You probably know Apple’s original “very sweet solution” for expanding the iPhone was web apps. But a year later the App Store arrived, and we got bludgeoned with “there’s an app for that” – even when an app was the last thing we needed. Half the time, a decent website would have done the job without demanding a square of Home Screen real estate.
Yet Apple clung to its app-first doctrine for years. Partly, that’s because it gave the company maximum control. But also, it locked services to Apple hardware – despite quite a few Apple services not being compelling enough to lure people to the ecosystem in the first place.
Things softened more recently. Apple Music hit the web in 2020, and iCloud.com finally became usable on an iPhone. Last year, Apple Maps escaped its app-only purgatory with a web version, which I imagine left Google Maps baffled, having itself been online for nearly two decades by then. Now it’s the App Store’s turn.
Head to apps.apple.com and you’ll find a full-blown browser version of the App Store. You select the platform you’d like to search from the top-left. Beyond that, you’re in familiar territory, with search, categories, videos, editorial articles, and reviews. It’s long overdue.
Mishap Store
The web version of the App Store on iPad.
It’s also… not great. And after all this time, it really should be. Don’t get me wrong: the revamp is far better than the single-page web ‘previews’ we had before. But you still get bumped to the app version of the App Store when you click a link to an app on a website or in search engine results. At best, this breaks your flow; at worst, the transitions can trigger dizziness in people with vestibular disorders.
What blows my mind, though, is an even bigger omission: you can’t buy anything in the online version. For as long as I can remember, Google Play has let me browse and buy. If I spot an app, I can buy it in seconds, and it’s waiting on my Android phone when I next pick it up. Given Apple’s fondness for money, you’d think it would be gagging to let me impulse-buy an app I don’t really need while being bathed in the glow of my iMac display.
Ken Segall recently wrote that Apple increasingly crosses the Steve Jobs red line of treating the customer experience as all-important. As in, Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t. Auto-launching apps and preventing purchases – along with other issues with this online App Store, such as not letting you copy text – fall somewhere between sloppy and user-hostile. And it’s taken 17 years to get here. Still, maybe by 2042 I’ll actually be able to buy an app on my Mac and beam it to my iPhone, while Apple pretends that’s the future.