I think that may be a bit too quick. Perhaps an App Store lease every half year, per app. Let's say every six months you have to pay $10 per app, or that app gets removed from the store. If your app is making money, no big deal. If it's not, why bother keeping it on the store?
I would totally pay a small submission fee at least to keep pure garbage apps from having a return on their investment. An upkeep fee might not be a bad idea, but perhaps would hurt really obscure but useful apps.
hmm I think that a submission fee (say 99$) is a waaaaaay better idea than cleaning iTunes from apps that do note sell for one very important reason - you don't see those apps anyway. they do not ruin the exposure, unless they receive an update but that doesn't happen much problem is with tons of crap appearing on top of new releases and then just forgotten by everyone I really see no problem with the fact that there is 60.000 apps out there. you cant see 59.000 of them no matter what you do so you can just ignore them, they dont hurt you guys... what hurts is basically the "new releases" page and major difficulties with being on it. charge for appearing there (submission fee) and it should improve really quickly
Apple already takes 30% of the profit. $20 (times however many apps you make) a year would be enough to stop upcoming developers. A small submision fee seems to be much more reasonable IMO.
All this, make devs pay more, remove apps selling less than X after Y days is a load of crap, I can only presume coming from people non developers, or developers who have a successful, or reasonable selling app. One of my apps was selling 1 or 2 a day for 60 days before picking up quite a bit in the last 20, should my app have been removed despite many finding it useful? Another app just isn't selling, only about 30 in total, despite the belief that it wouldn't have a problem selling when it was developed. Should this app be removed just because it isn't noticed (or maybe people just think it is crap before anyone suggests), despite it not being Shaikh style crapware? Should I have had to pay out more than I have received back in sales due to it not selling? The odd sale does drop in some days as well. Are the advocates of such proposals developers who are creating apps for a living and afraid of competition from hobbyists on a level playing field? What is the solution to Khalidware? The review process. It should simple reject apps that have no functionality, apps that appear to be in violation of copyright, contact that rights owners, reject if there is no permission.
How would it stop upcoming devs? They aren't paying anything upfront. If their app made any money at all, they could afford the $20 to keep it on the store. I would think a submission fee would stop many more devs.
No, I'm not suggesting your apps be removed. I'm suggesting that there is limited visible shelf space on the store, and it may be in everyone's best interest that the shelves get voluntarily dusted off a couple times a year, so that some form of quality is maintained. Let's say your app sells 100 copies in six months. At the end of the six months, Apple tells you your lease on your shelf space is up, and asks if you'd like to keep selling your app, or collect your earnings (even below $250), and call it a day. If you want to keep going, pay $10. If you believe in that app, it's an extremely small price. It's a movie ticket for goodness sake. Yes, it could add up if you have a lot of apps. Some you may want to keep, some maybe not. Heck, maybe there'd even be an option to convert to free. There are a ton of "devs" throwing junk on the store just to see what sticks. Many throw a wide net of junk, in the hopes of picking up a dozen suckers per day. Some sort of barrier is needed to stop these money making schemes.
No, competition is good. Forcing the customer to wade through junkware is bad for all of us. If every app had to be judged on functionality, researched for copyright violation, and funneled through the process of contacting rights owners, it would take days to review an app, rather than the five minutes they're spending now. Be prepared for six month review times, instead of six days. Nobody wants that. If you want people to change their behavior, affect them where it matters the most, their wallet.
The functionality is, supposedly already part of the process to a limited extent, the reviewers after all should be testing what an app does. Potential copyright violation I don't see taking much time, my thought here would be only in cases where an alarm goes off in the reviewers head saying this dev doesn't really have permission for this do they. The biggest junk peddlers probably get enough sales to cover the wallet inspectors, hobbyist devs are the most likely to lose out with such a process.
an example of limited functionality. e.g. the mirror application which for some reason beyond my comprehension is popular, has no functionality, can be done as a web page. reject. 1 second decision.
For what it's worth, I'm only selling a couple copies a day and I'd like nothing more than to pay both an up front fee and a renewal fee. Keep these apps from showing up in the first place, and keep them from staying once they're there. My last update was pushed off the new releases page in both the arcade and simulation categories after one day. Of course, combining this with improvements to how people discover apps on the App Store would be best. Half of the apps that showed up on the simulation category new releases page the day after my update was approved were either fart "simulators" or pictures of guns/half-naked people. Not sure how those fit in the "simulation games" category, and I'm not sure why I have to share shelf space with this cookie-cutter trash. Perhaps the fee could be a deposit against your sales - sell enough and you get it back. If you don't think your app can make $100-$300 in sales on the app store, why release it in the first place (as a paid app)? If you don't think you can make that much, then how did you justify paying the dev-related fees to get started? Let's have a completely separate section for developers who have no faith in their app's value. Stick free apps, and apps that don't put forward a deposit, here. Add the ability for real demos of paid apps, without the need for lite versions. Sorry for the rant, I guess I agree with Little White Bear Studios. Not trying to hurt small devs (I'm a pretty small-time dev myself), just want to see the app store abuse end. It may hurt us a little, but the gains would be more than worth it. I don't want my next app to be buried before it even has a chance.
I think the idea is that if the fee is per app, and the junk peddlers work by aggregating a few sales over many apps, it would hit them harder than someone releasing just a few legitimate apps.
Certainly, but the App Store is just as much a marketing tool for selling their hardware. I'd hope they'd be concerned about getting a reputation for having an App Store full of nothing but garbage. However, I guess the top 100 lists serve the purpose of providing people with a few standout hits, so we may just be screwed.
It might make that even if it doesn't currently, who can predict when someone will stumble upon an app and it suddenly starts selling where it didn't before? Can't say I like the deposit idea much either. Lets take a $0.99 app. You get $0.79, so that is about 380 copies. If you sell 1 a day you won't make $300 in a year, but people are interested. You don't get your deposit back. I don't like the thought of pulling a creative work, or charging more to sell it than another, because some arbitrary metric isn't reached unless they pay up more money on top of what they have already paid to be allowed to even publish it. It's not a matter of faith in the value, if devs had faith in the value of their apps most would cost more than they do and better reflect development costs. I just don't like the idea of being charged for the right to continue to have your product available when there is already a fee for development in the first place, and see this hitting smaller devs first. Not a rant at all The goal is good, you won't find anyone who will argue there, I'm just completely against the idea proposed to achieve it, and not even sure if it would solve the problem in the long term.
They are looking at the App Store application number counter rather than what is being approved. I once did a random surf on iTunes and noticed 2 blatant issues in 30 minutes. I don't want to know what else is there. 1. A TOTAL CRAP being named exactly "iDracula" like the popular game 2. A TOTAL CRAP game (very simple) being sold for $99.99 ... so the user believes it's $.99 and buys it.
