With censorship and a recent refusal of a Google Voice app, the App Store hasn’t been without its controversies. It seems that Apple has been wrestling with the demands of developers and bloggers on one hand and the maintenance of their highly valued brand and business strategy on the other.

To try and address some of the issues on censorship of content, Apple has set up mandatory application ratings that work together with the iPhone’s restriction settings (Settings > General > Restrictions). They also have an unofficial approval process that includes the following:

• Applications must not duplicate the functions of the iPhone (such as another SMS interface or a home icon that looks too similar to a native app)

• Applications must not be of “limited utility”

• Applications must comply with some iPhone UI standards (e.g. don’t play with the phone’s vibration function)

• Applications must not be obscene or offensive (in other words, no profanity or pornographic content)

• Applications must not violate copyright infringement (i.e. repurposing someone else’s data)

The rejections of certain apps have caused the blogoshere to foam at the mouth and with the latest Google Voice rejection, some have even sworn to put down their iPhones until Apple changes its ways. While we would all like to see something as large as the App Store be as democratic as possible, Apple has no intention of letting go of the reins for a few rebel developers and for anyone following the Google-Apple marriage—the honeymoon is over. Unfortunately, in this case, Apple and AT&T’s business goals had to take precedent over their users’.

You won’t find a shortage of advice when it comes to App Store improvements. For the most part, it revolves around legitimate business concerns that effect developers and small businesses and can be summarized as follows:

1. “I have put countless hours and money into building an app for which Apple gives no guarantee if or when it will be published to the App Store.”

2. “The App Store is a massive black hole where I throw in my app, never to be found again.”

Issue #1 would be a concern for any entrepreneur. While most apps are approved in two weeks, building a product with no guarantee of entry into the only place where it can be sold, is risky business. This is even more critical for multi-person companies whose entire business depend on the success of their app. It also makes it extremely difficult for any PR planning. Not having a set launch date can hurt any much needed marketing efforts.

Apple provides developers an email for questions for their “App Review Team”, but with over 100,000 developers I’m skeptical that developers are receiving the feedback they need. Some developers are reverting to workarounds where they submit a prototype of their app with a launch date set far into the future. By doing this, they’re able to get a review of their app before spending more time and money on it. Nevertheless, they still end up waiting 2 weeks or more for feedback, putting a lull in their product schedule.

What’s needed is a better way for developers to get feedback on their apps before submitting it for approval. At the very least, Apple should have an FAQ blog to keep developers up-to-date with evolving standards. Clearer communication and more honesty on the part of Apple would help both parties save time and money.

The App Store as a big black hole seems to be the biggest problem facing developers, users, and Apple right now. Actually, it’s a black hole with a layer. The layer is the unbalanced promotion of gamer apps.

One blogger complained:

“Apple does not feature enough non-games in other categories in their “What’s Hot” and “New and Noteworthy” front page sections to incentivize other applications other than dollar games. A quick look in iTunes or in the App Store on an iPhone or iPod Touch will leave users the impression that Apple is all about games and not much else. We have run into this feeling from our customers who say their bosses are reluctant to let them buy software for their iPhones because they view them as toys. We’ve made the bet that the App Store is a better option than BlackBerry or Palm’s offerings but Apple needs to do more to demonstrate to professionals that it is for real.”

At last glance, the App Store home page promoted the following number of gamer apps:

• 7 of 8 apps under “New and Noteworthy”

• 8 of 10 for “Top Paid Apps”

• 6 of 10 for “Top Free Apps”

• 6 of 8 for “What’s Hot”

Everyone knows games are by far the most popular apps anywhere but unless you’re a gamer, promoting them so heavily on the home page isn’t useful and creates the perception that the App Store is mostly about games. The solution might be to create a separate “Game Store” (and possibly other stores for big categories such as books) that levels the playing field and provides more space for others to promote their apps at the home page level.

