What’s the use of offering more than 500,000 wares if customers can’t find their way through the gigantic bazaar? I know, I already harped on about the lack of curation in Apple’s App Store, but that was 16 months ago…when the Store contained a “mere” 250,000 apps.
Since then, the iPhone has sold in ever larger numbers (we’ll soon see if the December quarter number crossed the 30 million units line, and by how much) and with more than 18 billion downloads, the App Store is an unmitigated success. If this is what “broken” looks like, why fix it? And how?
To answer the question, let’s take a trip back a hundred years to Clermont-Ferrand, home of Michelin. Known for its tires and tourists guides, Michelin is a very old company (incorporated in 1888), but they’ve always been at the forefront of their technology. Tires are complex products whose role in the safety, comfort, and economy of our driving experience lead Michelin engineers to joke that cars are peripheral to their lovingly engineered creations. (If you find yourself traveling through the center of France, treat yourself to a visit to L’Aventure Michelin, a really interesting museum that recounts the company’s many adventures, most of which are unknown, surprising, or forgotten.)
Edouard and André Michelin weren’t just good techies, they were astute businessmen and marketing geniuses. They seized on an obvious idea: If people take more road trips, we’ll sell more tires. And they shone in the execution that followed this intuition, they went far and well in their efforts to encourage and guide automobile travel. Michelin became famous for its world class roadmaps, for the Red Guides that grade hotels and restaurants, and Green Guides for regions, historic sites, and countries. The company also published literary Guides Bleus, forgoing culinary delights for a more cultural angle in their interpretation of locales. (I’ll skip their other marketing inventions, such as the Bibendum character and the iconic Michelin kilometer stones and road signs.)
Michelin had a staff of agents at the ready to devise an itinerary for your trip, all you had to do was write or call.
Did this “content”, as we would now call it, make money for Michelin? Possibly, but the revenue was negligible compared to the amount their tires generated. Michelin’s maps, guides, and services were created with one goal in mind, one mission: sell hardware. That’s where the real margins were, and still are.
Is Apple’s situation, it’s mission, all that different? Hardware revenue and margins are the sacred business model. Everything else, including the App Store, must support the ultimate goal. (For reference, the App Store generates less than 2% of Apple’s revenue, and much less than 2% of its profits.)
The scale of the App Store’s success, probably unforeseen by its creators, could lead management into complacency: Look at these numbers, ain’t they great? This is an incumbent’s attitude. And we know what happens to those.
But ask developers and, most important, users. For all its demonstrable success, the App Store feels broken. It’s too big and confusing, the app reviews are dry and the ratings are unreliable, search is primitive…
Label me naif, but I think Apple could do well by following the century-old Michelin model. It won’t take billions to implement, nor will it require the administration of the Apple Genii, just competent people and hard work. Here’s what a possible solution looks like:
Apple sets up a team in charge of publishing an App Store Guide. The editorial team writes opinionated (and presented as such) reviews of apps by category: Productivity, Games, Utilities, and the like. Published daily on a blog and accumulated in an on-line Guide, these reviews, one to two pages long, present the writer’s experience and opinion, culminating in a ranking in stars or numbers. It sounds simple, often the sign of a twisty road ahead…
Trouble starts quickly.
First obstacle: It’s already being done. True. How many iOS App Review Sites there are? According to this blog, the answer is…116! This is good news: Apple’s customers have an appetite for reviews, but which sites and reviewers can they trust? How do these reviewers make money? There’s no dispassionate, incorruptible Consumer Reports for apps.
Second, there’s Apple’s penchant for control. True, again — but irrelevant. Going back to Michelin, their opinion of a restaurant might be controversial, but the company has no financial gain in the number of stars they assign. They sell tires, not meals. Similarly, Apple wants to move hardware, not generate App Store revenue by favoring one app over another.
Third, attempting to sift through 500,000 apps amounts to boiling the ocean. How can one even hope to ‘‘make a dent” in that universe? But that’s no reason to sit on one’s hands. Let’s say that after a year the Apple App Guide has featured “only” 2,500 reviews, an average of 50 reviews a week, ten a day. Is that bad compared to today’s mess?
Fourth, the expense. Let’s do a gross, back-of-the-envelope overestimation: 20 reviewers at $250K/year “fully loaded” with management overhead and office expenses included. This gets us to $5M/year. Apple is notoriously cautious, if not downright stingy with (most) expenses, but $5M would be lost in the income statement noise. And this miniscule investment would exert a healthy influence on the rest of the app review ecosystem, just as the Apple Store raised the game for its independent retailers.
