The Art of the App Store: The Business of Apple Development

MEETING YOUR CUSTOMER'S EXPECTATIONS

Let's now take a higher-level view at what customers will expect to find in App Store categories, examples within each, as well as — in general — how feasible they are for the i-device with regard to both control features and “casualness.” The goal is to give you insight into current App Store expectations for each category, as well as ideas for what categories you might want to enter into with your new apps.

Visual and Graphical Expectations

Though visual styles were explored in Chapter 3 from an artistic standpoint, what in general do customers expect from the current App Store marketplace, in any category?

Even from the early days in the App Store, there have been some true stunners in terms of graphics and fluidity. Because these devices fully support three-dimensional (3D) capabilities and now all have relatively high-resolution graphics even on iPod touch (twice the pixels as before with 960 × 640 compared to 480 × 320 in the horizontal position), most all apps should be able to support this higher resolution, or what they dub “retina display” for clearer text and graphics. Apps may not only look inferior, but you cannot obviously list high-resolution as a selling point. In fact, many apps have already forgone support for legacy devices in favor of retina-only and iPad resolutions or greater.

As far as style goes, most anything is fair game and often found in the App Store, again with the caveat that presentation supports functionality ...