The iTunes Store is Beyond Ridiculous
There has been, in the last few months, an utter explosion in the level of Chinese language reference and education applications on the iTunes App Store. That would be fine but it’s just a colossal waste of time for all involved things stand. First of all, the Apple Store’s search functionality is a goddamn joke. It searches title and description, so if you look for “Chinese” you’re going to get every app which even mentions Chinese. Secondly, there’s no way to sort by score, price, reviews etc. This is the biggest issue, there’s a bazillion apps – it’s a pain to find one anything like what you want (unless you want a generic dictionary or flash card app), and there’s no real indication of quality. You have to buy and see if it’s any good. Well, I spent a lot of money when there were nowhere near as many and honestly, probably two were even passable. Now it’s just crazy, I wouldn’t know where to start.
The biggest problem is there’s just bazillions of exactly the same thing. Dead simple stuff, often straight shovelware front ends for existing free content. There are some good efforts regarding flash cards and writing practice but for everyone that’s good, there’s literally a hundred that are not. Because, quite honestly, anyone making an application can count on getting maybe 5 downloads due to this insanity, it obviously doesn’t bode well for quality software development.
On the other hand I’m currently beta testing Pleco for the iPhone. This being a new version of what is hands down the most ambitious, feature-laden high quality mobile Chinese language reference tool in the world – previously only being available on Windows Mobile and Palm. It’s got a bunch of bugs right now but it’s so far removed from the barrels of shovelware garbage on iTunes it’s impossible to communicate it. When it is released it’s likely to get absolutely buried in the garbage, and it’ll be priced at a level which will quite obviously make it the most expensive application on the store… that’s terrible really.
That said, I think word-of-mouth in the Chinese student community is enough, people will go looking for it and searching for ‘pleco’ should pretty much work in the utterly broken iTunes search scheme. What about all the other apps though? Why can’t Apple properly sort their shit out. Expose the App Store database properly on the web so we can use our actual web browsers instead of the iTunes Safari-powered abortion… that would be a good start!
Maybe if the market wasn’t so broken it would be worth the effort for these developers to spend a little more time and effort in making genuinely useful and original applications. As it stands I’m left feeling that maybe someone has but quite honestly I cannot see how on earth you’d find them.
