Firmware 2.2: The New App Store

by Eric March on November 22, 2008 at 1:06 am

Okay, so Firmware 2.2 is out and we’re all pretty familiar with the changes now. Street View, walking directions, bus schedules (none of which are relevant to anyone outside of the US), more stable browsing, yadda yadda yadda. I spent some time playing around with it all and I’m duly impressed. Street View works very well, though a bit slower than a desktop connection, even over WiFi — image updating takes a bit longer when wandering down random streets. Browsing does seem more stable now, address display of dropped pins is quite cool, and I really like the new home button feature that returns to the first page when pressed from any other page. Until Apple gets with it and implements proper folders for organizing apps, this is a handy little feature when you want to access your most important apps that you keep on that first page.

But what hasn’t been talked about so far are the changes to the Mobile App Store — and there are plenty. Amazingly, they’re mostly all good.

To start with, as I pointed out this morning on Frapstr, they repealed that ridiculous 100 app limitation when browsing categories. This isn’t a Firmware 2.2 thing, but it’s worth a mention anyway, because that bugged the hell out of me.

But as far as the changes to the firmware are concerned, let’s take a tour.

To start with, all of the categories now have icons beside them. Not particularly useful but nice-looking, and it helps distract from the fact that they’ve eliminated the app count that used to be beside each category. Granted, the count wasn’t particularly useful except for tabulating metrics, and it hasn’t worked since the beginning of the week when they started making more changes to the App Store, but it was nice to have nonetheless.

There have been big changes when browsing apps, too. To begin with, along the top you’ll notice 3 new filters that let you sort by top paid apps, top free apps, and release date (newest first). Still no return of the Free Apps filter (to browse all free apps) but I guess I can’t complain too much.

When you tap on an app to browse, the first thing you may notice is that the “Tell a Friend” button has disappeared from the top-right hand corner. This has been moved below the screenshots, with the addition of a “Report a Problem” button. And yes, I said screenshots. Plural. Because you can now view all of the available screenshots — and you can tap on them to view and browse them in fullscreen, too, which is something I’ve been waiting for. Furthermore, you can now both read and write reviews for games you have downloaded/purchased right from within the App Store — another feature I’ve been hoping to see.

Overall, the changes have made the Mobile App Store much more like browsing from iTunes, which is most excellent — especially for me, as it makes writing reviews on Frapstr just that much easier. There are still a few minor features I’d like to see. When searching for apps and browsing the results, it would be nice to see what category a particular app has been filed under. It would also be nice if one could tap on the developer’s name to browse a list of their apps. I know you can just search for their name, but this would eliminate a few steps.

Still, I’m liking the new additions to the App Store, and I think there are a lot of steps in the right direction here. But, hey, Apple … don’t you think you’ve dangled Cut & Paste in front of our faces long enough?

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One Response to “Firmware 2.2: The New App Store”

UncleBoogie said:

November 22nd, 2008 at 5:49 pm

I’m jailbroken on 2.1. It works great. I have no intention of upgrading.

Regarding the free filter, I’ve used the Appstore a lot less since that disappeared.