Fifth, the people. Will readers trust the opinions of enlisted Apple employees, or will they insist on “independent” voices? An employee’s loyalty is to the company, and there could be grumblings that a staff of corporate reviewers would choose apps that, above all else, show off the platform and the Apple brand. On the other hand, independent contractors are just that: independent. As such, they’re much more susceptible to “external influences.” There are any number of gadget blogs that smell of greasy palms and astroturfing.
Apple possesses [five s’s in a nine-letter word!] a treasure of closely-guarded user data — off-limits to a contractor — that could prove very helpful in rating apps. It’s “simply” a matter of finding, hiring, training, and managing competent and honest curators.
Today, Apple already demonstrates a type of curation when it decides which apps get featured as New and Noteworthy, or Staff Favorites. They might as well go all the way and please their users with subjective, personal reviews. Encourage the kommentariat to cluck its disapproval, allow dinged developers to rage online. If presented as an honest, competent effort — occasionally wrong but always with the Apple imprimatur — the review process will be as respected as any other high-quality editorial effort.
I hope Apple’s success won’t blind it to the need to give app seekers more than today’s skimpy categories and unreliable user reviews. Who knows, if Amazon or Google were to wake to the opportunity, their moves could spur Apple into action.
Related columns:
- Science Fiction: An Apple-Curated App Store TweetIn an alternate universe, Apple has announced the App Store Guide and Blog. Choice morsels from the PR material follow. “We came to realize that a quarter million apps meant worse than nothing to Apple users”, said Apple’s CEO. “I get confused too! Reviews are often fake, lame, or downright incompetent. PR firms have been [...]...
- An Apple TV Set In Our Future? TweetNot another Apple TV black box but a real 50” flat-screen TV, “Designed by Apple in California” — and Made in China, like most Apple products. Or Made In Korea, if the company concludes a new pact with its best frenemy, Samsung, the new king of TV sets, the new Sony. Rumors of an Apple [...]...
- US election — Follow the (money) trail TweetRemember the legions of staffers crowding electoral campaigns in TV series like The West Wing ? How much could they make ? The online magazine Slate did some research. Clinton’s campaign manager is making the equivalent of $164,000 a year, less that her counterpart in the McCain’s team ($200,000). Full-time speechwriters make $50,000 to $90,000, [...]...
- 10 Years of Apple Stores: the non-celebration TweetApple and understatement aren’t close relatives. Not that they don’t have a right to strut a bit: after all, under its returning co-founder, Apple 2.0 performed the most stunning corporate turn around ever — and shows no sign of slowing down. As a result, product launches, developer conferences and quarterly earnings announcements all turn into [...]...
- Under the hood: Google Apps and Apple TweetWith its Cloud Apps, Google tells a nice, simple story: All you need is a browser. Life is simple, we take care of everything, no more fighting with fat, expensive desktop bloatware. You can access your data and our apps Anywhere, Anytime…if you have an Internet connection. If you don’t, as we’ll see in a [...]...
28 Comments
Couple of thoughts…
You’re a VC would you invest $5m into an “Apple Directory” company? (My guess is no, because there’s no revenue)
Does anyone care anymore? 500,000 apps is the ocean. People use on average 7. It’s like drinking the Pacific – not worth the effort
The reason that both Google and Apple tout such high app numbers is simple. By saying there are so many apps it “implies” that the phone can do everything.
And yet from the second you pick it up it’s obvious that it can’t do everything.
Apple and Google will get complacent about their app stores – in essence it’s so yesterday.
What comes next is the web – where in the future there will be a “service for that”. You only really need one app – a browser. It scales to every device AND it can now access native device side API’s to give you a much better experience still whilst protecting your privacy.
So much easier to write HTML pages than code an app.
Cheers,
Peter
Jean-Louis, you have proposed an elegant solution for the consumer, and one that acknowledges that Apple is already curating the iTunes App Store to some extent.
There is another model emerging away from the bright lights of consumer apps such as games, and that is the “enterprise app store” or “business app catalog” (as we like to call it).
The idea is that businesses need their own inward-facing “catalog” of apps that their employees can use, and that is curated and managed by the company with input from empowered users (their own employees). This is already happening today with products such as Apperian EASE which is deployed by thousands of businesses deploying “in house” (internally built) apps.
In addition to in house apps, the “app catalog” becomes a curating tool as well for “public” application stores such as iTunes and Google Market. Beyond this, an internal “business” catalog can provide content (PDF, video, Office files), HTML5 web app links, shortcuts, and even iOS configuration profiles (for Apple device users).
So, the problem you look to solve is already being solved in companies around the world, but using the power of the voice of the employee (through rating and crowd sourcing). It’s a good start!
