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Since I'm working for a company that is making iPhone games, I've been thinking a lot about the medium that Apple uses to distribute games. Most recently I've been thinking about the quality bar... or lack there of.
Quality, usefulness and fun in an application is not something Apple is moderating. I'm not just talking about the sadly high number of beer and fart apps on the App Store. I'm talking about RSS readers that crash all the time. I'm talking about apps that offer little to no usefulness. Like chat programs that don't have push, RSS readers that don't support image zoom or html, or apps that just don't give a damn about looks and ease of navigation. I'm talking about quality bar.
Coming from a background working with Sony and Nintendo their approval processes were much more stringent. I'm not saying all games published on their platforms were amazing, but you knew as a customer that you were getting a certain level of quality and gameplay when you bought a game. Even one of those games that was $10 at Walmart 2 years after it was released. If Apple doesn't start upping the bar for application usefulness when approving apps, users are going to lose confidence in the kind of applications they can get on the iPhone and they are going to keep expecting to get every app without name recognition (see Tomtom & EA game downloads for examples) for 99 cents.
This doesn't actually drive away iPhone users all buy itself. What it does do is drive developers away. Good, smart developers aren't going to stick around and make only 10% of development costs back on a game because price standards have been set impossibly low. Developers are going to head to markets where they can make a profit. And with all sorts of other smart phones coming up, and a lot of mobile gaming platforms coming close to providing smart phone features, Apple is going to be sad when one of these other companies get it right.
On the other hand, kudo's to Apple for actually testing the apps on the App Store. Some of the other smart phone app stores have been much less aggressive about application standards. Making users feel that the software quality of the phone is sub-par due to apps crashing the phone OS or worse.
So, my feeling on this subject is this: Apple (and other app stores) need to start setting a higher quality & standard bar, similar to game console manufactures. They need to create a market place that's profitable for developers and builds consumer confidence.
