New 'Food & Drink' category goes live on Apple's App Store
MacStories reported in early July that Apple had sent out emails to relevant developers that their apps would be switched over to the new category. On Thursday, MacRumors noticed that the App Store section was now active.
The category currently has 2,824 paid and 4,040 free iPhone apps and 1,121 paid and 1,039 free iPad apps. It is reportedly meant to include software related to cooking and baking, mixing drinks, recipes, restaurants and bars, and social food recommendation. According to MacStories, "diet, grocery shopping, coupon clipping and food-related game apps" won't be counted.
Apple has been steadily making minor improvements and changes to the App Store in recent months. In May, Apple added an Editor's Choice section to the App Store and began free App of the Week promotions. In March, the company introduced a "Catalogs" category to the store.
Even as it works to improve the digital storefront, the iPhone maker is enjoying the rapid expansion of the so-called "app economy." During its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple revealed that there are over 650,000 apps available in the App Store. Total downloads have surpassed 30 billion and more than $5 billion has been paid out to developers. After expanding to 32 new countries last month, the App Store is now available in 155 countries.
15 Comments
I've said it before, and I'll say it until they do it: We need subcategories of subcategories of subcategories.
A food and drink category? Maybe iDevices are all about consumption. [size=4]????[/size]
So true, as a consumer it is frustrating, I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a developer to get their programme found by enough people.
I never browse the App Store. If I hear of an interesting app I might decide to download/buy it but I never go looking for new apps. I already have pretty much everything I need. I don't have any games. We'll I did buy one. It was some EA Sports car racing game a couple years ago when I got iPad 1 but I deleted it a long time ago. I suck at games like that anyway.
[quote name="festerfeet" url="/t/151257/new-food-drink-category-goes-live-on-apples-app-store#post_2145926"]So true, as a consumer it is frustrating, I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a developer to get their programme found by enough people. [/quote] I can't imagine it'll get better. iTunes, the app, is still very poor for organizing data. Some examples off the top of my head... Under books you don't have Title and author in Info you have Name and Artist. Technically correct, but not very useful. You also have all the other stuff that only relates to music. Another example — and one that really bothers me — is the ability to have multiple artist names for a a track. A lot of my music has multiple artists but I need to keep all additional artists as "(ft/ name_one, name_two)" format in the track name. Having them in the Artist name makes it harder to choose a track by an artist via voice commands. There should be a virtually unlimited number of artists you can append to a track so that for organization you only have one artist in your iTunes library, not many listings with an ampersand separating names and adding multiple listings. It's sloppy. Don't even get me started on classical music. Anyway, I digress, if they haven't resolved those issues don't expect them to be able to make the App Store better organized.