I read criticism suggesting that the iPhone storefront needed to change given the large amount of apps in-store. I disagree. I think the iPhone storefront gives ’stepped opportunities to progress an app’s visibility’ (1). In other words, it feels like apps get a fair chance to get noticed on the iPhone, especially combined with the iTunes storefront. The iPad storefront tells a different story.
You’ve made an iPad app. What does it take to gain visibility in the iPad storefront?
in iTunes, the iPad store is structured in the same way as the iPhone store – there is a button to switch between iPhone/iPad apps, right at the top when entering the iTunes app store.
on-device, the situation is different. The iPad has its own storefront. First off, the most obvious thing you might notice is that your app is… …not visible anywhere once it moved out of new releases. Yes, even if it’s moderately successful. This article explains why.
1. Storefront structure
Like the iPhone storefront the iPad store is divided into three categories:
- Featured apps. This seems to combine hand-picked products with high ranking products from the charts. I’m not covering this in detail here, as the mechanics behind featured apps are (from a marketers’ point of view) obscure.
- Charts. Yes. That’s just the best selling apps.
- Categories. We’ll come to that
Somewhat unfortunately, however, the similarity ends here.
2. Browsing by categories
If you pick a category, and you have a ‘moderately successful’ product, you’ll most likely try to select a sub-category (well, guess that’s what moderately successful means, right?). Alas, the iPad store has no sub-categories.
Here’s something even more interesting (or desperate). This is how the games category is organized:
- Spotlight: 17 apps – 17 screenshots, beautifully showcased.
- New and noteworthy: 48 apps
- Mini showcase: 6 apps – 6 icons, clearly visible but somehow demoted towards the bottom of the screen.
- What’s hot: 47 apps
What’s missing? There is no way that buyers can access the charts from this section! All of this is editorial stuff. I’d like to test the overlap between ‘editorial stuff’ and ‘best selling games’. But I’ll need to be doing it another time.
3. Browsing the charts
At first glance, it would appear that we can’t browse charts by category. It actually takes luck or perseverance to discover a small, gray on gray ‘categories’ button at the top left of the screen. Now, this is interesting. We have two category buttons in the layout, and one of these buttons allows browsing charts by category, but it’s not overly visible, so I’d safely assume that a reasonable percentage of iPad users will never notice it(!). Summarized…
- (Maybe depending on bandwidth) a user can view either the top 20,40 or 60 products (I say ‘depending on bandwidth’ because it’s down to my luck how many times I can press the [more] button).
- Users can get charts by categories (enter charts, then top left for categories) but this isn’t all too obvious.
Conclusion
Expect having a hard time with the iPad storefront, here’s an example:
- Antistar ranked #3 in RPG/Adventure (both!) on iPad (Japan). This only lasted for a couple of days, but I’m not boasting, just illustrating a point
- At this time, the RPG/Adventure sections of the iPad store (in iTunes, not on-device!) featured the product in ‘What’s hot’ and even ‘New and Noteworthy’.
- The game was hardly visible on-device. You’d have had to open the charts, find the categories button, and press ‘more’ a couple of times to find the product somewhere at the bottom of the top games list. Not featured in games. No sub-categories to have a look into, nada!
Given the storefront allows nothing like a stepped progression, and the iPad market is at least 10-15 times smaller than the iPhone market at the time of this writing, I raise my hat to the courageous developers that make dedicated apps for the iPad. The device is nothing like an iPhone in terms of weight, size and on-screen real estate, so the iPad needs dedicated UI design. Even with moderate competition (~30k apps) newcomers may have a hard time getting their apps noticed.
(1) No. I’m not just saying that because I was featured in top-something recently. I was, but I’m not now – ‘hardly anywhere not, to the least’. I’m not saying the iPhone market is ‘easy’ either. I don’t really think it should be anyway. The market is hard enough that it takes luck or hard work to get apps in the charts, and that’s a sign we have a healthy app market!
