The Biggest Flaw with the App Store
Plain and simple: it’s difficult to find apps. Let me explain.
Because of my ever-curious toddler’s propensity to play (and alter) my iPod Touch, I’m looking for an application that will lock my iPod Touch’s icons. I don’t want them to move or jiggle until I type a password to authorize the changes.
My first search was at the App Store itself. I performed a search for the term “icon lock”. Nada. Typing in search terms is not helping me find an application that will do what I want. This has happened to me on several occasions. Outside of doing a Google search, I wind up finding the specific apps I want via chatting with friends on Twitter.
(Still no luck on finding an app that will do what I want – and I have no desire to jailbreak my iPod to use an unsupported app.)
Which brings me to my main point: the App Store search is GREAT, if you know the name of the application you are looking for – but downright useless if the only thing you have a general idea of the functionality you’re looking for in an app.
Do you agree or disagree? Sound off in the comments below.
-Krishna
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
Mamie
March 8, 2011 at 11:23 amI would like to troll saying that Android is far better, but there is the same problem. Hopefully some people add a great description of their application so that the search engine can find it, but that’s not always done :(
Tom Dell'Aringa
March 8, 2011 at 11:28 amI agree. It’s gotten to the point where there are so many apps, that it becomes a chore to start digging through things. Like you, I generally get things either because they were suggested to me, or I read about them somewhere. Sometimes I will grab an app that is featured, but not that often.
Rene
March 8, 2011 at 11:44 amI think it’s up to the app developers to set this up, not Apple, who is just offering a platform.
Claus Wolf
March 8, 2011 at 12:40 pmI hear your frustration Krishna, but it is only partially Apple’s fault. When they set up the eco system I don’t think they seriously expected to have quite as many apps to handle as they do. However they could do a lot of things to help make it better:
First of all they could and should do a much better job at providing an advanced search. What they have right now is pretty much a joke, but in order to have better advanced search they would need better meta data and that can only be achieved, by either creating a controlled hierarchical vocabulary (thesaurus) or letting developers add their own keywords. Either way for the type of data they’d be looking at it would soon grow to be too large to be truly useful.
Thus I think they should allow their developers to tick features, i.e. uses GPS location services, has webkit browser built in, needs internet connections for some features, subscription based, has in-app purchases and so on. By adding features, already we could reduce the number of items significantly in an advance search.
As for the App you are looking for, I think it would never be allowed by Apple as it is a system utility that would block some basic functionality. Best thing to do is send an enhancement request to Apple, so they’ll add it to their parental controls. I totally see how this would be useful – my toddler is guilty of getting the icons to jiggle and reorder things for me ;) Fortunately my little one can’t delete stuff, as I have disabled that in the parental controls.