Every Thursday Apple refreshes the content in the Featured area of the iPad App Store. Yesterday’s update included a very nice little change to navigation in the Featured and Categories sections.
In the Featured area, in the New and Noteworthy and Staff Favorites sections, you used to see six picks at a time – and then have to tap on little arrows to move forward or back one page. This was always a little tedious and slow. Now you can just swipe left and right to move through the pages. This is much smoother, faster, and nicer to work with.
The change has also been applied to the What’s Hot and Release Date tabs of the Featured area. And to the Categories sections.
Although it’s only a minor change to the iPad App Store, I think it’s a very welcome one. Navigating through pages of apps is now much faster. That’s got to be good for users and for developers as the smoother experience should help app discovery.
The change also kills of an irritating problem with the old navigation method. When you were several pages deep into a section and you hit the back arrow it would often dump you back on the very first screen, rather than the previous one. This is no longer an issue with swiping through pages.
Had you already noticed this change to iPad App Store navigation? Happy with it?
Just a couple weeks before its widely-criticized new subscription policies were due to take effect in the App Store, Apple has retreated and made the policy much more palatable for publishers like Amazon and many others.
Apple has quietly changed its guidelines on the pricing of In-App Subscriptions on the App Store. There are no longer any requirements that a subscription be the "same price or less than it is offered outside the app". There are no longer any guidelines about price at all. Apple also removed the requirement that external subscriptions must be also offered as an in-app purchase.
This news comes in the same week that we learned that one big publisher – The Financial Times – had opted out of the App Store route and gone with a new web app.
It’s very good to see Apple backing off on this issue. The iPad is an amazing device for a number of reasons, but having great content created for it and published on it is certainly one of them. Driving publishers away with overly aggressive and seemingly excessively greedy policies never seemed a good idea.
Now that iOS has been out for a few days, a few 3rd party apps have been updated to support it. And the App Store now has a special section to showcase those apps that have done so. The section is called ‘Great AirPlay-Enabled Apps’ and you can find it in the Featured tab of the App Store, just above the Staff Favorites area.
The list is not very long or very impressive just now. It’s good to see iMovie in here but it’s one of Apple’s own apps of course. The only 3rd party app that caught my eye is ESPN The Magazine. I gave it a quick go and it works fine.
Your Apple TV will need an update too, in order to enable this new AirPlay support for 3rd party apps. I hadn’t updated mine in a while and it refused to play videos from the ESPN app when I first tried; then it prompted that an update was available. Once that was applied, videos from ESPN The Magazine played nicely on my big screen.
Have you tried out any of these AirPlay-enabled apps yet?
From a report at Apple Insider yesterday:
Apple has reportedly had "strong words" with publisher Capcom about in-app purchases in the free iPhone and iPad children’s game "Smurfs’ Village," and is said to be considering adjusting iTunes account login times after receiving complaints from parents.
Citing a "well placed source," PocketGamer.biz reported Wednesday that Apple has taken notice of "accidental" in-app purchases of Capcom’s "Smurfs’ Village." As of Wednesday, the free application, last updated Feb. 4, ranked third among the "Top Grossing" applications on the iPhone App Store.
"Apple has told Capcom in no uncertain terms that its freemium children’s game has been causing problems with an increasingly significant number of parents who have complained that their children have been racking up large amounts of in-app purchases without their knowledge," the report said.
I’m not at all surprised that this sort of issue is making waves in the App Store. In-App purchases – especially in games such as this one aimed at young kids – have always seemed like trouble waiting to happen. I’ve also seen this problem first-hand, as my wife and I initially tried the honor system with our daughter (she’s only 7.5 years old) in her usage of an iPod Touch and an iPad she shares with her mom. We set out some clear guidelines for her – that included making In-App purchases forbidden – but we still had a couple of slipups. Slipups that lead to silly amounts of money being spent on ‘mojo’ and the like in games that make it easy to buy your way up through their levels.
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The guys at 2D Boy, the developers of the multi-platform hit game World of Goo, have posted an article on their blog detailing their experiences leading up to, during, and after the release of the game for the iPad. This article is a really informative look at the dynamics of the App Store, complete with breakdowns of customer feedback and expectations for apps on the platform, sales figures, price point, rankings, profits, and publicity. If you have ever wanted an inside look at the inner-workings of the iOS App Store, and what a developer goes through and has to consider from development, to release, to post-mortem, then you should definitely take a look.
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