The impact of the App Store's disruptive revision on users and developers

In the early morning of June 6th, Beijing time, Apple was held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, USA. Since the death of the great Steve Jobs , Apple has basically had no confidentiality at all, whether it is WWDC or new product launch conferences. Before the meeting officially started, various news had been overwhelming, and most of the rumors were indeed confirmed later. This was also the case for WWDC this time, but there was one piece of news that was rarely reported, and that was the New App Store.

This article will analyze the visual design of Apple's New App Store in iOS11 and its impact on users and developers from the perspective of product positioning, visual design, information design, interaction design, and the development history and current status of the App Store. It will also explore why Apple made a major design revision 9 years after the App Store was launched.

Table of Contents

1. Why change
2. How to change
3. Impact

Why change

Market factors

From the 2017 Internet Trends Report released by “ Internet Queen ” Mary Meeker on June 1, we can see obvious changes in the market:

① Global smartphone shipments grew by only 3% , compared with 10% in 2015 and 28% in 2014. The shipment volume of Android smartphones far exceeds that of iOS smartphones.

②From July 2015 to March 2017, global mobile game playing time increased by 33%. At the same time, China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest game market, and Chinese consumers' willingness to pay has increased significantly, and they are willing to pay for paid content .

③The number of Internet users worldwide exceeded 3.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 10%, and the global Internet penetration rate was 46%.

④ The time spent on mobile devices by each adult user in the United States is about twice that of desktop devices, 5.6 hours.

The above text summary is from the "2017 Internet Trends Report", author Mary Meeker

The above are obvious changes and trends in the entire market. In Apple’s previous revenue, hardware revenue accounted for a large proportion. When hardware can no longer grow at a high speed, software revenue has become a very important part. The ban on WeChat rewards on iOS devices and the talks with major domestic live streaming platforms that caused a lot of controversy some time ago were also in the hope of generating more revenue from IAP.

In the second quarter of fiscal year 2016, iPhone sales declined for the first time, and the performance of iPad and Mac was also somewhat unsatisfactory. In China, the iPhone's market share has been surpassed by domestic Android phones and has now been squeezed out of the top three. But among all businesses, only the service business achieved a high growth of nearly 20%, becoming a growing star business. The importance of App Store in the overall business even ranked first.

Ben Schachter, an analyst at market research firm Macquarie, believes that Apple's service revenue is expected to grow 17% each year from fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2021. By fiscal 2021, 75% of Apple's total profits will come from its services business. The App Store will continue to grow at an annual rate of 30%. In comparison, hardware revenue grew at only 2.4% per year.

The importance of App Store to Apple is gradually increasing, and it has become an important growth point for Apple's future revenue. Based on this, it is imperative for Apple to make major revisions to the App Store. The goal of its revised design, in addition to considering the user experience , is self-evidently a commercial goal, which must be to increase the App Store's ability to make money as much as possible.

APPLE's values ​​and attitude towards the APP STORE

Every company has its own corporate culture and values. Apple's values ​​and attitude towards the App Store and the apps listed on the App Store are reflected in Apple's Human Interface Guide (Apple's official design guide) and the App Store Review Guide. The excerpts are as follows:

Excerpted from iOS Human Interface Guidelines

As an app designer, you have the opportunity to deliver an extraordinary product that rises to the top of the App Store charts.

As a mobile app designer, you have the opportunity to reach the top of the Apple App Store by releasing great products.

To do so, you'll need to meet high expectations for quality and functionality.

To achieve this goal, your product must meet high standards in quality and functionality.

Excerpt from App Store Review Guidelines

Apps are changing the world, enriching people's lives, and enabling developers like you to innovate like never before. As a result, the App Store has grown into an exciting and vibrant ecosystem for millions of developers and more than a billion users

Apps are changing the world, enriching people’s lives, and providing developers like you with unprecedented opportunities to innovate. As a result, the App Store has grown into an exciting and vibrant ecosystem that serves millions of developers and over a billion users.

WWDC 2017 poster copy

Technology alone is not enough.

Technology alone is not enough.

