The iPhone App store has been getting some quiet updates lately, but the strangest is Apple’s removal of the ever-popular “All Free Apps” page. Is it proof free apps are costing the company more than they’d like?
The link, previously found nestled underneath options for “All iPhone Apps” and “All iPod touch Apps” has now vanished from iTunes. The change means finding free applications is much more of a chore.
Visitors must now manually search each category for free apps, or use the existing “Top Paid” and “Top Free Apps” listings. However, it’s obvious that new apps won’t automatically make it into those lists.
Why has Apple removed the link? We’re perplexed. Maybe it’s to encourage more paid-for purchases. Maybe it’s evidence that serving up millions of free apps is costing more in bandwidth than Apple expected.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.
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10-1-2008
Duh.
Apple removed those listings so that people will have to hunt through the regular listings to find free apps. By doing so, they will also be looking at the apps which are not free, thereby attracting more impulse buying and sales of the apps that actually cost money.
This greatly helps developers what want to sell applications through the App Store. Users won’t simply go through the listing of free apps and ignore the regular apps.
This seems very fair to the developers.
The listing of new apps mixes both free and regular apps. Those who want to see which apps were just added can go there and hunt for the free ones if they are insterested.
Apple has made another changes for developers. User can review or comment on apps only if they have actually downloaded the application. This eliminates the harassing, non-sensical, whining complaints from users who have never used the application in the first place. These complaints unfairly scared off users. This change brings some sanity to the App store reviews. Thank you Apple!