|
|
|
|
|
|
by crazychrome
4099 days ago
|
|
|
Were Steve Jobs, John Ive, Tim Cook and other Apple guys crystal clear about the theory when they started iPod/iPhone? I don't think so. Apple has a unique weapon called design and is willing to pay whatever it costs to enhance it. Its business is to use the weapon wherever there is a chance: mp3 player, tivo, mobile phone, watch and more to come. The rest is upon professors in business schools to figure out. |
|
|
I can say with a high degree of confidence (but not 100%) that I'll switch back to iphone next year.
The reason centers on two things: Google's baffling lack of design sense (google's own apps look bad), and google's inability to filter out sham reviews on their app store.
The google app store and the apps are just awful. There are some diamonds in the rough, but they are few and far between and hard to find because nearly all the apps (good or bad) have 4+ stars.
There are tons of crap apps on the apple store too, but the good ones are easier to find because the ratings still have meaning on the apple store.
There is something seriously wrong with google's store. The AT&T app, which is a marginal semi web app, has 25,000 5 star reviews on google's store. It averages somewhere above 4, I can't remember the exact number. I'm sorry, there is just no way 25,000 honest people gave that app 5/5 stars. It's ridiculous to even consider.
It's barely a 3 star app on apple's store and that sounds about right. I'd give it 3 just because it is functional.
I think the real problem behind it is the concept of freemium apps. Apple has it too, but I think because of scale android/google are head of the game in terms of the damage caused by fremium apps.
I think the best way for either company to fix it would be to not allow in-app purchases on free apps. The reason I think it would fix it is that both app stores require you to have the app to vote on it, but with free apps it's no big deal to download-vote-delete an app. This opens you up to mechanical-turk type exploitation.
If it costs a buck to download, you've raised the cost of buying a vote, you've raised expectations of buyers. It has a side benefit of destroying the freemium market which in my opinion can only be a good thing.
My gut tells me that google could filter out sham reviews if they wanted to. I'm sure they can detect the download-vote-delete pattern easily, and if 25000 come in over the course of week or something, well, it just seems like it'd be obvious if the spent time mining the data.