Major App Store Changes Announced

By John Voorhees

Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, sat down with The Loop and The Verge to announce sweeping changes to the App Store, including changes to App Review, business models, and app discovery.

We have already seen the effect of the changes to App Review. According to Schiller, as a result of changes to the review process, Apple is reviewing 50% of apps within 24 hours and 90% within 48 hours and reviewing over 100,000 apps per week in aggregate.

Apple is also opening up subscriptions to all app types. Participants in the program will be able to offer auto-renewable subscriptions to services and content using in-app purchases. Under the new subscription models Apple will split subscription revenue 70/30 with developers for the first year a customer is subscribed to an app. For customers that subscribe for more than a year, the split with Apple will increase to 85/15 in favor of the developer. Subscriptions will be available world-wide at over 200 price points. Developers will not be able to increase a subscription price without existing customers’ authorization, but will be able to charge new customers an increased price.

We wrote about app discovery just last week and made a laundry list of suggestions about how it could be improved. The app filtering that was first noticed on the Apple TV App Store last week will be rolled out to all the app stores so apps that are already installed on your iOS device will be hidden, ensuring that visitors to the App Store only see new apps. Apple is also adding access to the share sheet via 3D Touch so users can share apps with others from their Home screens.

In addition, as rumored by Bloomberg in April, Apple will soon begin accepting search ads from developers. At the time the possibility of search ads was raised by Bloomberg, many developers were unhappy. Schiller in his interview with The Loop, said that:

Our store is not for sale—that’s not how we handle things,” said Schiller. “We are only going to do this if we can, first and foremost, respect the user and be fair to developers, especially small developers.

Schiller elaborated that there will only be one ad per search that will be clearly marked and contain the same App Store content returned by unpaid search results. Apple also stated that it would not collect analytics about click rates or share any such data with developers. Search ads will be launched through a beta program later this summer.

As we concluded in our story on app discovery last week:

There is no silver bullet that will improve discovery overnight – it’s a problem that needs to be attacked on multiple fronts simultaneously.

That statement holds true not just for app discovery, but the whole of the App Store. There is much more that Apple can and should do to improve the App Store, but the initiatives announced today are a good start. With this sort of major change being announced shortly before WWDC, I can’t help but wonder what Apple has in store for the WWDC keynote.

Google Research Releases Motion Stills →

Linked By John Voorhees

Yesterday, Google Research released Motion Stills, an app that turns Live Photos into movies or GIFs. There is heavy-duty computing going on behind the scenes to separate the foreground from the background, stabilize the video clip, and loop it, which is one of Google’s strengths. Here is a taste of Google’s explanation:

We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts. Our algorithm uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness.

There’s much more to what Google is doing to create Motion Stills clips, so I recommend reading Google’s entire post if you’re curious.

Image courtesy of Google.

In my limited tests, creating clips was fast and easy, but I also had some trouble with Live Photos not properly displaying in Motion Stills. Occasionally, Motion Stills would seem empty or skip recent Live Photos, showing old ones instead. Hopefully Google will get those issues resolved in a future update because when it works properly, Motion Stills makes fantastic video clips.

Motion Stills is free on the App Store.

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Metapho 2.0 Add New Photo Metadata Editing Tools

By John Voorhees

Metapho is an iOS photo utility for accessing, editing, and removing photo metadata. Whether you want to share a photo without the metadata associated with it for privacy reasons, make edits to that metadata, or add metadata such as a location to photos that have none, Metapho has you covered. With version 2.0, a free update to current customers, Metapho has added batch editing, date editing, a photo library filter, and file name display.

Learn Swift Interactively with TapCoding

By John Voorhees

TapCoding is an iOS app that teaches Swift programming. In the two years since Swift was announced, it has seen a lot of change, but with the language starting to stabilize and mature, now is a good time to dive in and learn Swift. TapCoding breaks Swift down into bite-sized mini-lessons with a curriculum that spans difficulty levels from first-time novice to intermediate.

