"Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected." <- So, sounds like the rather benign goal of keeping developers from impersonating Apple's own payment channel and thereby confusing users into believing they are transacting with Apple and then to send Apple support issues.
Apple just released the SKStoreProductViewController in iOS 6, which allows a user to access the app store from within an app (like a modal view that slides up from the bottom). In fact, the WWDC video presenting it uses cross-promotion of apps as its first example use of the view controller. If you're right about Apple's motivation, I would think using the SKStoreProductViewController would be an easy compromise for developers to take.
Completely agree as a user. I know this would annoy developers to no end, as their scammy "Load this App and will give you 5 jewels" promotions are a pretty common way to get App store "Popularity" juice, but first, it's annoying within the context of an app, and second, it artificially boosts the popularity of a secondary app that might be complete crap.
Still waiting for the authoritative metacritic/rotten tomatoes of the app store to develop. I'm happy to spend upwards of a thousands dollars a year on the App Store - but, other than trusting podcasts/trusted bloggers, it's pretty damn hard to find anything useful on it without wasting a lot of time and money.
The practice of giving incentives to download apps has been officially banned (by Apple) for over a year, but I don't think the apple reviewers have been enforcing it uniformly.
What I wouldn't give for a X day trial period on all apps. Hell, let categorization drive the length of trial period, I don't care. Please just give me a way to "try before I buy".
It's a really simple choice for an app developer, you either charge up front in which case apple for the most part controls the environment where the decision to buy or not is made. Or you charge with an in app purchase in which case you control the environment in which the decision is made. You can A/B test e.t.c.
Excellent point. On the iPad, my young kids can do most things easily, except deal with these advertisements. It usually exits the app, brings up Safari and they wonder what's going on.
The second most annoying thing is OpenFeint - Can't this be globally turned off?
The way Apple's restrictions work, you can't build global opt outs like that. Services, for the record, would love to be able to do it; in fact, I was once begged by some companies in the analytics space (think Flurry) to build a global opt out for their products on jailbroken devices, and after contacting other companies I found out they all wanted to do it but couldn't (so I built it).
That doesn't stop the app from prompting for the in-app purchases, it just prevents unwanted transactions.
Go download Talking Tom (it's "free") and see what parents complain about. Turning off purchasing doesn't stop my 2 year old from hitting one of three or four "upgrade" buttons available on screen at any given moment, bringing up a popup or opening a browser or the app store for cross promotions. I would have actually bought the damn thing because of the entertainment it provides if it weren't for refusing to support the total sleaziness of that monetization method.
I don't know if that will help. You can already lock down iOS pretty tightly for kids. It's the apps themselves that are the problem.
There's just a huge, annoying trend of making apps crippled or annoyware until you buy some ridiculous IAP. AFAIK, that situation is not much different on Kindle/Android.
I have personally experimented with TapJoy and even though it worked as a way of bumping my ranking for a small period of time I choose to never use it again and now that I understand those networks I would be pretty happy if they didn't exist anymore. I wouldn't want to get rid of all cross promotion though since if I really liked an app I may want to know more about other apps the developer made.
This is actually really painful for both devs and users - the main thing being that recovery of the paid upgrade will be finicky and unreliable. The UI for recovering an in-app purchase is the same as the buying UI, which leads many users to mistakenly believe they are being double-charged.
Who can blame them, the UI blows.
Since devs themselves also do not get any user-specific information when an in-app purchase is sold, it becomes pretty much impossible for your support channels to verify someone actually owns what they say they own.
Until the API improves (not holding my breath, it's been like this for, what, 3 years now?) IAP-driven upgrades will hurt both users and developers.
There are API methods that directly handle recovery. However, it wasn't until recently (earlier this year) that the App Store review process finally required developers to implement the restore mechanism.
Is recovering upgrades finicky and unreliable? The only app I can think of which has the functionality is Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [0], and it's pretty clear and seems to work quite well. The UI isn't easily confused with in-app purchases, although you do have to go to "In App Store" from the main menu. Once there, you click Recover and it just works.
This impacts free + IAP models also. Here's the classic use case:
1. User gets a shiny new iPhone.
2. User installs my (free) AwesomeApp on new device.
3. User is missing premium AwesomeApp features, is now confused about why.
4. User goes to IAP part of app and tries to recover the IAP/premium features, except Apple's UI here would lead user to believe they are being charged for the IAP again.
This is often followed by:
5. User contacts support and is very confused. Support cannot verify whether or not user owns the IAP, because the App Store is a black box and we get no information about purchasers.
Isn't that what the restoreCompletedTransactions api is for? It's the fault of the app developer for not using it, and forcing the user to go through the purchase flow again.
Not sure I agree, in-app purchases have turned so scammy recently (buy 1000 fun points for $100!) that I've taken to not even looking at games if they include IAP anymore.
No, I think the idea is that there are some full blown apps that seem to serve only to push sales of other apps.
Not a big deal for demo + full version apps, but when you pay full price for an app (or download a free, non-demo app) and keep getting pushed to buy other apps it gets pretty annoying.
Some apps have done it tastefully, like Temple Run. Others like Scramble (and my assumption is all Zynga apps) just make it a drag.
Nah. All app promotion apps that are affected are ultimately sending sales to the official App Store anyway, so there's no impersonation of the payment channel.
It does affect a class of apps, including AppShopper (mine).
While that's a fair comment, the services being described here really shouldn't be affected: there is no excuse for, say, TapJoy, to mimic the App Store (and I doubt they are doing it, although I haven't seen their UI in a while)... it wouldn't even be optimal for their mission and if they or someone in a similar position is doing so they should probably look at their layout again.
However, I will then point out that the distinction you are drawing can get somewhat vague: just because you aren't accepting money, doesn't mean users aren't now confused because they think they are using the App Store's interface; as an example, they might have expectations such as trusting the validity of the reviews and ratings being shown.
Sure you can argue that. But any App Promotion App is ultimately downloaded from the App Store originally, so I'd assume it's reasonably obvious. But even so, I don't think that Apple's adding a specific clause to their App guidelines due to the very small percentage of people who are downloaded App Discovery apps and then get confused.
If I had to guess at their motivation, it would be their attempt at blocking paid-for-promotion schemes that try to game the App Store ranking systems. I think that's more likely.
Totally agreed. I tried to get that across in the interview for the article. It's pretty hard to say that the pay-for-ranking firms help users, and I think Apple's just taking a first stab at combatting them. I think there's a lot more they can do to improve the ranking algorithm in helping to combat these firms.
As a user and as a developer, I really hope these changes help move some of the blatant junk off the Top Lists.
