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Last active June 9, 2016 15:40
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App Store Wishlist
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wishlist.md

App Store Wishlist

Some changes (besides the subscriptions features added recently) that I'd like to see in the App Store.

NOTE: This is in no way an attempt at an exhaustive list of all things wrong with the App Store. The focus of this list is mostly around improvements to make it easier for developers to make money from their apps without annoying customers. Other problems such as the broken review process, or inability to contact customers directly, etc. are out of scope.

  • Time or feature-limited demos with IAP to get full version. You could argue that this is already possible, but time-limits are against App Store policy, and apps that do it appear in the "Free" section with "Offers IAP" messaging, making them indistinguishable from pay-to-win junk. These would appear under "Paid" (and/or in their own category) and would have clear messaging that this was a free trial of a paid app. There would be other benefits too: You'd be able to gift a copy of the full app to someone without having to tell them to download the free one and then upgrade it themselves, for example.

  • Related to above - ability to buy or gift IAP for apps, or to buy/gift apps with all features already unlocked. To some extent this is achievable with vouchers, etc. but it's messy and the rules are unclear.

  • Paid upgrades. Again this can (sort-of) be done with IAP, but it's a hack and confusing to users. Also, the fact that it's hard to implement makes it rare, so users consider it to be "greedy". Apple making this a built-in feature of the store, with appropriate messaging, could help establish it as normal. Developers should also be able to provide maintenance updates to older versions, so users aren't forced to pay for bug fixes or minor OS compatibility updates.

  • An Apple-managed in-app ad network. They had this with iAds, but Apple had to become an ad reseller, which I guess they weren't keen on. Instead, they should use the iAds framework and APIs to server 3rd party ads, and ban any 3rd party ad SDKs. This avoids any issues with anticompetitiveness (they'd still serve Google Ads), but would allow them to prevent user data from being shared with 3rd parties. Hopefully this is (or is close to) what they're planning to do after July anyway.

  • Not really an App Store feature, more a StoreKit feature: I'd like a much simpler API for all these standard use cases. For unlocking a free trial or paying to disable ads, or whatever, you shouldn't have to write any code. You'd just configure the options in iTunes connect, then query StoreKit to see which ones had been unlocked (which would serve the answer from a local cache that is kept up-to-date by iOS and works offline). No need to track that yourself, and no need for a "Restore purchases" button.

@thkeen
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thkeen commented Jun 9, 2016

Ability to reply to users' reviews

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