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Mar 12

With More Than Enough Apps, Apple Pushes for Quality

Posted in: Apple, developers, iPhone, Phones, Today's Chili

Apple’s recent purge of sex-tinged iPhone apps and its lesser-known ban of “cookie-cutter” apps signifies the company’s new focus on quality in its App Store, rather than quantity.

Last month, Apple removed about 5,000 apps with “overtly sexual content” from its App Store. And this week Apple told Mobile Roadie, a company that provides templates for clients to build iPhone apps, that the App Store would no longer accept “cookie-cutter” apps — apps made with app-generating services that do little more than reproduce websites or pull RSS feeds from the internet.

“This is a hot issue as more focus is being placed on app platforms to ensure they’re providing a quality user experience and content,” said Michael Schneider, CEO of Mobile Roadie. He stressed that his company is not a maker of “cookie-cutter” apps because its templates are highly customizable.

“I’m not going to comment on specific competitors, but I believe as a result of the recent changes at Apple many of them will be out of business,” Schneider later wrote in a blog post. “The ones that are left are going to have to step it up, which is a good thing for the App Store, for our business, and for consumers.”

Since the App Store’s early days, Apple has boasted about the number of apps served through the store and highlighted its rapid growth. The App Store launched with 800 third-party apps in July 2008, and by November 2009 it had surpassed 100,000 apps. As of February, Apple’s App Store had accumulated about 150,000 apps.

That number has translated into a huge competitive advantage. In terms of quantity, the App Store has a commanding lead in the mobile space. Android is in a distant second with 19,300 apps. Windows Mobile’s store has 690 apps, Palm has 1,450, Nokia carries 6,120 and BlackBerry serves 4,760. Sure, you may not want to use the majority of the Apple store’s 150,000 apps, but the fact that customers have nearly eight times more selection than they do with Android phones and nearly 200 times more than with the Windows Marketplace is a convincing sales advantage for many.

In recent months, Apple has expedited its App Store approval policy to be much faster than it used to be. Several iPhone developers told Wired.com that the App Store has recently been approving their apps in as little as two days. Last year, an app approval could take between two weeks and two months.

Apple did not respond to Wired.com’s request for comment regarding major changes in the App Store. But Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing at Appcelerator, an app-building service, said it was likely that a larger staff and new automated tools are helping to speed up Apple’s approval process. As a result, that frees up bandwidth for Apple to institute bigger-picture changes to improve the quality of the App Store, he said.

“Now it’s a quality-versus-quantity issue,” Schwarzhoff said. “When they first started they wanted tons of apps, but now with 150,000 apps out there, there’s no need for Apple to have bigger numbers on its side as compared to quality applications.”

Without a doubt, those put out of business are chagrined by Apple’s capriciously changing App Store policy. For example, Fred Clarke, co-president of a small software company called On the Go Girls was making thousands of dollars each month before the policy shift. Now, with 50 of his company’s sexy apps banned from the store, his salad days are over.

“It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?”

However, all of the developers contacted by Wired.com said they were happy with the change. They said that thanks to Apple’s new (albeit unclear) quality standard, the App Store will be less cluttered with trashy apps, which benefits both developers and consumers.

Eric Kerr, co-founder of AppLoop, shut down his company 10 months ago for financial and personal reasons. AppLoop’s service, called App Generator, turned any online publication with an RSS feed into an app — something that might have fallen under Apple’s new ban of cookie-cutter apps. But Kerr sided with Apple on its decision to prohibit apps with extremely limited utility made with app generators.

“Apple doing this is really only accelerating the inevitable,” Kerr told Wired.com. “You have all these applications that don’t provide any additional value to users, and in the long run the market will determine they’re useless and people will not download them. Because of the application-discovery problem, that might take a while for that to actually happen, and during that time period you have a bunch of low-quality apps clogging the system.”

Obscure rules

Still, Apple has come under fire because of the lack of clarity regarding policy changes in the App Store. During Apple’s removal of apps containing overtly sexual content, many criticized the company for allowing sex-tinged apps from big companies such as Playboy and Sports Illustrated to remain in the store.

Apple’s vice president of marketing Phil Schiller said Apple had removed the sexy iPhone apps in response to complaints from parents and women. However, he said the apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated would remain because they came from reputable companies.

“The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” Schiller told NY Times.

But as Apple continues to push its new quality regime, a question arises: Where do you draw the line between raising quality standards and censorship? That’s already stirring some debate. Apple crossed the line with German tabloid Bild, whose iPhone app was pulled because of a feature containing sexual content, an act that the publication has called “a curtailing of press freedoms.”

“Today it is naked breasts, tomorrow it could be editorial content,” said Donata Hopfen, head of Bild’s digital media department, in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel. She said Bild was urging the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers to take action “in the interest of freedom of the press.”

That battle, however, will be a tough one for Bild. Apple is not a government, and thus it is not governed by the First Amendment, said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

In other words, the company’s rules may be arbitrary and unfair, but Apple has the right to make decisions about what it carries in its App Store.

The fact that it lacks significant competition may be encouraging Apple act more high-handed than it would otherwise, Scheer noted.

“They’re trying to create this aura of respectability and selectivity,” Scheer said. “Apple’s trying to create this censored environment. It’s a little like China. What China does to the whole internet with pornographic content is what Steve Jobs is trying to do in his neighborhood for the iPhone.”

With a big lead in the numbers game Apple’s move toward emphasizing quality might just help it retain its dominance in the mobile market. However, Scheer said if Apple’s moves continue to be construed as acts of censorship, it could drive customers to more open alternatives such as Google’s Android platform.

“Eventually you embitter a lot of people who don’t understand why they’re being denied access to something they’d like to have on a device they have and they own,” he said.

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Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com