Another issue is the pricing structure. Charles Wolf of Needham & Company noted in his analysis of Apple’s July earnings report, “In some respects, the App Store has taken its place alongside YouTube, where poor taste is the defining metric. More ominously, it has led to a deterioration of the entire pricing structure for iPhone applications. The risk is that developers who hope to build quality applications that have a long shelf life may be discouraged from doing so because prospective development costs exceed the revenues they expect to earn on the applications. In short, this race to the bottom has the potential to degrade the overall equality of the applications sold at the App Store.”

Ge Wang of Smule Ocarina fame commented that he would “like to see a top app list that counted revenue instead of straight downloads, something he said would encourage more premium applications.” In short, there needs to be some way in which quality apps can rise to the surface and be discovered despite the possibility of having a more expensive price tag. Apple is in danger of becoming a receptacle for bad apps that cheapen the Apple brand and cover up more valuable applications like Wang’s Ocarina. Wang’s suggestion is a good one and could be taken a step further by creating a “quality” list based on not only revenue but also on user ratings.

Some other suggestions for the App Store include:

• Adding a Genius sidebar to the user’s Library Applications screen

• Making the App Store more similar to the Amazon.com experience with top reviewers, “Listmania!”, save to wish list/bookmark and a personalized homepage based on search results and purchase history

• Stop the proliferation of “Lite” versions by allowing apps to run for a specified amount of time

• Allow sellers to integrate an App Store module for purchasing apps on their own web site so developers and companies can offer their customers a more customized experience and better promote their other products.

• Replace “Staff Favorites” on the App Store homepage with something more meaningful like “Killer Apps” or “Genius Just For You”

• Give users the ability to filter search results

• Provide developers a better method for demoing their apps from the App Store. For example many developers like to publish video of how their app works which usually results in dark, out-of-focus YouTube videos. Apple could come up with a method for easily creating animated demos, giving developers an opportunity to show user flows and specific screen details in a coherent and unified way.

The Internet began to take off several years earlier with the introduction of Mosaic, the first Web browser with mass appeal. In 1994, the same founders formed a new company and released Netscape Navigator. Only a year later, Microsoft launched the first version of Internet Explorer and soon everyone was moving to the Web.

Flash forward to this century:

• January 2007, Apple announces the iPhone

• In June of the same year at WWDC 2007, Apple announces it will support third-party “web applications”

• In October, an open letter from Steve Jobs announces a software development kit (SDK) will be available to third-party developers

• November 2007, Google unveils the Android platform

• July 2008, Apple’s App Store officially opens with downloads topping 1.5 billion in first year
• April 2009, Blackberry App World launched

• June 2009, Apple vice president Phil Schiller announces there are 50,000 applications available in the App Store

• June 2009, Palm launches the Pre

• July 2009, Motorola, Huawei, Archos, Lenovo and HTC have already built or have confirmed plans to release a phone with Google’s Android platform

• July 2009, non-tech companies Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Burger King , Coca-Cola, Nike, Adidas, Lacoste, D&G, Dior, BMW, Ferrari, Whole Foods, Kraft, and AAA all have iPhone applications

What’s going on? For some business owners, this might send shivers down their back. Is this for real? You bet it is, and you won’t want to be the last to know for the same reason you didn’t want to be the last to know about the Internet. Movement to mobile will be fast and as always, it’s the first to cross the finish line that counts, not the second.

Just as quickly as we turned into a culture with a computer in every home, we’re turning into a culture with one in every pocket. Not only are people walking around with little computers attached to their bodies, they are connected to them in a myriad of ways via online social networking, maps, news, games, video, music and chat.

This July at the VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference, the BBC reported that the big prediction is that the mobile applications market will be as big as the Internet in 2020. It’s no surprise that they are also predicting the market will grow to 100,000 apps by the end of 2009. Ilja Laurs, CEO of GetJar commented, “The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers.”

Here are some reasons why you’ll want a mobile app for your business sooner rather than later:

If you’re not on the web already, then you’re dead. The same will hold true for mobile.

