In Four Years of App Store, Federico Viticci summarizes the key pain points of developers with the App Store. There is, however, one aspect from the user’s perspective that he does not address: For international users, there are some extra problems that arise because of the different App Stores.
Curtailed Choice
There are quite a few apps that I would like to use but are not sold on Germany’s App Store, or have limited functionality.
It’s not that I don’t understand the decisions and the motivations underlying them.
- I understand the self-censorship of Timeline World War 2, the acclaimed educational app, to avoid problems with Germany’s law banning the depiction of swastikas.
- I understand why Starbucks thought it should omit the popular “Mobile Pay” pay-by-QR-code feature from the German app. Phased rollout perhaps, and country-bound credit cards.
- I understand why Dark Sky, the amazing weather app that was kickstarted last year, is not sold in Germany. The weather data is only available for the US.
- I understand why Yardsale might have wanted to build up a bustling community in the US first, without exposing themselves to the risk of users elsewhere leaving 1-star reviews complaining “absolutely useless!!! no users in my city!”
But. What if I spend a summer in the States and want to learn about Coventry, want to buy coffee at Starbucks without cash, want to know when it will start raining here in NYC, want to engage in exchanging my belongings super-locally here in Greenpoint.
The current setup is just bad for people who travel or have more than one home base.
Language
I for one have set my device to English, as I have always done with all my devices. (I find that in general the English localization uses less screen space – compared to, say, German – and often matches the user interface metaphor better.)
Since I am browsing the German App Store, I see the German-localized description and screenshots. Even though I have my locale set to English.
Workaround
The common workaround goes something like this:
- Buy an iTunes gift card for the country you are visiting.
- Create an Apple ID without a credit card (payment type: None).
- Redeem the gift card
- If necessary, change your App Store country.
This makes some things more tedious. You will need to add the second account to your iPhone/iPad. To update apps you got through that account (the other store), you need to switch to that account first.
It’s a hard problem
As much as I would love to ask Apple to “just fix it already!”, I realize it’s actually a hard problem to solve. Just some considerations off the top of my head:
Locale settings
Should the App Store respect my locale setting for the description and screenshots? This might make sense if, say, the Starbucks app in the US and German stores are actually identical (have the same App ID). Otherwise, I might see the QR-code-payment screenshot and would wrongfully assume that this feature was supported in Germany.
Different reasons for differentiation
App Store differentiation has different motivations, e.g. legal (Timeline WW2), community-building (Yardsale), data (Dark Sky), infrastructure rollout (Starbucks?). There is no one way for Apple to solve all these issues.
For legally motivated differentiations, I guess there is not much leeway at all.
For all the other reasons, one conceivable option is for Apple to let the developers check a box to display some kind of warning to unsupported countries (e.g. “Might not work as advertised in your country. Is intended to work in: USA, Canada.”). On the buyer side, there could be a global option to hide unsupported apps, or a banner displaying the warning on the app’s description.
Not any time soon
Alas, all these ideas just don’t sound like Apple at all, so don’t count on any of this happening any time soon.