Technology must intersect with the liberal arts and the humanities, to create new ideas and experiences that push society forward.

Only when technology is combined with art and humanities can we create inspiration and experience that drive social progress.

From the above official documents, we can see that Apple is committed to enabling Apple developers to create great apps for the App Store through a closed system, strict review and guiding design specifications, while ensuring that the App Store is a vibrant and creative ecosystem. As for Apple’s WWDC posters and new product launch posters over the years, the media always carefully interprets them. Most of the time, people interpret the event from a hardware perspective, hoping to find clues to the release of new devices. When the WWDC 2017 invitations and posters were released, most media interpretations were still from a hardware perspective.

It is true that at the just-concluded WWDC, Apple did explain its new devices by emphasizing the combination of technology with art and humanities, but the new App Store's revamped design and the currently launched applications and content more intuitively reflect that "only when technology is combined with art and humanities can we create inspiration and experience that drive social progress." After all, no matter how powerful the hardware equipment is, without the APP that can combine technology with art and humanities, it is just a machine made up of a bunch of materials.

This major revision of the App Store further brings Apple's values ​​to the forefront, allowing users to more intuitively perceive that APPs are constantly changing people's lives, and that people can create more valuable and meaningful things through these highly creative APPs that combine technology with humanities and art.

While writing this article, Apple announced the winning apps of the 2017 Apple Design Awards (ADA). Among the 12 winning apps, 7 are paid apps, and the rest are free but have IAP (in-app purchases).

The ADA award-winning apps over the years are one of the ways Apple demonstrates its values ​​to users, but this award is only given once a year, and it is just an opportunity for the winners to tell their stories and design ideas to all users of the App Store. Among the 2.3 million apps in the App Store, there are many excellent apps. Since Apple requires developers to create great apps for the App Store and users, it should provide more display platforms for these apps.

Change users’ impression of APP STORE

Let’s look at a set of numbers first

As of March 2016 (2016 Apple Spring Conference), there are 1 billion active iOS devices (excluding iPod touch)

Data from Gartner's "Smartphone Tracker for the First Quarter of 2017" showed that Apple shipped 52 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2017.

As of June 2017 (2017 Apple WWDC), the App Store has 500 million visits per week and 180 billion downloads (data from the 2016 Fall Conference was 140 billion). Apple has paid developers a total of approximately US$70 billion.

From the above data, we can deduce a number:

App Store has approximately 70 million visits per day

Assuming that all 52 million iOS devices shipped in 2017 are active devices, there would be 1.05 billion active devices in June 2017. In the closed system of iOS, App Store is a very important built-in application, and it is also an application that almost every iOS user will visit, but its average daily visit volume of 70 million times is really not high.

The reason for the low number of visits is not difficult to find: in the minds of most users, the app store is a place to download apps. It does not need to be visited frequently, and an app will only be downloaded when needed. This is not just the case with the App Store, but also Xiaomi Mall and Tencent App Store in China.

Therefore, Apple needs to change users' inherent impression of the App Store so that users will not only visit the App Store when they need to download apps. If the user payment conversion rate remains unchanged, attracting more iOS users to visit the App Store means more revenue and downloads, and will definitely lead to an increase in revenue.

How to change

Apple is currently facing the problems mentioned above. Although it has not yet reached the point of being in trouble or even desperate for survival, it must seek change. Apple has launched a special introduction page for the New App Store on its official website. From the main title of the special introduction page, it can be seen that the New App Store has made major changes and innovations in design, hoping to seek change with a brand-new design.

After dozens of days of in-depth experience with the New App Store, I personally concluded that the core positioning and goals of this App Store revision are:

By comprehensively enhancing content display and adjusting information hierarchy, we help users find and download their favorite apps, increase the App Store's daily visits and download conversion rate, and make users look forward to the App Store.

Any product, whether it is designed and developed from 0 to 1 or undergoing a major revision, will have information design, interaction and visual design formulated based on various factors such as the product's positioning and market environment.

In this chapter, we will analyze the new design brought by the New App Store from the aspects of product positioning, navigation design, information design, interaction design and visual design.