Just as it’s a requirement for most businesses to have a web presence, it will soon be one to have a mobile presence. For many businesses having no web presence would be death and holds true to the saying “out of site, out of mind” when it comes to staying connected with your customers. Not providing online content to your customers is a dead-end for them and with the price of advertising, no business can afford to throw away customer-generated interest. Mobile is no exception. It’s another extension to your customers. It’s 1999 all over again and you’re going to need a good mobile presence.

Mobile apps are an extension of your company’s brand

It’s no accident that brick and mortar companies like Taco Bell, Lacoste and Whole Foods have mobile apps. Mobile apps are another “touchpoint” for their brand where they can interact with their audience. Marty Neumeier in his book Zag writes, “Traditional advertising is in a death spiral”…”But the root causes for the death spiral are twofold: 1) People don’t like one-way conversations, and 2) People don’t trust advertising.”

So how do you extend your brand and not use advertising? One idea is to build a utility that your customers find useful…like a mobile app.

Sherwin-Williams designed ColorSnap for the iPhone to help their customers match colors they like with Sherwin-Williams paint color. Pizza Hut launched their iPhone app that lets their customers order their favorite pepperoni pizza in seconds. Pizza Hut promotes their app with words like “easy”, “fast” and “fun”. In short, they’re making it easy for their customers, and promoting their brand in a way that doesn’t come off as being intrusive or forceful. Best of all, their icon gets to live on the customer’s mobile device helping to establish a connection between Pizza Hut and their customers.

You will want to be connected to your customers wherever they go

Companies have found a multitude of ways to stay connected with their customers via TV, billboards, print ads, sponsorships, etc. Unfortunately for them, these mediums take on a static relationship with their customers when compared with mobile. Unless you have a logo tattooed to your body (I hope not), no medium goes everywhere your customer goes like a branded mobile application does.

Users don’t like to use their mobile web browser

Before Apple opened its App Store there was a lot of media coverage around increasing statistics showing the popularity of mobile internet usage.

That was then and this is now.

While having a web site optimized for mobile browsers is a good idea, it’s no longer a sufficient means of connecting with your mobile customers. Why? Because the experience doesn’t fit the medium. It’s slow and cumbersome and was originally designed for a PC experience, not your phone. For mobile users, speed is everything. Using a phone’s web browser is akin to using a knife instead of a Cuisenart to chop vegetables. One is automatic, one is not.

To use a browser on a mobile device the user opens it to a blank screen, types a long URL with their thumbs, zooms-in to be able to read the content and laboriously navigates via several zooms, pinches, swipes and taps. Basically, it’s a lot of work. Even optimized sites still require the user to type a URL and experience what is typically, a very generic, long and linear interface. In both scenarios, there’s also the frustration of waiting for long pages and big images to load. Why not make it easy for the customer to get the information they need within a few seconds?

When I want to read the New York Times I don’t go to their web site (which on my iPhone is little bit like reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass), I use my NYT app. When I want to track packages, I use an app for that. When I want to know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, I use an app for that… The point is the mobile web browser is a tool of last resort. It’s a manual experience versus the “automatic” experience of apps.
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Of course moving your brand and/or company to the web 15 years ago wasn’t easy, and neither will moving it to mobile now. The good news is that some of the most successful apps are light in content and need only a few screens. Apps are typically widget-like and don’t require outsourcing half of India to get the job done.

The bad news is that there are now several platforms to design and build for, and each one uses their own programming style, visual language and screen dimensions (for more about this topic and why “one size doesn’t fit all”, please view my previous blog post: 31 Flavors – Designing for iPhone, Android and Blackberry Platforms). While the iPhone seems to be leading the pack in regard to app usage, you cannot ignore Blackberry’s user base or the number of “Android phones” in the works.

The miniature size of apps compared to desktop applications and web sites has its advantage. A disadvantage is that users quickly lose interest. That’s why it’s important to continue to keep users and customers engaged via dynamic content, updates and new apps.

