This speaks to the quality of apps in the App Store though - sadly, there is a truth in the middle ground between the two viewpoints:
- Genuinely useful apps are worth well in excess of $0.99.
- iPhone consumers have been spoiled rotten by hyper-competition and the market of $0.99-no-matter-what.
- There's a lot of utter shit on the App Store that isn't worth the $0.99 people are charging for it.
The App Store signal to noise ratio is atrocious, and consumers have responded in their attitude towards app pricing. Bad apps are so plentiful (and have the same level of exposure as the good apps) that everything over $0.99 is a risk to the consumer for getting burned. Most apps are things that you'd start once, get bored with in 5 minutes, and never touch again, and provide little to no lasting use to the consumer whatsoever - it's not a surprise that consumers are tuned to paying $1 for such things.
We have very good ways around this crap - Google, for example, will not surface this crap (well, it does sometimes), and the networked/social nature of the modern web is intrinsically some kind of quality filter (or at least, relevance filter).
If some guy creates a crappy website full of information nobody wants, it will never get visited.
If some guy creates a crappy iPhone app, it gets a disproportionate amount of exposure compared to good apps people actually want to use.
The problem here is the with only a single portal that serves as both sales and marketing, the wheat mixes with the chaff and you don't know which way is up.
Comments
18 apps for $95.88 doesn't really sound that greedy. How much are 18 lattes at Starbucks?
This speaks to the quality of apps in the App Store though - sadly, there is a truth in the middle ground between the two viewpoints:
- Genuinely useful apps are worth well in excess of $0.99.
- iPhone consumers have been spoiled rotten by hyper-competition and the market of $0.99-no-matter-what.
- There's a lot of utter shit on the App Store that isn't worth the $0.99 people are charging for it.
The App Store signal to noise ratio is atrocious, and consumers have responded in their attitude towards app pricing. Bad apps are so plentiful (and have the same level of exposure as the good apps) that everything over $0.99 is a risk to the consumer for getting burned. Most apps are things that you'd start once, get bored with in 5 minutes, and never touch again, and provide little to no lasting use to the consumer whatsoever - it's not a surprise that consumers are tuned to paying $1 for such things.
But 90% of anything is crap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law Sturgeon's Law). 90% of the internet is crap, etc.
We have very good ways around this crap - Google, for example, will not surface this crap (well, it does sometimes), and the networked/social nature of the modern web is intrinsically some kind of quality filter (or at least, relevance filter).
If some guy creates a crappy website full of information nobody wants, it will never get visited.
If some guy creates a crappy iPhone app, it gets a disproportionate amount of exposure compared to good apps people actually want to use.
The problem here is the with only a single portal that serves as both sales and marketing, the wheat mixes with the chaff and you don't know which way is up.