A Tale of Two App Stores

technicat
technicat
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

I know there are some new goodies in iOS 11, but mostly, in the beta, I notice the App Store. It’s quite a revamp, and overall I think it does look nicer, but there is a form over function issue.

Here’s my developer screen on the iOS 10 App Store running on an iPad. It works, but doesn’t make great use of the screen. And I always thought it was confusing how they list universal apps as if they’re separate iPhone and iPad apps (not to mention using iPhone-only and iPad-only as the only search options).

The iOS 10 version is better that way and also has a Latest Release and iMessage section. I imagine if I had iWatch support, that would show up, too.

The only problem I have with this is that I actually have 18 apps and it’s only showing 10 of them. You can swipe/scroll horizontally to see the rest, but it’s hardly obvious just looking at this screen, and in fact it took me a while to figure that out. It’s a classic missing affordance case, the same thing that happens to me with a lot of web browsing with initially invisible scrollbars.

Even though I eventually did figure this out, I don’t like the thought that there will be users who look at my developer page and think those are all the apps I have. This will really be a problem when I achieve my grand ambition of having a hundred apps on the App Store! (even though I’ve already seemed to reach the point where I’m in a loop updating each existing app)

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