Another point to keep in mind is that despite an app’s limited number of screens, the time and cost it takes to launch a successful app isn’t cheap and takes several weeks. There are still, only a handful of good mobile app designers and developers out there. The ones that do exist are still learning on the job because the technology is still new and platform updates are frequent. In addition, the development might require two engineers if any animation outside of the SDK is used. An app, while deceptively small in size, can be extremely feature rich and challenge both designers and technologists to maintain a user experience that is efficient and at the same time, meaningful for the customer.
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If you’re shopping for an app team to help you, this is what you should look for:

Multidisciplinary team

While some single-person development teams have been successful building and launching their own apps, with over 50,000 apps in Apple’s App Store alone, the gold rush is over and it’s not recommended that you try to hire one person to do everything. It takes several people to launch a successful app including, in most cases, an interactive designer, a visual designer, an engineer and a project manager.

An understanding of the medium

Designing for the iPhone or Android platform is not the same as designing a web site. The designers should have intimate knowledge of the device or platform with a thorough understanding of its native elements and best practices. User interfaces should be designed to be intuitive and follow platform standards that the device’s users are accustomed to. For example, iPhone apps don’t use drop-downs. A good iPhone app designer will be able to provide an immediate solution for such a problem.

Documentation

Make sure the team has an iterative design process that includes documentation of user flows and screen details (i.e. wireframes). Paper is cheap. Make sure the team has worked out most of the design problems on paper before any coding begins. Apple’s UI Evangelist, Eric Hope recommends that at least ½ of an iPhone project’s time be spent on design.

Lastly, keep in mind that mobile apps are still a new medium, mobile platform updates are frequent and the rules of the game and its players are constantly changing.

So, maybe you’re asking: how do you design for three different mobile platforms without losing your marbles?

Before starting on each project, I did my homework to see what other designers and developers have done in the space. For Android and Blackberry, this study was not only a nice-to-have, it was a requirement. While Apple has a reasonably good human interface guidelines to shepherd designers and developers through putting together a consistent and intuitive interface for iPhone users, the other two leave a lot to be desired.

Google, ironically, preaches the value of using consistent UI components without ever really sharing what those components might be to any great extent. They have an in-depth tutorial on how to create icons but don’t mention much on what the other standard UI components should look like. This leads designers to go off on their own and create what they think is right for the Android UI versus Google suggesting what the best practices are. This could easily be solved by providing a comprehensive style guide.

What’s the purpose of doing this? The purpose is to understand the personality, interaction and visual language of a platform so that the designer is able to design an interface that users already visually and interactively understand. The users understand and intuit this language based on previous experiences with the platform’s native apps and/or other downloaded apps. This is why an iPhone app should look and feel like an iPhone app and an Android app should look and feel like one of its own. Differentiation is important where there’s competition, but without any consistent use of native UI elements, the user is at a loss with the interface and has to learn something new costing them time, effort and frustration.

Some companies take the easy route. They simply take any graphics and user flows they created for one platform (typically the iPhone) and adapt it to the new one. Because of Android’s lack of support (and perhaps because of the developer’s lack of interest), we see a lot of this being applied to its apps. This is not only bad for Android’s effort to provide a consistently intuitive user experience but it’s also, in some cases, bad for the app itself which doesn’t utilize native elements and behaviors that ultimately, could create a better user experience particular to that platform.

So here’s the answer to the burning question:

Can you Android-ize an already existing iPhone app? Does one size fit all?

No, not without confusing the user with elements they’re unfamiliar with and possibly missing out on better ways to present a feature using the platform’s native standards.

In regard to user interaction design, there are some big differentiators between the three platforms. Here are some of the big ones:

Android and Blackberry platforms have menus

They both have hard keys on their physical devices that make it possible to bring up a menu and navigate to other options or shortcuts, the iPhone doesn’t. This helps in some circumstances, to hide what would normally be considered clutter. It allows designers to conceal additional features and functionality for when the user is ready to use them. It may make the user experience actually easier by requiring less taps or clicks.

