Thomas Hempel iPhone Apps

This weekend, Apple has changed the behavior of the AppStore. Number one is the comment change. In “the old days” everyone with an iTunes account could comment and rate an application. Fortunately, this is history now. Apple has changed this and now you can only rate an application if you actually bought it. I hope that really keeps that trolls away that rate an application with 1 star because it is too expensive in their eyes.

The second change is not that nice. Apple removed the “All iPhone applications”, “All iPod touch applications” and the “All free applications” links. Bad decision!

I mean, how can one keep an overview if you don’t have the ability to check for new apps? It also seems like the pinchmedia RSS feeds fetched their data from this pages!? I didn’t get any updates from this feeds since friday what is pretty strange. I can’t believe, that now new apps where released this weekend!?

I really hope that Apple makes overview links available again. Without them, the AppStore will become unusable.

A lot of ideas made their way through the net, why Apple is acting like it actually does. Many of them say, Apple is stupid and needs some time to check that they are on the wrong road. I really hope so, but can such a company be that stupid?

[update]
Macrumors just posted a page where feeds for the AppStore are available. Check out http://appshopper.com.
[/update]

Greets,
Thomas

written by thomas \\ tags: Apple, AppStore, iTunes

Hi,

I just noted, that iTunes syncs your iTunes account to the iPhone. Well, that sounds not that critical on the first read but it becomes very odd if you don’t know the consequences.

Here is the situation. I have a german iTunes account as I live in Germany. From time to time, I check out the US store to see the US comments for PwGen. By the way, it’s a pity that it is not possible for AppStore developers to review *all* comments from all stores! But back to the story.

If you set your iTunes store to US for example and forget to set it back to german you will have a very (at least for me) strange behavior on your iPhone. The AppStore will be set to US! On my iPhone I have now the US prices in dollar and not longer the EURO prices. That is not the bad thing, because I know corresponding prices. What really is a mess, is that you can’t by anything because the AppStore tries to buy the apps in the US store. Even worse is, that you can’t set the AppStore back to german. This is only possible by setting the correct store in iTunes and sync your phone.

This is not really a solution if you are far away from your “sync-station”. I think Apple will sell this as feature but IMHO this is really an annoying bug. *narf*

Greets,
Thomas

written by thomas \\ tags: Apple, AppStore, iTunes, rant