallow the pill and undercharge, hoping the volume would make up for it. It’s sad, and given that most successful apps aren’t the first from a developer, and well, you get the picture.
Oh. The ‘idea’ guys and the app store get their cut, regardless.
I don’t think I’ve ever gone on the App Store hoping it would have good recommendations for new things to look at. Do people find good apps that way? 99.9% of the time opening an App Store I smash the search button so nothing loads and search for the app I want.
I rarely touch the App store to “find” something. If I discover I need an App for something, that’s when I just go grab it from the App store.
Trying to peruse the App Store is a nightmare. there are numerous things wrong with it, especially the rating systems and how ratings keep certain apps constantly in everyone’s faces, despite getting horrible recent reviews.
This is crazy timing because I just had the mirror experience while trying to find a scanner app for an android phone I wanted to use around the house as a smart home remote. The play store was a dumpster fire. I bought the Quick Scan app (Dev is iSolid) on iOS and was willing to pay good money for one on the Android phone too, but every single scanner app on Android had ridiculous subscriptions. A few were $20 a month!
Genius scan is free and pretty good.
Auto export is locked behind the ultra subscription at $3/mo or $30/year. I’m not against subscriptions or anything, I just don’t think the feature is worth that price. I don’t want their cloud storage and whatever else comes with the ultra tier.
Check your previously purchased and installed apps to get back non-shit stuff.
It’s really crazy how the only innovation we’ve seen the last decade from major tech companies is them making their products progressively worse for the consumers while they leech ever increasing amounts of data out of everything and hiding free features behind subscriptions. Hell man, I’ve had companies that I paid lifetime licenses for just completely break our agreement and roll out a subscription model, while also removing all of the features that made the product great to begin with (Spark email app).
The Apple Store was and is a great example of enshittification. Apple has everyone locked into it, and they make it impossible to search for what many of us want: free, ad-free, and if possible open source. That shows their values, their values are not your values, and they never will be.