They both have hard keys on their physical devices that make it possible to bring up a menu and navigate to other options or shortcuts, the iPhone doesn’t. This helps in some circumstances, to hide what would normally be considered clutter. It allows designers to conceal additional features and functionality for when the user is ready to use them. It may make the user experience actually easier by requiring less taps or clicks.

Android and Blackberry platforms have a back key

Same as above. This makes it easy to remove controls that would otherwise be necessary to go back.

Blackberry screens come in several different sizes

In my opinion, this is why Blackberry’s App World has a long, long way to go and may ultimately, fizzle out. Designing and developing an app that works on five different screen sizes is a headache. It requires a great deal of production and time from designers and developers and leads to too many compromises. In order to save time and money, the app’s design is required to be generic enough to work with all the various device models. To understand this better, check out Pandora’s Blackberry page.

Blackberry uses a trackball on most of its devices

This is yet another hindrance to Blackberry’s success in the app market. While trackballs work fine for scrolling through a list such as your email’s inbox, it’s cumbersome when it comes to navigating through the tabs of an app, especially if there are two sets, one at the top and one at the bottom. Unless there’s something I don’t know (Blackberry users?), a user must select all the screen’s components (tabs, buttons, fields, hyperlinks) on the way to navigating from one end of the screen to the other. There’s no way to fly from, lets say, the top-left tab to the bottom-right tab like you can do with a mouse or even better, your finger. Everything snaps to a grid and the trackball cursor must follow it. Needless to say, this is extremely cumbersome and requires that screens have few selectable components.

Pop-ups in Android are completely customizable

One nice work-around with Android is that pop-ups are completely customizable. This means in some cases you can use a pop-up interface rather than having to take the user to a new screen. Where would this be helpful? Any kind of detail screen where the user taps an element on the screen to learn more. The pop-up can be customized to have its own background, scrollbar, icons, etc. (caveat: Android pop-ups are not meant to be used like this, so it’s a bit of a hack from what I understand).

iPhone apps don’t use standard web browser form components

What, no radio buttons? No drop-downs? Nope. While web pages displayed on the iPhone do have these options, iPhone app interfaces don’t. Instead, they have switches, slot machine-like pickers and sliding knobs. This is a good thing—they thought about the new touchscreen technology and adapted the UI components to fit it. From a design point of view, this means that you will have to think of how to set up form components differently.

Needless to say, there are also many visual differences between these three platforms. Once you figure it out, Android actually has a pretty nice graphical user interface. Again, there biggest problem is not giving designers and developers enough guidance (i.e., this is what a progress bar looks like, this is what a standard OS button looks like, this is what a pop-up looks like, etc.). In return, their collection of apps appears somewhat clunky and doesn’t have the same cohesiveness that the iPhone’s apps do. This might not be such a big deal except for Android users never know what to expect and the constant use of iPhone-like components in Android apps (such as the ubiquitous shiny buttons) makes Android appear cheap. Android has some exceptional functionality, why not do the same with the UI standards? All it would require on their part, I believe, is a well-written user interface guide.

So, again, how do you design for three different mobile platforms without losing your marbles?

One at a time. Each version of the app will have the same list of key use cases but will require a fresh perspective when it comes down to user interaction and screen layouts. In some cases, like the Blackberry, you can’t squeeze a square peg in a round hole. You have to take it for what it is: a conventional mobile phone UI. Each platform has its own unique challenges and that’s half the fun of being a designer or developer.

Lastly, I’d like to speak directly to Apple, Google, Blackberry and Palm on behalf of all those who seek a better understanding of these interfaces and wish to design and develop a coherent user experience for these platforms. Just as you have given developers the tools to code your apps, you should give designer’s the tools to design your apps. Offer up layered Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator files of all your UI components just as this kind person has done for the iPhone and these people and these people. Why make it hard for everybody to put together an accurate representation of your interface? Give us the visual language so that we can, as designers, design useful and intuitive apps that contain the visual standards your users are already accustomed to. To Google’s credit, they do provide templates for creating menu icons, but offer little more for the designer. It would go a long way to not only provide an SDK but also a “software design kit”.