alt Hacker NewsIt recently occurred to me that it’s been years since it was possible to find some new and interesting app just by browsing the App Store, like it used to be when iPhone and Android were first introduced. Now I open the store knowing in advance what exactly I’m looking for and take care not to accidentally click on a lookalike.
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I've had success finding games in the Apple Arcade by just browsing. The bonus is that the games are all included with Apple+ and don't have any ads or microtransactions.
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
Not only that, it’s dangerous too specially if you have a family account with a single credit card.
Apple doesn’t care about quality.
I still do this but with F-Droid (or one of the nice frontends like Droidify).
Will some new player come and give us some golden years of VC handouts and pre-enshittification decency? I hope so, but the barriers to entry are mighty.
Discovery is social
If you’re optimizing for searchers (SEO) you’ve been out of the loop for a decade or catering almost exclusively to the elderly
It's only getting worse with the amount of AI Slop being poured into the store.
I'm relatively new to the space, but it feels like more and more of the time of indie devs / bootstrappers needs to get allocated towards marketing.
Same on Android.
Except on Android when you search for something and you get the big "match found" with "install" button, it's an ad and the real result is hidden like a search result.
This practice ought to be illegal. These are trademarks, and monopolies are injecting themselves as market makers in a bidding war they created.
This isn't enshittification. This is Roman Empire collapse. It doesn't work anymore.
It's a mature market. Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over? I know I've pretty much settled into a small set of apps that I use on my iPhone, ThinkPad, and iPad and probably haven't installed anything new (ie not upgrades) for five or ten years now.
The last new app I installed was either Fusion360 or Visual Studio Code.
I guess I have had to install apps for other things I bought (like Christmas tree lights), but I don't really count that because the app is only a gateway to the thing I really want to use.