App discovery
Apple needs to make it easier to find the right apps for you
There’s no denying Apple makes impressive hardware, but Macs and iOS devices would be nothing without apps. Of course, when you first power up your Mac, iPhone or iPad, you already have some preloaded software, but it’s with third-party apps that things become interesting, enabling you to turn a device into anything from a full-featured music studio to a gaming powerhouse.
The snag is that finding new apps is hard. Apple attempts to simplify things on its app stores by highlighting new products it considers of interest, and curating collections so that you can quickly find apps for photography, writing and various other tasks. But beyond this and the odd promotion – kudos, Apple, for the indie showcase on iOS – everything feels a little… last century.
We want app stores that understand who we are and what we’ve bought, and suggest further purchases accordingly. When Apple offered ‘Genius’, it was anything but. (“You’ve bought a Twitter client. How about another Twitter client?”) It’s 2015, so we should at least expect some intelligent recommendations to be rather more prominent, perhaps backed by social network integration that tells you what your friends are buying.