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Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

marco.org

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Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#101

Post by zimpenfish »

tolmasky wrote: post #44

Here's an idea: show me the top lists without the apps I already own! Why do I need to see Mountain Lion at the top of the App Store constantly in the #1 position? Just so I can know how little Mac Software gets sold and completely dissuade me from ever considering writing Mac software again? EIGHT of the top 10 apps are Apple apps. Most of which people probably already own (I happen to own all of them). Is this the…

A friend suggested that once.

He unsuggested it after I walked through the umpteen problems involved in implementing this over hundreds of millions of accounts.

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#102

Post by OliC »

I would imagine that Apple like the headlines they get from runaway app successes like Angry Birds. Along with the subtle "Write apps for iOS and become the next Rovio!" message they send out. These massive hits are usually initially fueled by the "Top" lists so I don't see them being removed any time soon.

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#103

Post by tehwalrus »

zimpenfish wrote: post #101
tolmasky wrote: post #44

Here's an idea: show me the top lists without the apps I already own! Why do I need to see Mountain Lion at the top of the App Store constantly in the #1 position? Just so I can know how little Mac Software gets sold and completely dissuade me from ever considering writing Mac software again? EIGHT of the top 10 apps are Apple apps. Most of which people probably already own (I happen to own all of them). Is this the…

A friend suggested that once. He unsuggested it after I walked through the umpteen problems involved in implementing this over hundreds of millions of accounts.

As a user-side filter, this is actually not that difficult to implement (assuming the device caches the list of purchased app ids for the current iTunes account, or even easier just the apps that are already installed on this device).

It means it'll take multiple requests to get all the results, sure, but if you weigh the initial request statistically (for the first 10, I think we'll need 12..) and so on, you can avoid even that.

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#104

Post by tehwalrus »

many buyers appear to be buying from them as their primary store-browsing channel

I just realised - I don't think I've ever "browsed" the app store. I've only ever searched for the thing I'm looking for, and used the first 10 results to gauge whether it exists. It didn't seem worthwhile because I knew there were squillions of apps, so why try to read through them one by one?

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#105

Post by thwarted »

zimpenfish wrote: post #101
tolmasky wrote: post #44

Here's an idea: show me the top lists without the apps I already own! Why do I need to see Mountain Lion at the top of the App Store constantly in the #1 position? Just so I can know how little Mac Software gets sold and completely dissuade me from ever considering writing Mac software again? EIGHT of the top 10 apps are Apple apps. Most of which people probably already own (I happen to own all of them). Is this the…

A friend suggested that once. He unsuggested it after I walked through the umpteen problems involved in implementing this over hundreds of millions of accounts.

This is solved in a distributed fashion. The end user machines know which apps they have, and the ordering of the top 11 doesn't change if you already have the first one. So you ship down identifiers for top 20 or 50, which, even with metadata, is going to be smaller, bytewise, than the average apple.com homepage. When you go to display them, you remove the ones the user has and display the top 10 of the remaining set. If there are none left, request another block of apps. The size of the first block to send can be honed in on over time based on the number of subsequent blocks requested by clients.

But even doing this server side isn't that bad, calculating the difference between two sets, the top 100 apps and the apps a user owns, iterating with more if the size of the result is less than 10, is a lot less work on a per-user per-request basis than a lot of sites do to customize their experience.

Of course, Apple most likely doesn't want anyone to know which app is the 11th or something, which means a lot of server side processing to customize the exact list of 10 sent to the client. Sites like Facebook already do this kind of stuff for calculating the timeline for hundreds of millions of accounts.

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#106

Post by salmonellaeater »

credo wrote: post #83

Marco is correct in pointing out that the "top" list approach has a few flaws.However, I think that the "top" list (in addition to Apple's featured list) is the best solution among a list of sub-optimal solutions. He seems to suggest the top-lists should be replaced by a list of apps that Apple classifies as "great software". However, Apple already shows a list of featured apps and this list already has a huge impact…

Another option is to fix algorithm used to sort the top-list. It's similar to search results, in that a purchase from the top list should be attributed to two* factors: 1) the app's quality, and 2) its current position in the list. Basically, you can separate the effect on purchases of the position in the list from the effect of the app's quality, and then sort apps based on their quality rather than raw purchases.

*Maybe I should say, at least two factors. You can go really deep when constructing rankings.

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#107

Post by __alexs »

salmonellaeater wrote: post #106
credo wrote: post #83

Marco is correct in pointing out that the "top" list approach has a few flaws.However, I think that the "top" list (in addition to Apple's featured list) is the best solution among a list of sub-optimal solutions. He seems to suggest the top-lists should be replaced by a list of apps that Apple classifies as "great software". However, Apple already shows a list of featured apps and this list already has a huge impact…

Another option is to fix algorithm used to sort the top-list. It's similar to search results, in that a purchase from the top list should be attributed to two* factors: 1) the app's quality, and 2) its current position in the list. Basically, you can separate the effect on purchases of the position in the list from the effect of the app's quality, and then sort apps based on their quality rather than raw purchases. *…

So apps should have a sort of ELO ranking where they fight with apps in the same category (possibly multiple categories simultaneously) for dominance and the fight is implemented as which app gets bought when displayed to a user at the same time as another similar app?

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#109

Post by mjolk »

melling wrote: post #50
brianwillis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find the genius lists go some of the way toward solving this problem for you. They try show things you're likely to be interested in, and don't show stuff you already own.

Now if you could only remind the 500 million other iOS users. Discovery needs to be better. Most people aren't going to dig. If my girlfriend wants an app that she's heard about, I've got to install it for her. Guess who updates the apps on her phone? :-( It's gotta be real easy for most people.

I'm sure your girlfriend is capable of searching for apps on her own.

Re: Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

#110

Post by salmonellaeater »

__alexs wrote: post #107
salmonellaeater wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is to fix algorithm used to sort the top-list. It's similar to search results, in that a purchase from the top list should be attributed to two* factors: 1) the app's quality, and 2) its current position in the list. Basically, you can separate the effect on purchases of the position in the list from the effect of the app's quality, and then sort apps based on their quality rather than raw purchases. *…

So apps should have a sort of ELO ranking where they fight with apps in the same category (possibly multiple categories simultaneously) for dominance and the fight is implemented as which app gets bought when displayed to a user at the same time as another similar app?

The ELO ranking is more suited to explicit head-to-head matchups, but its statistical basis could be adapted to app rankings. You could basically collect statistics for each app position (#1 averages 1000 purchases/day, #2 averages 500, etc.) and then estimate the quality of each app based on how its purchase rate differs from the expected average for that position.

Google and other advertisers face a similar problem with sorting ads, which suggests some other relevant inputs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Score

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