940670 - Expose list of most recently updated apps

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Marketplace Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P4)

Description

[kirk f]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.57 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Visit the main page of marketplace


Actual results:

There is no way a user can find the most recently updated applications, developers take a considerable time updating applications which are lost in the marketplace. That should be shown as a new tab next to 'Popular' and 'New'


Expected results:

A new tab should be created next to 'Popular' and 'New', called 'Just Updated' or 'Recently Updated', showing in chronological (ascending) order the apps that have been updated recently. By doing this it provides both the developer a second chance for exposing their application to a greater pool of users who simply skim the homepage, and second it provides an opportunity to end users to discover apps that have been improved

Comment 1

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

I'm inclined to think that the New tab should be changed to reflect when the latest version was added rather than when the app was submitted.

OTOH, this has the potential for abuse, since you could just spam your app with versions. This is especially true when we start skipping the full review process for unprivileged packaged apps. This can be negated, however, by throttling app submission, though that has other repercussions (i.e.: a developer that accidentally ships a bad update has to ship an emergency hotfix can't do so because he's throttled).

I'm torn on this feature. It's a good idea on the surface but it has a large potential for abuse.

Comment 2

[David Bialer [:dbialer]]

I am inclined to believe that New does mean New Apps, whereas existing users of an app get updated apps automatically (if hosted, and if the user is registered as well for packaged).  

It is a good suggestion, but we don't know yet if users care about updated apps as a major category.  This is the first time for this request.  It would be worth testing.  I do do understand from a developer standpoint.

I had heard that there was abuse of updating on Add-ons.  Some people updated every day so that that their Add-on would rise to the top of the New list.   That said, most developers wouldn't do this and should have the opportunity to improve their app - and the only way I can see to fix this would be to throttle submissions and/or implement a complex filtering system for "updated"

This might be a good "Feed" element in the newer UI under development.

This is something we can test.

Comment 3

[kirk f]

I agree that there can be abuse, nevertheless keep in mind that deviant behavior is possible even without this option, a packaged app can simply be renamed and repackaged with other icons and ultimately re-submitted to the app store as a new application. Nevertheless I would like to again stress that there are ways around this minimizing abuse, i.e. an application can show up in that new section based on a timestamp that records the last update (or submission date if it is a first update), hence this would provide the marketplace an easy way reduce abuse. In essence if I update an application everyday, only one update will show in the marketplace for a given period (i.e. 1 week, 1 month etc.). Abuse is something that always occurs but can definitely be minimized. Another idea is to also store an update frequency regarding the applications, that way frequently updated apps can be flagged for review if it is a factor of abuse. And a third idea would be to fetch the size of the updated app, if there is no significant deviation from the current release than possibly the app is not a significant update (and not worth displaying).

Again thank you for your time and consideration.

Comment 4

[Matt Basta [:basta]]

> a packaged app can simply be renamed and repackaged with other icons and ultimately re-submitted

It would still have to go through a review process. Additionally, the developer would need to delete the old app since we do not allow duplicate apps from the same developer. This kind of abuse is not possible with the current system.

> only one update will show in the marketplace for a given period

This is actually quite difficult to do, since the value is computed in a sliding window, and we don't know whether we'd need to show the app in a list until the list is requested.

Your suggestion regarding update frequency is what I mentioned in comment #1, which would have unintended consequences.

Lastly, the size check could be easily circumvented by including a blob of garbage in the update. It would also cause issues for apps that want to legitimately provide updates which only change existing fixed-length data and don't add or remove anything to the file size.

I don't believe time-based abuse prevention is the answer here, but I do think there's got to be a way to expose this information in a clean way. Ultimately, it'll probably be (as David said) a feature of the feed, which will look at factors besides when the last update was submitted.