Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its crazy to think there could ever be a "one size fits all" store for all types of people and all types of activity that digital devices are used for. Maybe an IGN store, a LifeHacker store, a ThinkGeek store, a Fortune store etc.
Apple/Google/MS could spend their time on the simpler effort of curating and promoting good stores instead of good apps and offer them a typical referral fee on each purchase. I think everyone would benefit - better shopping experience for users, better niche surfacing for developers, new revenue source for tech reviewers, simpler curation job for the platforms.
http://www.padgadget.com/2013/06/10/50-billion-apps-download...
Maybe there's no need. Or maybe the real problem isn't app discovery - but a problem of managing more than 20 apps on a phone and remembering to use them in the right context.
It might be a personal preference but "browsing" apps in the store isn't something I do at all. Most installs come from directed searches after reading reviews online, buying new Hardware (e.g. pulsemeter) or subscribing to a new service (e.g. spotify and friends).
EDIT: Simply being available in a store is definitely not enough to be found. Get a good webpage show the benefit (most apps are struggeling here ;) ) and give me a chance to try it out without much hassle
I'm actually currently working on such a setup.
https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentat...
You mean, like the "internet"?
We haven't been featured either, but that's made things harder on us. Getting featured is still huge for visibility. We're pressing for it pretty hard when we release our next game. It's 90% likely we won't get one, but its a huge win if you can pull it off. (It does increase the already silly graph of first-week downloads vs. the-rest-of-time-ever downloads, but it definitely makes sure that second part averages a bit higher.)
We had a dev relations contact and got featured worldwide with Hexiled, then a smaller feature later when we added more language support. I argue with my dev partner about press - I think the best tactic is more decent apps in the store trying to get a home-run feature by honing the app style, rather than begging little app reviewers for coverage.
I think if your feature gives your virality a launch pad, that's the best bet. We had the feature, but at the time our app was flawed and we had not yet introduced a couple of sharing functions.
I agree with your thoughts on tactics, BTW, which is why I'm working hard on polishing the UX.
That is no advice at all, just a confirmation of how biased the app stores are. All the big guys can do that. How is supposed a small indie dev, across the world can success at this, now?
On the other hand, a tablet layout that "flattens" a UI hierarchy by displaying a list Fragment to the side of a display/edit Fragment is pretty simple to do. Material Design works just fine for this, too.
They kind of already completely gave up on it because of the iOS appstore is much more popular and it's not really adding anything good to the consumer.
