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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
How Not to Make Your iPhone App And then there are apps that just miss the mark entirely and suffer the ire or ennui of users in the unforgiving reader review and ratings section of the iTunes App Store. The users are telling developers and brands how not to make an app. The rules are pretty simple, and more than a few branded media apps are following them. The following list is a quartet of what not to do. Be Slow and Stingy: Wired Product Reviews (2.5 stars, 3,724 ratings) gets high marks for good reviews and video when users can find them, but the app gets slammed by users for poor loading times and a dearth of new content. Crashes and reviews not loading properly are frequent complaints from users. In our own experience, we have tried loading reviews in some of the product categories in this app and given up. Don’t Pay Attention to the Competition: Sports Illustrated quietly came into the app store a couple of months ago with its news and sports scores app (2.5 stars, 867 ratings). Many of the users who actually did discover that their favorite sports brand was here were sorely disappointed by poor updating and buggy behavior. While some users simply like having access to the magazine’s great writing and imagery, the majority of reviewers say they are let down. The big problem for SI is that their main competition, ESPN, has hands down some of the most popular applications across the App Store. Overpromise, Under-deliver: CBS promises “personalized TV” in its TV.com streaming media applications (2.5 stars, 7,929 ratings) and instead gives most users TV the way we remember it in 1957. With only a handful of shows available in full episodes, a weird collection of brands (CBS, CNet, CW, Showtime) and a lot of promotional trailers. Without clear utility or a reliable and rich content experience, this is a tube TV still waiting to warm up. Keep Making It Worse: The jury is still out on whether the magazine branded shopping apps we have seen in recent months really are getting traction with users. Many suffer from tepid and few reviews. Lucky At Your Service (2 stars, 1,228 ratings) got slammed by some reviewers who actually like the early iterations of the app and then felt betrayed by cluttered and buggy updates. Complaints about crashes and slow downloads abound, and the reviews have not rebounded even as the app reaches Version 3.0. The App Store feedback loop can be an unforgiving space, and it tends to skew negative for some apps because people are prompted to rate apps when they delete them from their deck. Nevertheless, as we will see in next week’s follow-up piece that singles out media winners in the App Store, reviewers go out of their way to praise the brands that get it right. Having 100,000 apps in the App Store may be good news for Apple, but it is not always great news for publishers or consumers. How do you slice through the clutter here? How do you stand out when scores of competitors beat you to the space and grabbed your audience? How do you recover when the first app development team overcharged you and drove you crazy with their missteps? These are the hurdles facing many media companies as they try to get into a still-fledgling ecosystem. Is there an app for that? If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
1.
100,000 apps is impressive. But are there even 100 apps that are useful for something more than quick chuckle?
Posted by iGenius on Thursday, November 5, 2009 @ 10:26 AM
2.
The real problem with these misfit Apps seems to be not a lack of great editorial/marketing ideas, but a lack of staff/resources to support them. Each case smells to me like publishers pushing editorial and marketing into the iPhone App scene (due to market/reader/competition pressure) without also giving them a realistic budget or staff to support these hungry little beasties with new content, well planned and executed design and programming, and the right player technology to make them work properly. If editorial is stuck creating this stuff, who’s going to create the content, for these apps or for their original brands?
Posted by technoeditorchic on Thursday, November 5, 2009 @ 02:13 PM
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