Content Display

With the concentrated outbreak of content-paying apps such as Fenda and Get , 2016 is called the "first year of content". As the Internet's demographic dividend gradually weakens and users' attention and time become increasingly precious, strengthening and valuing content has become a consensus among mobile Internet entrepreneurs .

The same is true for the App Store. As mentioned earlier, as hardware revenue gradually declines, shipments slow down, and the daily visits to the App Store are not optimistic, Apple has gradually paid more attention to content.

In fact, in the past few years, the App Store has also optimized the content of the store to a certain extent, but it did not take "content display" as the core strategy of the App Store. Overall, users did not feel too obvious changes. Instead, it was in a state of stable maintenance.

"Content exposure" means that content that originally required downloading an app to be viewed is made available to users before downloading so that they can view and understand it.

The design of the New App Store makes extensive use of short videos and application screenshots to introduce APP functions. The New App Store allows developers to upload 3 short videos and 5 screenshots, and automatically plays short videos of recommended APPs in the APP and Games tabs.

In addition, the New App Store recommends and introduces apps selected by the App Store team to users through modules such as "Editor's Recommendations", "Featured Lists" and "Tips and Tricks" on the Today tab interface.

In the "Editor's Recommendations" and "Tips and Tricks" of the Today tab, Apple editors can use rich media, flexibly using text, pictures and videos to introduce the APP's creation background, usage methods and some APP skills.

As can be seen from the above picture, the New App Store’s “content-explicit” strategy is the same as the way that various Android app stores value content.

For iOS users, this is a disruptive design, but for friends who are familiar with the Android App Store, this is not a change worth mentioning, because domestic Android App Stores have long begun to lay out "content display" and are ahead of the App Store.

In September 2015, Wandoujia released version 5.0, adding the "App Preview" feature for the first time, helping users preview app content before installing the app and choose whether to download the app based on a full understanding of the app's content style.

In January this year, App Store launched version 7.0, with "content display" becoming its main mode. It reduces the number of apps displayed on a single page and uses the services provided by the app as the core of display. At the same time, searches can not only find apps but also the content within the app and related reviews.

"Content display" is not just a static visual design. The New App Store also uses technical means to help users not only search for apps when searching, but also search for extended search results including "Editor's Recommendations", "Tips and Tricks", and "Featured Lists". It makes searching for apps easier and helps users make decisions through rich information. This is a bit similar to the app review articles in the search results category of App Store.

Apple has always encouraged developers to develop great apps for the App Store and hopes that developers will maintain consistent values ​​with Apple. But the reality is that as more and more developers release apps on the iOS platform, the number of apps in the App Store is increasing day by day, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to find an app that meets their needs and satisfies them.

Although Apple has strict reviews for apps launched on the App Store, the App Store is also filled with a large number of junk apps that have plagiarized designs, plagiarized functions, have similar functions, or are simply full of advertisements. At the same time, a large number of developers complain that they have developed excellent apps but find it difficult to reach new users.

I believe Apple should have noticed this. On the surface, the New App Store highlights content through a new product design and a new visual design, thereby increasing the App Store's daily visits and download conversion rate. But in fact, this is more about Apple strengthening its control over the App Store and further promoting Apple's values.

Don’t forget that starting with Mr. Steve Jobs, Apple has always emphasized its strong control over its platform and its firm values.

TAB B AR disruptive redesign

The New App Store has made the most significant change in navigation design since its release nine years ago. Let's turn the clock back to WWDC in 2008, when Steve Jobs took out the iPhone 3G from his iconic trouser pocket and the App Store was officially launched.

The originally designed App Store Tab Bar has five entries: Featured, Category, Top 25, Search, and Update.

In the past nine years, the App Store has made many adjustments to the entrance of the Tab Bar, whether it was the addition of the Genius alternative category in iOS 6 or the transformation of Genius recommendations into Near Me in iOS 7. Later, it was replaced by Explore in iOS 9, but the disruptive change was not big. Only the category tabs kept changing. However, the original one is still the best, which is similar to the most common saying among designers: the first draft is always the best...

