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Apple App Store’s Untapped Potential

Apple has quietly released a few changes to its iPhone App Store on iTunes, in an attempt to alleviate some of the growing pains around its app ecosystem. The App Store has recently hit 10,000 apps and is expected to accept many more.

“Most popular” lists and 19 high-level categories are hardly up to the task of helping consumers find new apps. Limited discovery is hampering the App Store’s growth and monetization and could have a depressing effect on the ecosystem.

There are however quite a few opportunities for Apple to improve discovery and bring the overall shopping experience on the App Store away from simply being a “port” of the iTunes Musicstore:

- Improve discovery through experience

- Enable free trials – free trials are critical to bring feature-rich and higher priced apps to the ecosystem.

- Add videos and user video reviews – text and screenshots do little justice to an app’s capabilities, design, and overall user experience;

- Improve discovery through richer feedback and needs analysis

- Categories and search are limited tools for demand generation;

- Amazon-style recommendations and discovery needs to be more ubiquitous and prominent on the App Store to enable genuine comparison between apps;

- Blending the feedback process about apps much with the user experience on the iPhone could open up a much more personalized experience

- Improve discovery through finer segmentation and filtering – the free vs. paid segmentation is dragging all paid iPhone apps down in the ringtones pricing range; there are only 14 apps over $100 (out of 10,000) and there are still relatively few games at a price comparable to that of a typical game console.