What happens when the app store gets too big?

[iNick]

It's obvious that the app store has had huge growth over only one year. There are already enough apps to keep one searching through the catalog for an enormous amount of time. What happens in 2 years? 3 years? 8 years? the production of apps is astonishing and its clear that the app store is much more than we all thought it would be. It's already difficult enough to discover new apps that get hidden in the masses (although the new genius feature is helping) how will we keep track of everything when the number of apps is 5X the size? One thing is for sure, it is truly amazing how one tiny icon can hold a whole world of apps. Im excited for the future...

 

[whmurray]

It's obvious that the app store has had huge growth over only one year. There are already enough apps to keep one searching through the catalog for an enormous amount of time. What happens in 2 years? 3 years? 8 years? the production of apps is astonishing and its clear that the app store is much more than we all thought it would be. It's already difficult enough to discover new apps that get hidden in the masses (although the new genius feature is helping) how will we keep track of everything when the number of apps is 5X the size? One thing is for sure, it is truly amazing how one tiny icon can hold a whole world of apps. Im excited for the future...

I am excited too. I think that tens of thousands of purpose-built apps, replacing hundreds of highly generalized ones, represents a paradigm shift.

That said, the solution quickly becomes the problem. Finding the "right" purpose built applications among tens of thousands is a chore. For example, there must be close to ten apps for processing payment card transactions. I have two apps for downloading my travel itineraries to my iPhone and two to track flights. We went from having no turn-by-turn navigation programs to needing a program to choose among them.

I had hoped that the forum would help. Remember the top-five apps thread? I read every post and maybe found one app that I wanted.

If this new paradigm is to succeed, it is going to need lots of help. How about a few apps for finding apps?

 

[Pat]

App store listing categories

One problem is the limited indexing - - Apple has only 20 some odd categories into which all of these thousands of apps must be listed. The developers of these apps have been asking Apple - - from day one - - to create more categories so that people can find the apps. Apple is non-responsive.

If anyone knows how to get through to them - - please help. We need better indexing.

 

[sting7k]

I'm hoping at least half of the 50,000 crApps disappear and we can have just the ones with some potential value. App searching on iTunes is still pretty weak.

 

[shmatlay]

i hope that it will grow