Mac App Store - an epic fail?

While the iOS app store is a great success, the app store for the Mac looks like a bit of a failure.  If you look at the free/paid charts and see what the most popular apps are you will see what I mean.

Lets start with the free one.  The top 10 apps are

1. OSX Yosemite
2. M$ Remote Desktop
3. Xcode
4. Unarchiver
5. Memory Clean
6. Slack
7. Bit Defender
8. Instragram
9. RAR Extractor
10. M$ One Note

That is an OS update, two M$ business tools, two zip utilities, Developer tools, a dubious memory cleaner and anti virus.  To begin with it implies most Mac users are business users who do most of their work in a M$ environment.  Zip utilities should really be standard with OSs these days, rather than an add on.  Then there is Xcode.  Does this mean that more people out there are developing new apps (for iOS probably) tun are downloading free apps on the Mac?

Then there are the paid apps.  I won't list them but in at #5 is Final Cut Pro, at £230 and at #8 is Logic Pro X at £150.  How low are sales if a £200 professional video editing app is the fifth most popular app?  we are talking niche market here.  Why would you even launch an app at £0.79 and how many would you need to sell to get to #180 in the paid list?

You can only hope those charts are summarised some how and not actually indicative of weekly or monthly sales figures.  

Is iTunes Racist?

Yes, it is to a certain extent.  How?  Well you see, it tends to classify everything that comes out of the US, England, Australia and some parts of Europe as "Pop", "Alternative", "Electronica" or whatever.  The musical output from the REST of the world get labelled "World Music" which, in all honesty, is a bit ignorant.  It may come as a surprise to some,  but the rest of the world can do our sorts of music as well as we can.  Labelling everything as "World Music" is like labelling Bob Dylan and Daft Punk as the same genre.  It is just not the case.

Things I Hate About iTunes ...

In no particular order

1. No undelete option. You spend 2 hours hand crafting a play list and hit delete by mistake. Boom, its gone.
2. It will fetch some artwork for albums you rip but not all of them. Even really obvious ones.
3. If you rip a 2CD set then it will invariably try to name each CD differently. Why?
4. The interface in general. Start playing a track, rename a whole bunch of other and a dialog box pops up while the renaming takes place. Can you stop the track? Nope.
5. Genres. Some have "&" in them and some have a "/". There is Electronic, Electronica and Electronica/Dance. I think you will find that Alternative is quite separate and different to Punk.
6. Oh look, Apple has released a new bit of hardware. Time for another huge iTunes download with a couple of features that aren't applicable to you.
7. Why is Bob Dylan next to Bob Marley in my collection? One is D and one is M.
8. Why it gives strange errors (Error 50, I'm looking at you) when Apple make iTunes, the iPod and even the computer it's all running on.