Solving the App Store Discovery Problem with App Playlists and Good Taste
It’s common knowledge that there are too many apps on the App Store, with no reliable way of discovering the good ones. It’s like panning for gold: piled on every hidden gem is a heap of worthless lumps.
Most of the attempts to solve the problem lean on shoddy software algorithms. They’re blunt tools at best, and games for crooks at worst. From “What’s Hot” to the top free/paid/grossing sections, the algorithm-based lists of apps have spawned a cottage industry of companies like TapJoy and AppGratis, which promise to pump up downloads in exchange for thousands of dollars from desperate developers. There’s also the “Genius” recommendation engine, which isn’t vulnerable to app marketing tricks, but in my experience it has never produced a recommendation that matched the quality of a recommendation from a friend with good taste.
Taste is the missing ingredient in App Store discovery thus far. People with good taste, whether in apps or otherwise, nourish their taste by continually looking for things that stretch the boundaries of what they know and like. I don’t know if I have good taste, but I try to. When a friend first played Tom Waits for me, I was still listening to godawful Dave Matthews Band and Korn. I hated Tom Waits. Eventually I learned how to love him. Tom Waits’ work is music about music. When my mind finally snapped into that higher register, my taste expanded. I learned a new way of listening.
Your taste in apps can grow in the same way, but no algorithm can take you there. Only the good taste of a friend can help. This is why the App Store needs “app playlists,” a list of all the apps currently installed on the iOS devices of anyone with an iTunes account — one playlist per account.
Consider the failure that was Ping. Ping’s failure is a lesson to learn, not a fate to repeat. Ping tried to be too many things, worst of all a new social network. It missed the crucial element that could have made it powerful: taste. As my brother pointed out to me, Ping should have been nothing more than a way to snoop through my friends’ album collections, with a buy button next to each one, and a “Buy All“ button at the top. We improve our taste by absorbing the tastes of people whom we admire.
App playlists should be rigorously simple: just a list of apps. Not all the apps ever downloaded, but the apps that a given user currently has installed on their device. The assumption is that if somebody has an app on their device, they probably like it. App playlists should be given top-level priority via their own tab in the App Store. When selected, that tab should contain two main screens: one for recent activity, and one for a list of all the people you follow. When viewing a playlist, you should be able to buy each app individually, or buy them all with a single tap of a “Buy All” button at the top of the screen. The playlist view should look just like the current “Purchased” screen in the Updates tab.
App playlists would succeed where other attempts have failed because they would be effortless. Even the most esoteric high-quality app is downloaded by the developer’s friends and Twitter followers. It would take no extra work for these “promoting” users to share their new discoveries. Simply downloading an app and keeping it would suffice.
There are a number of ways Apple could build the social graph behind this. They could do it the same way they built Game Center, whose popularity is the strongest counterargument to any Ping-hating naysayers. Alternatively, Apple could require linking to a third-party account like App.net or Twitter — App.net is especially poised to back this kind of service, with its powerful, open-ended API. However Apple builds the social graph, it should only be used to keep track of following status. There should be no comments, likes, reposts, or anything of that nature. The problem of App Store discovery is not due to a lack of social media coverage or bad algorithms. The real problem is a failure to empower people to share their good taste.
Pencil Stylus Review
Since I received one last week, I’ve been jotting and sketching with a Pencil stylus from Fifty Three, makers of the Paper drawing app for iPad. Paper, which was already my favorite iOS app, promised to be even better when paired with the Pencil stylus. That promise is mostly fulfilled.
From bottom: Pencil, Maglus, and Bamboo styluses.
My Pencil arrived packaged in a cute cardboard tube that opens from the top like a tiny diploma canister. Pencil communicates wirelessly with the Paper app via Bluetooth, so there is an internal battery that requires charging. A warning label on a protective wrapper around the stylus reminded me about the battery. Fortunately, my stylus was already fully charged.
Pairing the stylus was easy. A short video showed me how to do it. You press the tip of the stylus against a spot on the left edge of the tool tray. It pairs after pressing and holding that spot for a few seconds — faster than I was expecting, but not as fast as I would like. It is disappointing that the stylus must be re-paired after an extended period without using it. In practice, I have found that I need to pair the stylus every time I pick up my iPad. Your experience may differ, since I probably use my iPad less than most folks.
You don’t need to pair Pencil to use it as a stylus. Pairing is only necessary to unlock the features specific to the Paper app. You can see these features here. All of them work as advertised, almost without caveat. Even the palm rest detection was perfect. The eraser was the only new feature to give me trouble. The eraser tip’s shape, a wide thin rectangle, is different from the shape actually used by the app, a small circle. This makes it hard to judge what areas you’ll actually be erasing.
As a stylus, Pencil is better than most of the others I’ve tried, but it is not the best. That accolade still belongs to the Maglus by Applydea.
Pencil’s tip collapses easily and requires too much force to trigger a touch recognition. This is a common problem with every stylus I’ve used except the Maglus. The black material at Pencil’s tip may be resilient, but it feels fragile. It buckles under the tip of my finger. By comparison, the Maglus’ tip is sturdy, and feels paradoxically stiffer as I apply more and more force. The tip retains more of its resting shape under pressure than the tips of other styluses, making the Maglus the most accurate stylus I’ve used.
