Its been said many many many times that the App store is broken. Several of the podcasts I listen to have discussed it at length. The search is terrible. The ranking system is awful. For new apps, it must be extremely hard to gain any traction.
I’m not an App developer (as much as I wish I was), but from a user perspective both the iOS and the Mac App Store are pretty painful to use.
Don’t get me wrong, if the App has a unique name, its pretty easy to find. It’s even better if its on one of the front pages. Apart from that? Good Luck.
One of the issues I have with both versions of the Store is the lack of interoperability.
I was looking at the Desk App online, via the developers web site. It looked pretty neat, had what looked like a good feature set, but no price. To see the price, I had to check the Mac App Store.
At the time, I was on my iPhone, and not near a computer (I use a Mac mini, so its not overly portable). Safari on my iPhone detected it was an App Store link, and fired up the iOS store, where I got the ever so helpful “Desk […] is only available on OS X” with no price. There is a handy “Learn more about this App” link, however that just takes me back to the developers website, desk.pm.
This isn’t directed at the developer of the App, but at the App Store itself. It just put off a potential impulse sale until I was back at my Mac.
I completley forgot about the App until just now, when I was using my Mac. I was installing Xcode, and on the main page of the Mac App Store, there was a featured App called Notability, tagged as “App of the Year”. Reading the description, I saw that it was both on sale and that there is an iOS version of the App.
Now, the reason for this whole post. Even though these apps are from the same developer, and will most probably be used together, nowhere in the Mac App Store (or the iOS App Store) does it provide an easy link to view the App for the different platform, nor provide an option to purchase it immediately.
Likewise (and again, I’m not a developer) I’m guessing that App Bundles can’t be used for cross-platform purchases.
It seems like Apple is missing a trick here. And for the record – I still haven’t purchased desk.