Apple's App Store has had, by all accounts, explosive success. Thanks to more than 35,000 apps, however, it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. According to a new report from BusinessWeek, Apple may be considering ways to "share" apps with friends in an effort to increase app discovery and spur wider distribution.
The App Store allows users to leave ratings and reviews, which can give potential users some idea if an app is good or not. But those ratings can be skewed by the fact that the iPhone asks for a rating of an app when it is deleted—chances are if you're deleting an app, it's because you don't like it. The App Store also maintains lists of top downloaded paid and free apps, both overall and in several categories.
But discovery still remains an issue. "As every day passes, it gets harder to rise above all that noise," Michael Boland, a program director for consultant The Kelsey Group, told BusinessWeek. "It's difficult to be found in the app store."
One way to address the issue is to have a way for one user to make a direct recommendation to another. Like the Zune's infamous song "squirting," a source for BusinessWeek says that the upcoming update to iPhone OS 3.0 includes a mechanism that would let users "share software with one another." The suggestion is that the mechanism is integrated into the OS but is not yet "activated" by Apple.
Such a feature makes us wonder how a "sharing" system would work. Apple has filed a patent on such a sharing mechanism, which provides for broadcasting data from one mobile device to another. It doesn't seem likely that one user could "beam" an app to another, though, given that apps are DRM-encoded to a particular device. It seems more likely that Apple could enable some mechanism that could utilize the Push Notification system, or perhaps SMS or MMS messages to send recommendations, including a link to the App Store.
Even more useful would be an integrated method of offering time-limited demos. Suppose I send a recommendation for an app to a friend—what's the use of the recommendation without a way to see if the app will work for the person I recommended it to? Such a demo mechanism would benefit users and developers alike, and would eliminate all the feature-limited "lite" versions of apps littered throughout the App Store.
Discovery and sharing are problems that competing app stores from Google, RIM, and others face as well. Google is also said to be experimenting with a way to enable direct user-to-user gifting and recommendations for its Android Marketplace. As the app store concept continues to evolve, we can be assured that new ways to share the apps we're using will become integral to how these stores operate in the future.