App Store: Love it and hate it.
By john on Jul 30, 2008 in Apple, featured
With the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 software update, and launch of the 3G iPhone (I’ll have one soon), Apple also launched the App Store, where 3rd party applications are sold and distributed for the platform. This is a wonderful thing as it creates a slick, clean, one stop shop for applications to run natively on my mobile device. The list of applications available continues to grow and several that are incredibly useful (and some that WILL be incredibly useful) are available there. Unfortunately, while the idea of the App store is great, and some aspects of it’s current incarnation are really awesome, it still needs some refining.
The biggest problem I see for the App store, at least for the time being, is that it’s slow to push out updates provided by developers. As a Mac user for several years now, I’m used to developers pushing out updates to their products very fast, generally as fast as they can get fixes done for the bugs. With the App store, a developer can push an update that fixes several critical crash bugs and it isn’t made available to the end user for several weeks - a delay that can potentially kill some promising piece of software. This is an issue that has many a developer frustrated.
Beyond that, there are some apparent bugs with the update mechanism used by the App store - some users are reporting data loss in applications after they are updated. Others are reporting no issues when updating the same applications. From what I’ve read there is no easily discernible common thread to it - some did the update via itunes, others via the phone itself, with success and failure with both methods. I’m one of those affected by this particular issue, with several applications causing data loss when they were updated. Other applications updated fine with no data loss. It seems pretty hit and miss.
The last issue, and it’s fairly minor compared to the first two in my opinion, is that the update feature doesn’t always accurately reflect whether or not there’s an update for a particular app. Many times my phone will tell me there are no updates available, but itunes will say differently - or vice versa. It seems kind of strange that there’s this disparity, but it is mostly a minor annoyance.
Despite all of these things - I still love the App Store. It’s new and as with most new things there are bugs and kinks that need to be ironed out. No amount of testing will accurately reflect real world demands. If Apple can adapt and resolve these issues fast then I doubt there will be any long term repercussions - if they are slow to address the issues, though, there may be some long term bad blood between Apple and developers, and I really hope that doesn’t happen.
Popularity: 75% [?]
Post a Comment