Like the Maglus, Pencil is shaped like a carpenter’s pencil, though Pencil’s shape is much closer to the real thing. Pencil’s body feels smooth and light — too light, I think. I ordered the walnut version. It’s definitely machined from real wood, but hollowed out until the walls of the stylus are thin. A matte finish was applied thinly over the fine grain, leaving behind a satisfying texture. The part line where the black tip meets the wood exterior would benefit from higher manufacturing tolerances. This part line is where the electronics separate from the body when you need to recharge the battery. There’s a distracting contrast there, unfortunately placed right where your fingers spend the most time. I feel anxious that I might break what feels like a fragile seal.
In contrast, the Maglus is a tank, constructed from a solid piece of aluminum. It’s pleasantly heavy and practically indestructible. Both Pencil and the Maglus have magnets embedded in their bodies to make it easy to stow them on your iPad’s Smart Cover or on the side of a filing cabinet. Pencil’s magnet is much weaker than the Maglus’ magnet, and placed near the eraser end, making it harder to attach it to your iPad with confidence. The Maglus’ magnet is in the middle, right under the black rubber skids, and is so strong that I don’t think I could ever accidentally brush it off.
If you love the Paper app as much as I do, you’ll find that Pencil is an indispensable companion when using that app. While it isn’t the most comfortable or accurate stylus you can find, the features it unlocks in the app are enough to overcome its weaknesses. On the other hand, if you are looking for a general purpose stylus, the Maglus still can’t be beat. The Bamboo stylus, pictured above, is the best alternative for folks looking for something that feels more like a pen than a carpenter’s pencil.
Accessible No. 4: “They’re Not Stupid”
I was a guest on this week’s Accessible podcast by Steven Aquino and Ben Alexander. We talked about teaching Siri to understand folks who stutter; how my wife is much smarter than me; what Ellie Sattler’s Jurassic fern frond has to say about iOS 7; web leather, mobile leather; and how a pile of dog parts on your living room floor doesn’t make a Lassie.
Tumblr's iOS App Updated for iOS 7
This app is unabashedly my vote for the best iOS-6-to-iOS-7 redesign I’ve seen. It retains the spirit and flavor of the previous version, while still treading safely within the new flatness dictated by iOS 7. Get it here.
Playful animations are easy to spot but not overbearing, which is difficult to achieve. My favorite animation is the animating hearts when tapping a like button (I sure hope people don’t get push notifications every time I tap a heart button, because I can’t keep myself from tapping them again and again).
If I could change one thing, it would be the use of the blurring views behind the status and navigation bars. They’re so heavily tinted blue that the resulting effect is a distracting flicker when scrolling. The true purpose of iOS 7’s blur is to create the illusion that your “content” is always visible, even from behind a navbar. This goal would be better achieved in Tumblr’s case by using semi-translucent non-blurring blue bars.
Hidden Goodies in OvershareKit
Together with Justin Williams, I recently announced an open-source iOS sharing library called OvershareKit (available on GitHub). It makes it trivial to add rich sharing options to your iOS apps. There’s enough material in OvershareKit to warrant many blog posts, but I figure I should start with some of the cooler bits that you might not discover right away:
OSKTextView: A Better UITextView
OvershareKit comes with OSKTextView, a fork of JTSTextView, my open source UITextView wrapper (until Apple fixes some bad iOS 7 bugs with UITextView). The OvershareKit version has some nifty additions. It can highlight links, hashtags, and @mentions as you type. You can move the cursor with the Riposte-style swipe gestures: one finger to move by character, two fingers by words, and three fingers by paragraphs. It also automatically converts dumb quotes to smart quotes.
Built-In Support for In-App Purchases
This was Justin’s killer idea. Your app may have certain sharing activities that require in-app purchases (e.g. Riposte only shows the OmniFocus and Things options if you’ve upgraded to Riposte Pro). Why hide those from the share sheets, when OvershareKit could do more? Once you mark your chosen activity types as requiring in-app purchase, OvershareKit will badge those activity icons with little price tag indicators until they’re purchased. If a user taps one of them, OvershareKit queries the relevant OSKPresentationManager delegate for your custom purchasing view controller. You are still responsible for making the purchase from the App Store, and for storing/validating purchase receipts.
Optional Dark Mode
More and more customers are realizing how nice it is when an app shifts to a low-light mode or “dark mode” during evening hours. OvershareKit has an optional dark mode setting, which you can trigger through the OSKPresentationManager’s style delegate. You can also customize many of the default colors.
1Password Buttons
The username / password screens in OvershareKit show 1Password search buttons if that app is installed. Tapping the button launches 1Password with a search query based on the activity, e.g. “Instapaper.” This logic is based on some open source code I wrote for Riposte, available on GitHub.
Account Management
With the exception of Pocket, all third-party services in OvershareKit support multiple accounts. We included an account management screen that you can use to add or remove accounts for each service. You can see the accounts screen in the sample app by tapping the left navigation bar button from the app’s main screen. You’ll know best where this screen should live in your application.
VoiceOver and Localization
OvershareKit’s views and alerts have 100-percent VoiceOver coverage. All user-facing strings are in English, but you can provide localizations via the localizationDelegate of OSKPresentationManager. Never ship an app without VoiceOver, and never ship a new design without testing its accessibility implications first. Ask your users for help. You probably already have some tech-savvy users with visual or other impairments that would love to join your beta team. Look for smart folks like Marco Zehe and Steven Aquino.