Peter – “What comes next is the web”
Reminds me of “it’s the year of desktop Linux”
Just now, 5 years after the introduction of the modern smartphone and 4 after the app market explosion, one can now access device-side APIs. I’m afraid that your dream is just a fairytale. Web standards/features will always trail native. Standards bodies move at a glacial pace compared to the hardware manufacturers, they’ll always be implementing way late.
And, above all, if everything is web, what differentiation would there be between platforms? None.
Like desktop Linux, I think the web taking over from native apps is just a pipe dream.
PXLated… au contraire
Why wait for the standards (which as you say take forever). Why not improve the standards yourself. Why not take a standard open source browser and make it smarter? And make it work with all existing web standards and web servers.
The HTTP protocol explicitly allows you to extend the protocol (X headers) so simply add a little more context to the “conversation” between browser and web server.
Next allow JavaScript access to native device side api’s using a plugin approach to the same open source browser.
Finally make the browser really smart by changing the browser menus in real time based on the context of the device, the user, the location and the service it’s interacting with.
What do you have? A super app – one that adapts to you and the device and yet at the same time can access web services.
As for differentiation between platforms? Customers want solutions to their problems and yet they all want to BYOD (bring their own devices). So let them – just make your solution work across everything.
As for native apps vs a browser. I only have to learn one app with a browser.
Apple already has a “staff recommended” list that goes some ways to what you ask. But the more-followed ranking is the star score. This is what could be quickly and easily enhanced.
First, when a rating is given, the author should attest that they are only connected to the product as an ordinary customer — not a beta tester; not a freebie-accepting type; certainly not an employee, backer or friend of the developer. Simple check box; reminder that reviews are about the product, not anything else.
Second, Apple could roll up the stats on how helpful people find any given app review, and use that to add a “Thought Leaders’ Guide.” Those might be super-stars.
And finally, they could buy Netflix simply for its ranking methodology: my own ratings can be correlated to others’ ratings, to get a list of like-thinking “friends” (probably, all anonymous) whose opinions I implicitly trust. So if I have liked Twitter, and this list did the same but moved on to SuperTwit, I’d see that called out as a “you might be interested in…” call.
None of these create the opportunity for a dev feeling that Apple is discriminating against him, but all provide much more credibility to the ideas… what you were asking for.
@Peter Cranstone— please let me know when there’s a web app anywhere close to the power of my Pleco English-Chinese dictionary app (real-time OCR; multiple dictionaries; flash cards; Chinese handwriting recognition; …). Even if I couldn’t use it while I’m offline, I might be interested.
.
Also, please let me know when the W3C is going to put in the features necessary to support Apple’s iBook2 type functionality. Again, it’d be a disappointment to not read when my commute train goes out of coverage areas, and I *DO* like to read on the train, but maybe we’ll have internet coverage everywhere on the planet Real Soon Now and the W3C should be ready for that Glorious Day when I can read all the copyright-free books (only) through Google, together with my own annotations, etc.
.
And since you’re so thoughtful, I’m sure you will also have a good idea for how these can be monetized in a way that’s a whole lot better than the pitiful ad model that web apps primarily use today. (I really hate my paid-for-with-hard-cash bandwidth and my precious time being used to destroy value—the cost of my time and bandwidth is many times more than the fractions of a penny that Zynga gets out of the poor advertiser shouting for my attention.)
Peter – “Why not improve the standards yourself. Why not take a standard open source browser and make it smarter? And make it work with all existing web standards and web servers”
It’s your pipe dream, you do it. Let me know when you’re done.
I loved this story of Michelin. I even thought this was a great idea. For about 60 seconds. Than realized, despite your second point, that it would take a revolution for Apple to allow any of its employees to actually publicly express an opinion, no matter how unbiased or limited.
@PXLated. It’s already done.
@Walt French
Continue to use your app. New web services will appear in the future. They’ll be personalized for you – (and that’s how they’ll be monetized).
As for reading – It’s just text. If the W3C work up they’d already have an interchangeable format for books.
As for bandwidth – Google’s mobile home page is about a 1/4MB – with personalized technologies it could be reduced in size to about 50K.
The browser has always been the gateway, no one has made it do any different for year. That’s about to change.
HP had an interesting approach to the problem for its ill-fated WebOS platform: they created a magazine style app called Pivot, that had well-written, full-screen profiles on apps, not the sad templates the app store has. It’s easier when you have a paucity of apps, to be sure.
Peter Cranstone wrote, “As for reading – It’s just text.”
.
Of course, iBook2 includes new interactivity features beyond what the W3C supports, so no, it’s NOT.
.
