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Apple Removes 11 Categories From the Mac App Store Categories Tab [Update: They're Back]
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You are probably right in some ways but I could imagine someone who is looking for a news app or a fitness app will disagree with you.
What categories would you now move fitness and news to?
I certainly hope this is a temporary thing... because the Mac App Store was nearly useless with the 21 categories—with only 10, it pretty much removes any chance of it ever being used.
Honestly, where do news, health, fitness and sports go now? Do a search for sports and all you get are games. Pretty much anything you search for, you get a list of games (or bogus apps looking to game the system). Then again, that has pretty much always been the case.
Honestly, where do news, health, fitness and sports go now? Do a search for sports and all you get are games. Pretty much anything you search for, you get a list of games (or bogus apps looking to game the system). Then again, that has pretty much always been the case.
Maybe Apple decided that those categories were to thin or they had limited substance. If you have a limited number of apps in one part of the store it really makes the whole thing feel empty. (Much like post holiday Target looks as people snag the clearance items and that's left is broken crap.) I hated searching the medical section because I never found anything useful.
Probably in Music or Photography.
Ya know... the top categories where the dev thinks their Health app will get the most visibility. Heck, the dev could even add an IAP component and put the Health app in Games.
If a button, port, key, jack, intuitiveness in iOS, or fraction of a mm of hardware thickness can't be taken away every 12 months, then why not this.
Pretty soon they'll the the "A Company" and iPhone screens will be just pure white or black.
Why sir, you are asking a silly question. One should ask the wisdom of the crowd who say good riddance to the silly array of categories. It would not be Apple if there was not something that they could take away.
The missing categories include Finance, Lifestyle, Sports, Weather, Medical, Travel, Education, Reference, Entertainment, Health & Fitness, and News. That leaves the following 10 categories that users can still browse individually:
[*]Business
Developer Tools
[*]Games
[*]Graphics & Design
[*]Music [*] Photography
[*] Productivity
[*]Social Networking
[*]Utilities
[*]Video
[*]
Seems like a good move in terms of streamlining navigation and avoiding redundancy. Why would finance be its own section and not either business or utilities? Most of those seem like they'd fold easily into other categories: do Weather apps need their own category or are they utilities people use to, you know, check the weather. Does education need its own category or do people need education about things like business, design, and photography? I would expect a lot of those missing categories would fold into utilities.
I also wouldn't be surprised if this is part of an effort to move people away from browsing by categories. The categories function is buried in the iOS app store, eg. But I think most people either use the search function or hear about apps through sites like this, rather than browse for them.
Consider push back that many Mac users have been dreading being locked into the App Store. Preferring to load software themselves and of course developers get more money buying direct from them rather than through the App Store...
Maybe less apps are being submitted....?
Maybe less apps are being submitted....?
The category section ever since they reformatted it in iOS is a huge mess. It is hard just to get a list of items without it being in a weird editorial-like hotmess. I really hate these changes for the sake of change. What is it one day someone gets a shower thought, tests it out on their test servers, and it gets rolled out?
Once Cook let Apple employees ignore good UI design, Apple has gone nowhere but down, down, down in terms of usability. This is why the BOD should not let a finance guy run the company.
Agreed! It’s already difficult enough to find news apps without cutting down on the categories. Sure, those particular ones may or may not have been the most useful - there’s plenty of room for debate - but IMO there needs to be at least one sub-layer of categories before it will be useful.
For example:
Utilities / Disk Management
Utilities / File Management
... etc.
I not bothered by the change. But they should combine their music, shows, movies and books and computers into one store as in one location for all purchases. A super store.
I don't know who is in charge of all the updates they have made to the builtin apps like store but they should be gone. All have gotten worse over the last few updates. This was never the greatest app in the world but the old one was simple and easy to use. This, when it works, is much harder to use.
I know the previous version had been unchanged for years -- and had some issues for sure -- but this new App Store just feels like really dumbed-down iOS-ified version.
Apple did an effort to prevent people discovering apps through external websites recently:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/01/apple-is-ending-its-app-store-affiliate-program-in-october/
The reduction in the number of categories doesn’t bother me personally, as I’ve never used the mac app store to discover new software. As a matter of fact I’ve been screwed before by using the mac app store (e.g.: updates to applications arriving late... or never), and I will only use it in the future when the software is not available otherwise.
Maybe Productivity Utility, if Apple next decides to combine categories. I think weather apps now fall in that same dual category.
What a stupid decision. I would have no problem if they just try to tweak things a bit, or even increase a bit. But chopping it down to just a few is stupid. IMO.
I wonder if books are next. Categories: Interesting, Blue, Utility, Illuminating, and Swimming.
"OK, thanks. As it turns out, what you are noticing is expected behavior." This is about the most Apple response ever. LOL. A passive-aggressive non-acknowledgement that they made a change that they informed nobody about, and then act like the user is the one who is mistaken or "doing it wrong". SMH.
This. So much this! Headphone jacks, I/O, Good keyboards, Aperture. ugh.
Better yet, ditch keywords and just use hashtags and have apps endlessly scrolling as updates happen. Put trending tags, most liked, etc. The twit store. #MyAppIsBest