kosertech

The restrictions on the iPhone SDK really make for some idiotic things hitting the app store.  Because a developer can’t alter his Application title or icon on the fly I saw about 100 applications hit today that were all just different *Call Name* names so you could speed dial someone.  It’s things like this that are making the AppStore an utter nightmare.

There are already so many duplicated apps and no really good way to weed out the junk that this kind of thing really just makes it so much worse.

I’d like to see some changes to the SDK to allow developers to alter the text under an icon on the fly as well as alter the icon graphic on the fly.  This would prevent what I saw today hitting the store.  I’ve seen this exact same thing for other applications so It’s not an isolated incident.

Apple also needs to improve searching somehow so I can search for utilities with higher than 3 star rating and more than 100 downloads or use some form of criteria like that that would give me some better results back from the store searching.  As it is now I’m pretty much 100% reliant on external sites to tell me what is worth buying / installing.  Right now on the iPhone you can’t even search by rating you pretty much have to know the applications name to find it and even then it’s a crap shoot.

Take the above search for instance.  I’m trying to find applications with Things in the title and the AppStore did a nice job on my first returned item but Powerboat Challenge is a total miss and down the list is 43 Things and a page or so down was another application with Things in the title.  Apple, at least make the search work if thats my only method of finding applications.