eCommerce in the News Week 3

Apple Tweaking iPhone App Store: Good News for Shoppers, Developers
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This is a follow-up article I found on CNN money about the same issue that I found last week. It seems like Apple is finally tweaking its App store to give the less popular applications a chance to compete against the popular ones. They are also separating free applications from "Most Popular" because they keep appearing on the list. According to the article, these changes help with the overall experience of the app store, but it still doesn't solve the problem with the $0.99 app domination like I mentioned in last week's post.

I think its becoming more interesting to track how Apple will act according to this issue. On one hand, they have all these talented developers who want to make top of the line software, yet the mass of consumers still prefer the free and $0.99 "ringtone" applications. The recent change of the store's appearance doesn't seem to reflect this issue, so perhaps Apple either doesn't care about their shop populated with low quality applications, or they simply cannot come up with a solution for it. One can argue that apple is just letting the market play itself, yet I think the way they display popular items creates a tendency for customers to download those only.

I'll keep looking for updates and see how Apple wants to deal with this situation. Meanwhile I'll just go ahead and download all the free semi-useless applications for my iPod.