Monday Note

As they approach the one million apps mark, smartphone and tablet app stores leave users stranded in thick, uncharted forests. What are Google and Apple waiting?

Last week, Google made the following announcement:

Mountain View, February 24th, 2013 — As part of an industry that owes so much to Steve Jobs, we remember him on this day, the 58th anniversary of his birth, with great sadness but also with gratitude. Of Steve’s many achievements, we particularly want to celebrate the Apple App Store, the venerable purveyor of iPhone software. 

Introduced in 2008, the App Store was an obvious and natural descendant of iTunes. What wasn’t obvious or foreseen was that the App Store would act as a catalyst for an entire market segment, that it would metamorphose the iPhone from mere smartphone to app phone. This metamorphosis provided an enormous boost to the mobile industry worldwide, a boost that has benefitted us all and Google more than most.

But despite the success of the app phone there’s no question that today’s mobile application stores, our own Google Play included, are poorly curated. No one seems to be in charge, there’s no responsibility for reviewing and grading apps, there’s no explanation of the criteria that goes into the “Editors’ Picks”, app categorization is skin deep and chaotic.

Today, we want to correct this fault and, at the same time, pay homage to Steve’s elegant idea by announcing a new service: The Google Play Red Guide. Powered by Google’s human and computer resources, the Red Guide will help customers identify the trees as they wander through the forest of Android apps. The Red Guide will provide a new level of usefulness and fun for users — and will increase the revenue opportunities for application developers.

With the Google Play Red Guide, we’ll bring an end to the era of the uncharted, undocumented, and poorly policed mobile app store.

The Red Guide takes its name from another great high-tech company, Michelin. At the turn of the 20th century, Michelin saw it needed to promote automotive travel in order to stimulate tire sales. It researched, designed and published great maps, something we can all relate to. To further encourage travel, Michelin published Le Guide Rouge, a compendium of hotels and restaurant. A hundred years later, the Michelin Red Guide is still considered the world’s standard; its inspectors are anonymous and thus incorruptible, their opinions taken seriously. Even a single star award (out of three) can put an otherwise unknown restaurant on the map — literally.

Our Red Guide will comprise the following:

- “Hello, World”, a list of indispensable apps for the first time Android customer (or iPhone apostate), with tips, How-To guides, and FAQs.
- “Hot and Not”. Reviews of new apps and upgrades — and the occasional downgrade.
- “In Our Opinion”. This is the heart of the Guide, a catalogue of reviews written by a select group of Google Play staff who have hot line access to Google’s huge population of in-house subject matter experts. The reviews will be grouped into sections: Productivity, e-Learning, Games, Arts & Creativity, Communication, Food & Beverage, Healthcare, Spirituality, Travel, Entertainment, Civics & Philanthropy, Google Glass, with subcategories for each.

Our own involvement in reviewing Android apps is a novel — perhaps even a controversial — approach, but it’s much needed. We could have taken the easy path: Let users and third-parties provide the reviews. But third party motives are sometimes questionable, their resources quickly exhausted. And with the Android Store inventory rapidly approaching a million titles, our users deserve a trustworthy guide, a consistent voice to lead them to the app that fits.

We created the Red Guide because we care about our Android users, we want them to “play safe” and be productive, and we feel there’s no better judge of whether an application will degrade your phone’s performance or do what it claims than the people who created and maintain the Android framework. For developers, we’re now in a position to move from a jungle to a well-tended garden where the best work will be recognized, and the not-so-great creations will be encouraged to raise their game.

We spent a great deal of time at Google identifying exactly the right person to oversee this delicate proposition…and now we can reveal the real reason why Google’s Motorola division hired noted Macintosh evangelist, auteur, and investor Guy Kawasaki as an advisor: Guy will act as the Editor in Chief of the Google Play Red Guide.

With Guy at the helm, you can expect the same monkish dedication and unlimited resources we deployed when we created Google Maps.

As we welcome everyone to the Google Play Red Guide, we again thank Steve Jobs for his leadership and inspiration. Our algorithms tell us he would have approved.

The Red Guide is an open product and will be published on the Web at AppStoreRedguide.com as well as in e-book formats (iBookstore and Kindle formats pending approval) for open multi-platform enjoyment.
——– 

No need to belabor the obvious, you’ve already figured out that this is all a fiction. Google is no better than Apple when it comes to their mobile application store. Both companies let users and developers fend for themselves, lost in a thick forest of apps.

That neither company seems to care about their online stores’ customers makes no sense: Smartphone users download more apps than songs and videos combined, and the trend isn’t slowing. According to MobiThinking:

IDC predicts that global downloads will reach 76.9 billion in 2014 and will be worth US$35 billion.

Unfortunately, Apple appears to be resting on its laurels, basking in its great App Store numbers: 40 billion served, $8B paid to developers. Perhaps the reasoning goes like this: iTunes served the iPod well; the App Store can do the same for the iPhone. It ain’t broke; no fix needed.

But serving up music and movies — satisfying the user’s established taste with self-contained morsels of entertainment — is considerably different from leading the user to the right tool for a job that may be only vaguely defined.

Apple’s App Store numbers are impressive… but how would these numbers look like if someone else, Google for example, showed the kind of curation leadership Apple fails to assert?

– JLG@mondaynote.com

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