It’s time for Apple to clean up the App Store. The App Store arms race is over - both iOS and Android are entrenched as platforms, and both platforms get all major apps eventually. For WWDC this year, Apple released a promotional video titled “The App Effect” that boasted over 1,500,000 applications in the App Store, with over 100 billion downloads of those applications. And the App Store has tremendous velocity, adding over 1,000 new apps per day. But there are an increasing number of “zombie applications” that remain on the store, abandoned, gumming up search results, impeding app discovery, and generally degrading the perceived quality of the App Store.
I performed a series of searches on the App Store earlier today. Here are just a few of the zombie apps I found.
Search term: “podcast”
11th result: Alarm Clock 4 Free
Last updated: Oct 2, 2013
Search term: “weather”
Top 25: NOAA Radar US - HD Weather Radar and Forecasts
Last updated: Oct 2, 2013
Search term: “books”
Top 50: Audio.books
Last updated: Sep 12, 2013
Search term: “photo”
Top 100: Wood Camera - Vintage Photo Editor
Last updated: Dec 18, 2013
Apple is consistent about moving developers forward, using mandatory SDK targets. The iOS 7 SDK has been mandatory since February 1st, 2014. But only for new application submissions and new application updates.
Apple no longer sells devices that support iOS 6. Apple no longer sells non-retina mobile devices. Applications that haven’t been updated for iOS 7 or for retina screens with @2x graphics should be removed from the App Store. These zombie apps hurt the overall quality of the App Store and impede app discovery, an already acute weakness of the App Store.
Apple has long censored the content of the App Store. Just last month, Apple was in the news for removing apps containing the Confederate flag. It’s time for Apple to filter out bad platform citizens not just based on content, but also on technical merit.
Monday marked the beginning of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, or WWDC for short. Along with new versions of their iOS and OS X operating systems, they announced that they would be open sourcing their Swift programming language, including support for Linux. This drew by far the largest cheers of the day from the 5,000 or so developers who had assembled in Moscone West for the kickoff keynote. While Apple doesn’t have a perfect track record when it comes to following through on open source promises, it has been better lately. And there are a few good reasons that developers are so excited about the proposition of Swift being open sourced.
On today’s web, server applications are typically written in an interpreted language like Javascript, Ruby, or PHP, or a managed language like C# or Java. Swift is different than these languages - it is a compiled language, which gives it significant speed and scaling advantages compared to the languages listed above. And it gains these advantages while still offering all of the high-level conveniences we expect in our programming languages today.
One of the core design philosophies of Swift is safety. Inferred types allow for less error prone code. Memory is managed automatically. Variables are always initialized before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow. Errors are bounded and can’t throw exceptions, preventing crashes. All of these safety features add up to one thing - increased reliability. And when you are hosting a web service, increased reliability pays dividends in the most important currency on the web - uptime.
With the backing of the world’s largest and most influential technology company, it’s not hard to imagine a strong and vibrant ecosystem springing up around Swift as a server-side programming language once it has been open sourced. It has already seen tremendous adoption within the iOS and OS X community, despite it’s rough edges, and is continuing to grow in popularity. And with the Swift team’s relentless optimizations, it’s getting faster with every release.
Imagine lightning-fast, scalable deployments of RESTFUL web services, or a Rails-like front-end framework written in Swift - native, fast, and safe. Quicker responses, and lower server costs, without an increase in complexity.
The future of Swift seems to be very bright indeed.
Since they popularized the category with the Game Boy in 1989 Nintendo has been the king of mobile gaming, selling over 400 million portable gaming systems. Competitors like Sega with it’s Game Gear and Sony with their Playstation portables have never managed to approach Nintendo’s level of success. The Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo’s newest handheld console and the first to be launched in the smartphone era, has sold reasonably well since it's introduction in 2011 — just over 50 million units — but at only half the annual rate of it’s predecessor the Nintendo DS, which moved 20 million units per year over it’s lifetime. These flagging sales numbers combined with Google's 1 billion active Android users and sales of Apple’s iOS devices passing 1 billion in January have had analysts, journalists, and Nintendo fans alike clambering that Nintendo has a smartphone problem.
For years Nintendo’s handheld business was a steady constant for the company amidst tumultuous transitions between home console generations. While Sony floundered in the new mobile landscape with failed efforts like the Xperia Play phone and PlayStation Mobile, Nintendo remained silent, leaving fans to speculate about what Nintendo Mobile might look like. By the time they announced a partnership with DeNA, a Japanese company that focuses on making mobile games for smartphones, the dynamics of the app stores had shifted away from valuing the premium content that Nintendo is known for. This wasn’t a partnership made from a position of power and confidence. A bet on quality in the face of the overwhelming choice and churn of today’s app stores, even by a giant like Nintendo, seems like a fools errand.
Their choice to partner with DeNA, a company who’s portfolio is filled with the kind of run-of-the-mill free-to-play games endemic on mobile today is indicative that any kind of positive outcome from this partnership will be strictly financial for the parties involved. While the deal gives Nintendo a clear path to get their characters and games on to smartphones and in front of the next generation of gamers, it is also a deathblow for those clinging to the hope that Nintendo Mobile would mean innovative, interesting, original games. This is part of why it’s so viscerally unpleasant to watch them sacrifice their beloved characters at the altar of the micro-transaction in service of the bottom line — more so than Nintendo’s other marketing and merchandising efforts over the years.
As Nintendo’s fortunes creep back into the black, partially on the strength and value of the intellectual property they're looking to leverage in the DeNA deal, perhaps the creative voices in Kyoto can postpone or halt the spiritual dilution of the great gaming institution. Or perhaps 'Clash of Kongs' will simply be regarded as a necessary evil while they continue work on their next console — where they will continue to create great games, as they always have. With Nintendo’s stated plan being to release one game by the end 2015 and four more by 2017, they won’t have to wait much longer for the coins to start rolling in.