Instagram Adds Basic Extension Support

By John Voorhees

Tucked away in an update to Instagram described as “Bug fixes and performance improvements” is a share extension that allows you to share photos to Instagram from Apple’s Photos app or any other photo app that supports share extensions. A share extension is a long time coming to Instagram, which previously required you to import photos into Instagram from your Photo Library or take a snapshot or video using Instagram.

Unfortunately, the Instagram share extension’s functionality is limited. All you can do is add a title to the photo you post to Instagram. There is no way to crop your shot, apply filters, tag people, select a location, or select social networks on which to share your photo, all of which are available in the main app. Even so, the addition of a share extension is a welcome addition to Instragram, which received a significant design refresh and new icon last month.

Apple Releases ‘Shot on iPhone’ Videos

By John Voorhees

Apple released eight short, fifteen-second videos as part of its ‘Shot on iPhone’ series today. The videos highlight each of the seven continents, plus a bonus video set in the sky between North and South America. Each video highlights features of the iPhone camera or effects that can be accomplished in apps like iMovie such as image stabilization, slow motion, reverse playback, and time lapse.

The videos, which you can watch after the break, also feature snippets of an eclectic variety of music.

Remind Me Makes Quick Work of Reminders Task Entry

By John Voorhees

Remind Me by Nick Leith is one of those apps borne out of frustration with a stock Apple app – in this case, Reminders. Reminders has some compelling features like iCloud syncing between iOS devices and with Macs, shared reminder lists, and the ability of some third-party apps like OmniFocus and 2Do to import reminders. Yet despite these benefits, Reminders can be tedious and frustrating when you want to enter a reminder with a due date. Remind Me is a handy lightweight iPhone utility dedicated to fast Reminders task entry.

Note Taking Apps

By John Voorhees

John

GoodNotes GoodNotes is probably my favorite of the note taking apps in this week’s collection. Sometimes creating a handwritten outline or task list helps me organize my thoughts when I’m writing or working on a project. Other times, I prefer to mark up something I’m editing by hand by writing on a PDF...

“Where’s the App for That?” – Fixing App Store Discovery

By John Voorhees

When the iPhone debuted in 2007, it was by no means a forgone conclusion that there would ever be an App Store. Steve Jobs reportedly resisted the idea over concerns that it would ‘mess up’ the iPhone,¹ yet about one year later, the App Store debuted with around 500 third-party apps.

The App Store grew like wildfire. By January 2009, there were about 15,000 apps. Though modest by today’s standards, 15,000 was already enough apps that it felt like there was one to fulfill every possible need you might have. Apple celebrated the success of the App Store the next month by launching a TV ad campaign featuring the catchphrase ‘There’s an app for that.’

Fast-forward to today and the scope of the App Store of 2009 feels quaint by comparison. There are now approximately 1.5 million apps in the App Store – a 100-fold increase in just seven years. But while the App Store has been an undeniable success for Apple by almost any measure, that success has come at a cost. With so many apps in the App Store, discovery has become such a serious problem that today’s version of Apple’s 2009 catchphrase may as well be ‘Where’s the app for that?’

The good news is that change is afoot in the App Store. Last December, Phil Schiller took over responsibility for the App Store. In April, Apple launched a site dedicated to helping developers build their businesses, which includes a way for developers to contact the App Store team directly about promoting their apps. In mid-May, app review times dropped dramatically, from around a week to under two days, instantly changing the launch cycle for developers. Then, just in the last week or two, Apple quietly started hiding Apple TV apps from its Featured pages and top charts that customers have already downloaded, making room to display more new apps.

According to rumors Apple has about 100 people working on changes to the App Store. With WWDC just around the corner, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how Apple could improve App Store discovery and gathering ideas from other developers. I’m optimistic that meaningful progress can be made to make developers’ apps more discoverable, but these are hard problems. There is no silver bullet that will improve discovery overnight – it’s a problem that needs to be attacked on multiple fronts simultaneously.