Tab Bar is the most important primary navigation in all mobile apps. In addition to the navigation functions it carries, it also reflects the core functions and product positioning of an app. The design of the Tab Bar of the New App Store is no longer a minor experimental adjustment, but a subversive redesign, retaining only the two tabs of Upgrade and Search that have been retained from the first generation App Store.

Among all the tabs in the Tab Bar, the first tab is the most important.

The New App Store assigned the first label to the Today label, which brought about core changes, to highlight the New App Store's emphasis on content and control over the App Store, while achieving the goal of changing users' impression of the App Store. The next two labels were assigned to the Daily Fresh APP ( APP ) and Daily New Game ( Games ) that have existed in the Old App Store for several years.

In the early days of the App Store (before iOS 6), there were no daily fresh apps and daily new games in the featured tab. Daily fresh apps and daily new games were added to the App Store after iOS 7. In the past nine years of development, games have become an important part of the App Store. Games occupy a very large proportion of the App Store in many countries and bring a lot of revenue to the App Store.

The New App Store separates APP and Games into separate tabs. On the one hand, it makes way for the Today tab that highlights the content, and on the other hand, it makes them independent in line with the trend.

Rankings can guide and help users find high-quality games and apps, but after nine years of development, the App Store has grown from more than 500 apps when it first went online to 2.3 million apps. The App Store has become the world's largest mobile application market . Ranking manipulation has become a global problem (especially serious in China). The best-selling list has long been dominated by top apps. At the same time, the rankings also have a certain impact on the traffic of Apple's featured recommendations .

With Games and APP becoming independent tabs, according to the recommendations of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, there can be a maximum of five tabs on the Tab Bar. The ranking list , which has undergone many adjustments since the first generation design but remains strong, has been moved to the Games tab and APP tab, becoming a module on its page. A detail can be seen from the New App Store currently installed on iOS 11. In the APP and Games tabs, the paid list displays apps in an orderly manner and the number exceeds that of the free list . Viewing the complete list requires users to actively trigger the operation.

This design has been widely discussed on the domestic Internet just a few days after WWDC 2017. After several changes in algorithms and weights failed to effectively curb the crazy chart-topping behavior in the country, Apple seems to have directly cut off its own axe and decisively cut it off.

But I personally think this is just one of the reasons, and my opinion is that the design of the rankings does not conform to the explicit content positioning of the New App Store. If the rankings are designed according to the interface layout of games and apps, and a large number of screenshots, videos and other information are added, the original intention of the rankings will be lost. The essence of a ranking list is to discuss rankings. The most core information in the design of a ranking list is the ranking. Forcibly adding interface design and information design that explicitly displays content may be counterproductive.

Also moved was the only category that has been changed repeatedly in previous adjustments. As the only label that has been repeatedly changed in nine years, it can be seen that it may not be very important in the eyes of the App Store.

Categories in the Old App Store serve more as secondary navigation, helping users to further explore features.

In terms of design, categories have always been displayed in the form of Labels, which only serve as an entrance and do not provide much information. This design is naturally inconsistent with the positioning of the New App Store's content display.

It’s not that there are no categories in the New App Store. Instead, they are divided into modules in the Games and APP tabs. In terms of number, only 6 popular categories are displayed, but there are still 3 more category labels than the Old App Store.

As can be seen from the above picture, the New App Store has made major adjustments to the product’s information architecture. The most obvious adjustment is the major adjustment to the primary navigation Tab Bar mentioned above.

Add more buttons to increase purchase conversion rate

The New App Store continuously strengthens the display of content through external content display. Whether this method can significantly stimulate the increase in visits is still unknown, but Apple has obviously made preparations for both situations. Even if the existing daily visits do not increase significantly, the New App Store can still increase revenue. The latter is the Call Action Button (such as Get) that can be seen everywhere.

The New App Store adds an entrance to the app details page and a call button at the bottom of the "Editor's Recommendations" and "Tips and Tricks" content in the Today tab. In the Games and APP tabs, a call button is added after each recommended app except for the top banner.