But especially if it were: what could be more insane than doubling or tripling the volume of text from what could be downloaded ONCE, just to allow you to dribble it out over the web? You have the obvious example of Kindle’s download model working INCREDIBLY efficiently, and you claim that should be replaced by something that cannot work better in the best of circumstances, and has many circumstances where it works worse.
.
Could you come up with a better example of the triumph of Google’s dogma over today’s and tomorrow’s reality?
@ Peter Cranstone: A couple of points.
1. As a VC, I wouldn’t invest either in Michelin Guides or in an Apple App Guide. That’s exactly why Michelin itself did the job, that’s why Apple ought to do the same. The idea isn’t to make content $$ but hardware revenue and, more important, profit.
2. Web apps vs. native apps. It depends, it’s not black and white. Look at the iPhone and iPad manuals, they look like native apps but are web apps, nice ones at that. I think it’ll depend on the app’s requirements for access to system resources. I have no idea of what the future holds.
3. As for the ocean: I’d rather have something to guide me than nothing. Web apps would create the same problem of getting lost in the maze.
@JLG
Point 1 – agreed. Although I’m not sure there’s motivation
Point 2 – Think Web Services. There are 3 different things here…
Mobile Apps
Mobile Web Apps: All content resides in one place on the server
Mobile Web Services: browser can access any content
So what’s the holy grail here? Access to Native Device API’s.
Mobile Apps – check
Mobile Web Apps – limited
Mobile Web Services via the Browser – impossible (no plugins allowed)
So everyone assumes that there’s only two kinds of app in play here. As you say it’s not black and white but close.
So what if you could access native device API’s using HTML/CSS/JavaScript?
Well how many people out there can code using the above? A whole lot more than there are mobile app programmers. Want to tweak a service, maybe a day. Want to change the UI and make it better on a Mobile app – a lot more than a day.
What continues to amaze me is that no can think beyond the first two. If it’s not a Mobile app then it must be a Mobile Web app. That’s it – game set and match. It’s over.
And yet with a little innovation you could tweak the browser and make it so that it can do much more.
That’s what I think the future holds.
There’s a post out there about Eric Schmidt talking about how apps and devices need to be friends (link: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9223334/Google_s_Schmidt_says_devices_apps_need_to_be_friends)
In the future the devices will recognize you – that won’t come through just an app, it will also come through the web. Mobile Web apps are way too limiting for that. You need access to everything.
Is the “lots of Apps problem” any different from the “lots of books problem”? Many media outlets publish book reviews, with the reputation of the reviewer inherited from the publisher of the review, say the New York Times. And isn’t social media supposed to help quality “float to the top”. Is the answer really going to be in the hands of a Google or Apple? Heaven help us…
@JLG : unfortunately, the presented idea is much closer to the “FNAC” model and its infamous “Guide FNAC”. In essence, FNAC reviewers test and provide their advise on products they also distribute. The notation is clearly labeled using “stars”. Getting the maximum number of stars is the ultimate objective of many manufacturers and consumers.
“Guide FNAC” started by building its brand, with solid reviews. And then what happened ? The obvious.
Products which were good enough to receive the maximum number of stars were also “hinted” to give discounts to FNAC distribution. If they did not accomodate, this would cost them one or two stars.
Soon enough, the opposite become true, and mediocre product could also “buy” some stars through gifts and financial terms.
In the end, everyone should know today that the guide, once a good one, is now just a ploy to direct consumers towards highest margin products for FNAC, if not for FNAC’s reviewers…
What’s the difference with the Michelin model ? Well, as you said, Michelin has no financial incentive to provide more or less stars to a restaurant or a visit place, they don’t get any “share” in return. That’s what makes them more independant, and therefore a bit more “trustful”. Since consumers buy the review, it matters a lot that it is trusted.
Unfortunately, in this model, Apple sells & distributes apps, not the reviews. Although i hear the argument that “it doesn’t count much at the bottom line( only 2%)”, it’s still not convincing enough. The FNAC model seems to prevail here.
@ Yann: Thanks for your comment re. FNAC, I’ve been a longtime customer, of course, and I even tried to buy the company in 1987. You’re roght, FNAC “stars” can’t really be trusted, they make _all_ their money selling the stuff they recommend and could be inclined to recommend a product that “all things being equal” more them more €€.
That’s not the case for Apple. Their _only_ money is the hardware money. I see you dismiss the 2% argument, I respectfully beg you to reconsider. They make much less than 2% _profit_ on that 2% revenue. They’re motivated to see apps that sell hardware, that’s all.
