While I have more thoughts, I haven’t had the time to research and properly hash out my thoughts the way it deserves. However here is my list of annoyances with the AppStore and some possible fixes.
Rankings should be influenced by revenue. I don’t think revenue should be the sole deciding factor, or else we are going from one extreme to the other. Do we really want niche apps that command high prices dominating the ranking lists? I’m not quite sure what the formula should be as I don’t have the numbers Apple does to tweak and see how it would play out across the entire store. I think this will encourage developers to appropriately price their applications on what they are really worth. Though I do think if you have a $5 app and a $10 app that have the same revenue there is something to be said for the $5 app having the appeal to get twice the buyers.
Reviews are not support channels. I don’t know what Apple can do to further encourage this, but the primary audience of a review is other customers. If you want to get in contact with the developer there should be a link on the product page. Also it would be great if reviewers couldn’t penalize developers for their own ignorance. My worst reviews that left actual reviews wanted offline access for Lexikon, even though it was stated plainly that it wasn’t something I or really anyone could offer cause of the existing copyright. So the application was useless for iPod Touch users without wireless internet access. I’ve seen many other apps with similar reviews demanding essentially the impossible. If an application is providing access to data online, and you don’t see all the data you want, perhaps it’s cause the source isn’t providing it for the developer to include, you would be better off at least complaining to the right set of ears.
iTunes Connect, the website developers use to interact with iTunes is antiquated. Slow and the UI is horrendous. I know stability is important, but we don’t even get that. On that note Lexikon is a pre-rendered icon, so it should not have the shine that a lot of applications’ icons have, to fix this it used to be that you re-uploaded your artwork even though it hasn’t changed. Apparently even that hack has broken and so Lexikon wrongly has the shine added to it in iTunes and I have no idea how to get it to go away.