Opinion: iTunes 9 Hides App Categories, Makes It Harder to Find What You’re Looking For
There is much to like in the just-released iTunes 9, not least the ability to arrange iPhone apps on the desktop rather than on the phone, with the fiddly and unpredictable maneuvers that that usually entails.
One change to iTunes I don’t understand — or like — is the removal of app categories from the App Store home page. Apps are still given categories but now to get to a category page you have to be either a bit of a sleuth or very lucky.
One way to get to the categories is to click on an app in the category you want to search and then look at the top left of the screen. There you’ll see some links (called “breadcrumbs”) that look something like this: “App Store > Utilities > AppBox Pro.” If you click on that middle link (in this case, “Utilities”) you’ll find yourself on that category’s “home” page.
The App Store home page of iTunes 8.x used to have a simple box of text links to each of the categories but that now has, for some inexplicible reason, been removed.
Put category links back on the App Store home page, Apple!
It’s hard enough wading through 80,000 apps to find what you’re looking for when the app categories were easy to locate. Making us play Sherlock Holmes just to find those categories in order to begin a search that is often frustrating and futile is adding salt to an open wound.
Comments
One Comment on Opinion: iTunes 9 Hides App Categories, Makes It Harder to Find What You’re Looking For
-
After a Stellar FY09, Business and Education Has Much to Be Bullish About iPhone in FY10 : iPhonesAtWork on
Fri, 16th Oct 2009 5:17 pm
[...] iPhone users of course have their gripes. The App Store’s groaning wealth of almost 100,000 apps is a beast to explore, made worse by iTunes 9 which made listings of apps by categories almost impossible to find. [...]
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
