Secrets of App Store revealed by artificial life forms

Modelling Apple's App Store marketplace as an ecosystem reveals what makes it thrive and which apps are likely to sell

IT IS easy to get rich as a developer on Apple's App Store - just build an app that mimics a bestseller. So why doesn't everyone get in on the act? Because the ploy ends up killing interest in the store entirely, according to researchers who built a simulation of the store to see what makes it tick.

Apple's thriving marketplace of well over 500,000 apps for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch is a self-regulating ecosystem that doesn't tolerate copycats, say Soo Ling Lim and Peter Bentley at University College London, who modelled activity on the App Store.

Since Apple releases very little data associated with App Store interactions, Lim and Bentley built the next best thing - an "artificial life" simulation of the store. Named AppEco, it uses bits of software that obey unique behavioural rules to mimic apps, developers and consumers.

The simulation mimics four types of developer the team labelled innovators, optimisers, milkers and copycats. The copycats found it easy to make money - they simply built knock-offs of top-selling apps and confused users ended up buying the facsimiles.

But any developer who does this risks legal action and being banned from the App Store. That's one reason Lim and Bentley chose to build a simulation of the store, rather than run a real-life experiment that would involve them releasing their own apps.

"If I released 1000 copycat apps to assess the result, I'd be in trouble," says Bentley, who developed the popular listen-to-your-heartbeat app, iStethoscope.

Innovators, as the name suggests, come up with groundbreaking apps - like AroundMe or TuneIn Radio - while optimisers take a hit formula, such as the Angry Birds franchise, and try to adapt and continually improve it. Milkers, meanwhile, have one idea and use it repeatedly. They might, for example, create apps for each of hundreds of town maps, rather than building one app that can call up many maps.

Lim and Bentley ran a series of simulations, each time starting with all four categories of developer contributing an equal number of apps. If they forced the proportion of apps from each group to stay constant, the copycats quickly made the most money. But their advantage soon fell away as the ecosystem suffered from a lack of novel products.

"Unhappy users abandon the platform in search of a healthier one," says Lim.

In another simulation, consumers' choices dictated which apps thrived and which sank - as on the real app store. Under these conditions, optimisers sold most apps, with innovators next, followed by milkers - leaving copycats scraping the barrel. "Surprisingly, it naturally suppresses the copycat 'bad guys' without even needing the App Store owners to start imposing rules," says Bentley.

The work also revealed ways in which the App Store could boost sales. Users tend to be guided by "top 25" charts showing bestselling apps in various categories. The simulations showed that updating the charts more often made users make more purchases overall. Lim and Bentley will present their work at the GECCO computing conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July.

Updating charts more often and dropping the policing of copiers could boost the store's economics, but Apple's response was non-committal. "We don't talk about how we engineer our products, nor do we pre-announce new features," an Apple spokesman said.

Even the best apps need top billing

Innovative apps are crucial to the overall health of the App Store, a simulation of the store confirms (see main story), but it also reveals that smart ideas alone do not guarantee success. For an app to go viral, there's no substitute for promotion on the App Store itself.

"Our model shows a number of great ideas will simply drown for lack of publicity, with some gaining zero downloads," says Peter Bentley of University College London. To help achieve that crucial publicity, says his colleague Soo Ling Lim, "app stores need to improve their storefronts" to help users find apps they might like. Right now, she says, "the functional part of the app store is like the tip of an iceberg".

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