Further, I don’t like the stars-only model of recommendation, I want to see a mid-length (one or two pages) review. With, unavoidably, some numeric ranking. And, as I wrote in the piece above, this ought to be presented as an _opinion_, not, as in Consumer Reports, a judgement, the result of lab tests. Nothing wrong with those, but apps rise and fall on more than quantifiable performance: look, feel, ease of use, “fluidity”, “nice” and the like, all fodder for opinions. Apple would get in trouble for their opinions, but that’s what they do today already.
@ Marius Coomans: Yes, Heaven help us if Apple and Google are the only arbiters of taste. There are, as noted in the piece, 116 sites trading in app reviews. Again, this is different fron book publishing: Apple has no real vested interest in one app selling more than another. Their concern is having good apps that move hardware.
@J-LG: As I learned at a tender age from this little piece of doggerel,
The word “possesses”
possesses more esses
than any other word
in the English language.
Although I have not attempted to verify the claim…
@ Cimarron Buser: Thanks, glad to hear about the rise of app-curation solutions.
This said, surprise, your handle, when clicked on lands me on http://www.apperian.com/company/. And I see you’re Apperian’s VP of Business Development, the company you cite as an example in your comment. No harm done, I just feel comments are stronger when the commenter’s affiliation is clear at the outset.
Jean-Louis – Point taken, I was not trying to hide the affiliation. When the site asks for email and website I put them in and assumed that they would show in text. I will certainly be clearer in the future on the blog!
Best,
Cimarron Buser
VP Bus Dev
Apperian, Inc.
I’ve long thought that a great way to approach this problem of discoverability would be for Apple to officially publish the iTunes feed API so that people can create their own curated shops. For example, I might be interested in documentaries, AFI might do their own store of classic movies, someone might curate a collection of classic jazz, someone else might pull together the classic TV offerings on iTunes, or concentrate on Apps. One might even consolidate a store across their subject, like pulling all the country and western podcasts, albums, movies, and books together. Incentivize this via some sort of affiliate commission, and now you have destinations where people can find what they want and weigh in as a community.
@ Mike Meyer: Apple does provide an affiliate program (5% commission), blog and resource site for partners. They also have a Search API and and feed. The interface is straightforward JSON. See http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/faq.html for more information.
@ Cimarron Buser: As I wrote, no trouble. Glad to enjoy your insights based on your business experience.
Brilliant idea.
But, only if done in French.
I find the Guide Rouge to be a much better book than the Red Guide.
@ Dave Barnes: As you say in English: Touché!
This is one of those really great ideas that Apple will almost certainly bypass. Why? Because it does not ‘change the world’. (But, wow, this sort of thing would be my DREAM job!)
Jean-Louis, great post. I’m the CEO of Appstores.com. We believe that app discoverability is going to happen on the websites and properties that people visit everyday. We give publishers and thought leaders the tools to curate their own app galleries and experiences on their own properties.
We are firm believers that it’s not the platforms jobs to curate the best apps. At the end of the day their core business is in providing the platform, not knowing which apps are best for recipes, cycling, or music. There are already thought leaders in those spaces, so why not give them the tools to showcase apps that are highly relevant to their audiences?
Our publisher app galleries work both on desktop and mobile, and allow curators to choose from any of the +1M apps on iOS and Android.
@ Ryan Merket: Thanks, I went and visited appstores.com. Interesting proposition, I’ll be watching developments.
7 Trackbacks
[...] Apple ($AAPL) needs to provide users with more App Store info. (Money Note) [...]
[...] Gassée, former director of Apple’s French subsidiary and VP of research wrote a delightful piece where he gives advice to Apple, saying they should follow the Michelin model: [Michelin founders] [...]
[...] way, is a push in favor of an Apple-curated guide described in the Monday Note by Jean-Louis (see Why Apple Should Follow Michelin). In the UK, several print publishers have detected the need for independent reviews; there, [...]
[...] way, is a push in favour of an Apple-curated guide described in the Monday Note by Jean-Louis (see “Why Apple should follow Michelin”). In the UK, several print publishers have detected the need for independent reviews; there, [...]
[...] way, is a push in favour of an Apple-curated guide described in the Monday Note by Jean-Louis (see “Why Apple should follow Michelin”). In the UK, several print publishers have detected the need for independent reviews; there, [...]
[...] way, is a push in favour of an Apple-curated guide described in the Monday Note by Jean-Louis (see “Why Apple should follow Michelin”). In the UK, several print publishers have detected the need for independent reviews; there, [...]
[...] way, is a push in favour of an Apple-curated guide described in the Monday Note by Jean-Louis (see “Why Apple should follow Michelin”). In the UK, several print publishers have detected the need for independent reviews; there, [...]