Volitans Software

App Store Full of Buggy Apps

Paul Graham makes a very interesting point in his article about the reasons the App Store is failing:

By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App Store tends to be an old and buggy one. One developer wrote:

I believe that they think their approval process helps users by ensuring quality. In reality, bugs like ours get through all the time and then it can take 4-8 weeks to get that bug fix approved, leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don’t work. Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms that have immediate approval processes.

I had not considered that because Apple takes so long to approve updates, that most apps in the App Store are very buggy since no updates can be approved. Whereas on the Mac, an update can be pushed right away to fix a bug, the APp Store takes an unknown amount of time. So the tendency to roll as many fixes and changes into one update is overwhelmingly strong, because who wants to wait 3 months for 6 updates, and instead to 1 update every 3 months.

Just another reason the approval process is broken.