Compared with the Old App Store in rankings and searches , the New App Store slightly increases the proportion of the call button in visual design, changing it from a ghost button with a stroke to a solid gray fill button, while also increasing the font size and weight of the text in the button.

On the APP details page, the call button also uses the App Store’s blue primary color as the fill color while maintaining visual consistency.

Unprecedented amount of text information

If pictures and videos are the most intuitive display of content display strategy, then carefully compiled articles and text information related to the APP provide users with more information to make decisions. The New App Store has made a lot of adjustments to the text information on each tab, and the guiding principle of the adjustments is to display more information that can help users make decisions.

In the Games and APPs tabs, in addition to a large number of screenshots and videos, the New App Store displays the information on the Games and APPs tabs in fixed categories based on the original design, such as "Independent Games", "Niche Selections", etc., and adds explanatory subtitle text to describe the APPs and games. In the upgraded Tab label, the New App Store will be able to decide whether the user updates the new feature description text directly below the APP title, removing the APP version and APP file size information that is irrelevant to helping users make decisions.

More powerful search

Although the New App Store achieves its content-explicit product positioning through a new visual design, information design and a subversive design of the Tab Bar, one thing that cannot be ignored is that search is an important way for APPs to gain downloads. According to official data from Apple, more than 65% of APP downloads come from searches.

In terms of functionality, from the promotion of the New App Store on Apple's official website, we can see that in addition to being able to search for related applications by keyword , the search results will include "Editor's Choice", "Tips and Tricks" and "Featured Lists" in the Today , Games and App tabs. By searching by name, type, developer and subject content, users can search for results related to specific apps and games.

Although Apple has advertised on its official website that the search function can be used to search for editors' selections that match the search keywords , judging from the actual screenshots in the above picture, the fuzzy search stage can only search for app names so far. Perhaps in the future, the fuzzy search stage will be able to search for more app internal content or related article information like the Android app market.

In terms of visual design and information display, the search tab of the New App Store has the following changes:

1. Replace the developer information with the category information of the APP.
2. Remove the "Editor's Choice" label.
3. Delete information about apps running on other devices (such as providing Apple Watch apps).
4. Use a larger star rating icon to increase the visual priority of the app star rating, and increase the font size of the review number.
5. The number of app screenshots displayed has been increased to 3, and developers are allowed to upload three preview videos.
6. The preview video on the search page plays automatically (you can also play/pause it interactively)
7. The subtitle of the application will be fully displayed in the fuzzy search module

In addition to raising the priority of information that can influence user decisions through adjustments to visual design and information design, the search tab also strengthens the core positioning of the product by displaying more application screenshots and videos, making the content more explicit. The search results presented are still only apps that match the search keywords. There are no richer results as officially promoted to help users understand the apps. Perhaps this number will increase after iOS 11 is officially launched.

Comprehensive optimization of the app details page

The New App Store adopts a new visual design and adjusts the priority of information hierarchy. Compared with the Games and APP tabs, the application details page is more intuitive in this regard. The text information on the app details page is the interface with the most information in the Old App Store. Although the amount of text information in the New App Store is not as much as the "Editor's Picks" in the Today tab, as the page most frequently visited by users, the app details page is still the most important page in the entire New App Store. The principles of information architecture and priority adjustment of the application details page of the New App Store still follow the core principle of the product to help users make decisions.

In terms of information hierarchy optimization, the New App Store divides app ratings and number of reviews, app rankings in the App Store, app age ratings, and editors' choice labels into the same information area. The age rating has been promoted to the first screen for the first time. Along with the age rating, the description of new features has also been moved from the second screen to the first screen. Editor's recommendations are moved from the first screen to the second screen and placed below the comments.

In terms of interaction, the New App Store has cancelled the Segment Control that has been used for a long time, breaking the sense of segmentation in the previous design. User comments are displayed in the form of a single column sliding left and right on the second screen, showing the 16 most recent user comments, and providing an entrance to view all comments. Each comment can display up to 187 Chinese characters. The two recommendation modules, "More Developer Works" and "Customers Also Purchased", are also directly on the same page as the app details. At the same time, drawing on the practices of most e-commerce companies , "Customers Also Purchased" was changed to "You May Like".

