App Store utilitarianism

Friday, November 27, 2009 - 483 words - Tweet this

“But I’d also like to have some assurances from Apple about reducing the length of the App Store approval process, having the ability to respond to factually incorrect iTunes reviews, not be limited to 100 beta testers, or that large, prominent developers won’t always get preferential treatment.”

This was written, here, by Gedeon Maheux – iPhone app superstar behind Twitterific and RampChamp in a very interesting post about the failures of the App Store, which have contributed to the commercial failure of the beautiful RampChamp.

There are whole swathes of arguments and debates surrounding the Apple App Store, especially with regard to it’s slow approval process for application updates. I won’t attempt to delve into these arguments here. But one thing that I do believe, is that the quote above isn’t a realistic, sensible or fair way to approach the approval process.

Of course, it seems very righteous and principled to cry that everybody (well, every developer) should be treated with utter egalitarianism, but is this really for the best? Applications like Tweetie, for example, have many thousands of people that use it daily. A relatively new, unpopular or niche application may have a few hundred users at best.

Taking this into account, there seem to be two clear reasons why Apple would favour larger, more prominent developers over everybody else (and why I think they’re right to do so).

Firstly, seeing as the whole platform exists for the people who use the App Store (ie: iPhone users), – and therefore the App Store approval process itself only exists to faciliate the product for them – I think this may be an appropriate time to take a utilitarian approach. The best way to make the maximum number of people happy is surely to ensure that the more prominent applications used by the larger numbers of people are functional and at their best for the greatest amount of time possible.

The second reason is a commercially relevant extension of my first point. If it can be accepted that the best thing for iPhone users as individuals is to guarantee the applications they probably have installed work consistently, then this can easily be seen as a commercially significant consideration. Clearly, if Apple can keep as many of their customers as possible happy with their iPhone and the overall App Store experience, then they stand to benefit hugely from the increasing utility in their platform. Because Apple aren’t merely selling a mobile phone – they’re selling another operating system; they’re selling a platform, and it’s circular. The better the platform, the more people who will buy an iPhone.

So let’s try and keep as many of those people as possible happy.

(I intend to write a follow up to this, because – of course – there are problems with what I’m suggesting, and the App Store as a whole, and they’re worth thinking about too. Let me know what you think in the comments.)