In terms of usability and user experience, the New App Store has finally optimized the interactive process for ratings, which has been criticized by users. It has removed the correlation between ratings and writing reviews, and users can directly rate purchased apps without entering any comments.

In terms of visual hierarchy, different font weights and sizes are used to optimize and unify text information in a visual way, strengthening the visual hierarchy of different information. For example, the user ratings on the second screen use the largest font size among New App Store products. For the first time, a colored background was used in the interface to strengthen the visual hierarchy of user comments and editor recommendation information.

Impact

The App Store, the world's number one application platform, is home to the world's top mobile application developers and users with the strongest willingness to pay. Any change in the App Store will have an impact on users, developers and the entire industry. The New App Store, which is labeled a "disruptive change", is undoubtedly equivalent to a blockbuster bomb. I will not go into details about the impact of this disruptive change on Apple. In the last chapter of this article, we will mainly talk about its impact on users and mobile application developers.

Impact on users

Hooked by rich and varied content

The core of this disruptive revision of the New App Store is the emphasis on content. Apple hopes to hook users through the Today tab and the global "content display" to gain as much attention and time as possible from users as the dividends of mobile Internet gradually fade away.

The "Editor's Choice" and "Daily List" designs of the Today tab also reflect Nir Eyal's point of view in his book "Hooked", "hooking users through varied rewards."

The different daily recommended content will attract users to a certain extent. This design also changes the user's inherent impression of the App Store - the App Store is not just an app store for downloading apps, but also a place to discover the stories behind the apps and learn some app skills.

It is expected that after iOS 11 is officially launched, the average daily frequency of users visiting the App Store, the time spent exploring the App Store, and the possibility of impulse payments will increase significantly.

Easier to find the APP you need

The New App Store helps users discover apps that meet their needs and satisfy them through more powerful search, global "content visibility" design and unprecedented amount of information, providing users with sufficient information to make decisions and helping users save time.

The App Store of the future will most likely have more powerful technical capabilities to make better and more accurate recommendations. This is somewhat similar to the current practice of e-commerce, which can recommend apps based on user preferences based on the apps they download and browsing behaviors. At the same time, it is not ruled out that the App Store will have powerful artificial intelligence to accomplish this task in the future.

Requires certain learning costs

For users who have been using the App Store for nine years, the disruptive changes of the New App Store have overturned many of their existing operating habits and psychological cognitions, and it will take some time to adapt.

From my personal point of view, the cancellation of categories made me unable to adapt for a long time. I believe that different users will have different degrees of discomfort during use. After the New App Store has undergone a disruptive change, it should not undergo major changes in a short period of time; so after a certain period of time, I believe that users will gradually adapt to the New App Store.

Impact on developers

Changes in traffic entry brought about by disruptive design

Any developer who has used data tracking such as Google Analysis for their own APP knows that the entrance on the Tab Bar has always been the entrance with the largest traffic in the entire APP.

The subversive design of the New App Store has changed the entrance to the App Store user traffic. There is no doubt that Today will be the main traffic entrance, and apps that can appear in Today will have unimaginable traffic. For developers, if their APP is included in Today , it is equivalent to getting a Buff. With more powerful technical and strategic support, the traffic share of search will also increase significantly compared to the Old App Store.

The New App Store has weakened the rankings this time and directly cancelled the rankings on the Tab Bar, but the rankings still exist. This is still a huge traffic entrance for developers, so the problem of ranking manipulation may not be completely eliminated in a short period of time. But now there are only the paid list and the free list, and the paid list only shows the Top 3. The rest require users to click and slide to view them. The free list has become randomly sorted, and is not displayed in an orderly arrangement in the APP and Games tabs.

This means that only by ranking very high can you gain traffic advantage. In order to compete for this limited position, even if one still resorts to opportunistic means, it will cost more to swipe the charts. Even if the ranking is successfully manipulated, the revenue brought by the strongly castrated and weakened rankings is far less than that of the Old App Store rankings . Instead of racking your brains to manipulate the rankings, it is better to use this energy and financial resources to strive to get the buffs of the Today , APP and Gamse tabs.

Categories were once one of the important traffic entrances of the App Store. In the design of the Old App Store, for example, the page design of categories such as photography was similar to the selected interface, while some unpopular categories such as weather and navigation were not edited by the App Store operation team. The display method was to display the applications in this category according to the most recent release, most recent update and ranking. The characteristic of this interface design is that even a crudely made APP, as long as it is recently released or updated, can get more user attention in this category compared to the popular categories, and its download volume will also increase significantly. Some developers may have figured out this trick, so categories such as weather and navigation are often filled with shoddy apps. In the New App Store, only free and paid rankings are displayed in each category interface. To a certain extent, developers who gain traffic by developing shoddy apps may not have as good a life as before.

Content display brings an increase in total traffic and APP exposure

As mentioned above, Apple's core strategy of using "content externally" as the New App Store will inevitably increase the total user traffic of the App Store and the average daily time users spend using the App Store. The biggest benefit this change brings to developers is that the exposure of their own apps has increased significantly compared to the Old App Store era, and the difficulty for developers to acquire users may be relatively reduced.

On this basis, for developers who work hard to create excellent apps, if they are lucky enough to get the Today , APP and Games buffs, it means that the number of users will increase exponentially. At the same time, the New App Store's adjustment of IAP also allows users to purchase in-app purchases directly on the App Store and use them directly in the APP. The developer's income will increase several times because of this change.

Even if there is no way to get the Buff, by optimizing your own ASO and making excellent preview videos and screenshots, relying on Apple's powerful search function, you can also get enough traffic. Especially after the rankings and categories are cancelled, users will use the search function more to find an application. In the future, it can be foreseen that the premise that determines whether an independent developer's APP can gain a large number of users may be a competition of who has better ASO and publicity.

It may be easier to get user ratings and reviews

APP ratings have always been an important reference factor for users to choose to download an APP, and all developers attach great importance to this. Before the New App Store, APPs usually invited users to rate the APP internally through pop-ups or other forms, but the interactive process of rating was designed to be very difficult to use. Users had to jump to the App Store to rate, and they had to enter the rating content.

The New App Store allows users to rate purchased apps without entering any text. At the same time, ratings are no longer an option in Segment Control, but are directly combined with details and related apps to form a complete Page. In terms of information hierarchy, the rating is second only to the APP description and is located on the second screen.

After the launch of the New App Store, for developers, because there is less resistance to user ratings and lower operating costs, users' willingness to actively rate their apps may be stronger than in the Old App Store era, and it will be easier for apps to obtain user ratings and reviews.

During the development process, developers can focus more of their time and energy on developing excellent apps for users and the App Store. If users like your app, they will rate your app when they see the rating reminder you designed based on their experience, and they will also choose to rate your app when browsing the App Store.

Of course, it is reasonable to pop up a rating reminder when necessary. As long as you master the right rhythm and timing, it will be easier to obtain user ratings than before.

postscript

New App Store has attracted the attention of the industry since its debut at WWDC in 2017, and has also caused widespread discussion in the UI design industry. However, in the discussions I have seen, most of them focus on this new visual design. Most of the conclusions are that the visual style of the New App Store is a continuation of Apple's visual style design after iOS 7. Some designers even believe that this is to extend the design language of Music to the App Store.

If a designer can only observe and experience it from his or her own industry or professional field, his or her insights and thinking must be very narrow. The industry has developed to the present, and the requirements for UI designers are getting higher and higher. If you want to become an excellent designer, in addition to focusing on essential work such as skills and vision, you should also have a broad understanding of the factors behind a product's visual design.

This is my original intention of writing this article. In order to complete the writing of this article, I began to try to view the brand new App Store from the perspective of market, users and products; I believe that this analysis, sorting and creating this article will definitely be a milestone in my career for me.