A couple of weeks back, the Tap! app went live. I had nothing to do with it, so I got the same experience as everyone else on grabbing it and downloading a copy. It’s hard for me to not be a little biased (given that I’m a contributing editor to the magazine), but I think it’s all kinds of lovely, with a great UI, issue pricing that’s way cheaper than buying the printed mag, and components that take advantage of the medium (such as video previews of games).

Now iOS 5 has arrived, Future Publications has made a big deal about its 50+ Newsstand-compatible apps, and the reviews have been flooding into the App Store. They’re so diametrically opposed that they would be comical if they weren’t so utterly depressing. Take Tap!, for example. At the time of writing, it has eight reviews on the UK App Store. These break down as follows:

5/5: Four

1/5: Four

The negative reviews appear to be one general grievance (a guy who likes the app but, for whatever reason, hates the content), and a lack of demo content (which I think is a fair point—and I imagine that will arrive soon for those mags that don’t yet have it). I’m not sure the latter warrants a 1/5 review, though, instead of a letter to the mag itself, and the sad thing is, these are the best of them. Trawling through Future’s other app reviews and you stumble across a slew of entitled ‘reviews’, complaining that—gosh!—someone downloaded a free app and yet they then had to pay actual money for magazines! One particularly inane review complains that since they bought an iOS device for hundreds of pounds, they should damn well get free magazines! (Just like when I bought an expensive new TV, I automatically got free DVDs and Sky+ forever. No, hang on…) Others simply whine that when an app says ‘free’, it should mean ‘free’, despite in-app purchase being for a long time now a major part of the iOS app ecosystem. In perhaps the worst example, someone who clearly has an axe to grind against a certain publication lets loose with a spew of almost libellous garbage.

I posted about this subject on Twitter yesterday, and despite it being a Sunday there were plenty of replies. Some sided with me (“The app is free, the content isn’t. How hard is that to understand?” complained a friend of mine who works on the iPad version of a major newspaper), whereas others said that labelling an app as free cements an expectation that it isn’t something that you should end up paying for. One guy suggested these kinds of apps should be badged in a different manner, with ‘subscribe’ instead of ‘free’, although it would obviously be down to Apple to implement such a solution and could cause further confusion with mag/newspaper apps that enable you to buy single issues rather than enforcing a subscription.

The thing is, I’ve seen these problems dozens of times before when working on iOS games. Almost every time a dev drops the price of a game to free, the 1/5 reviews flood in. Some complain that the game “doesn’t work”; others whine when the game has IAP to add extra content; many just moan for the hell of it.

But that’s the problem with ‘free’: anyone can review, because anyone can download an app, without making any investment whatsoever. Typically, when people have paid money for something, they are more considered. And in making an app something other than free, you filter out the idiots. I’m not sure what the solution is for mag apps. I’m sure Future Publishing (and others in a similar situation) did a ton of research before deciding on the ‘free app and paid content’ model, realising what the risk would be. But I wonder if a lowish app price (say, £1.49) that bundled the current issue would be beneficial from a feedback standpoint. Of course, that isn’t necessarily beneficial for the consumer, because you’re ‘forcing’ them to buy the current issue, even if they don’t want it. But as is often the case, consumers en masse don’t always know what’s good for them and so end up with inferior solutions; I wonder if that’ll be the case in the medium term with mag apps, especially if the negative reviews keep flooding in.

Update: on the ‘free issue’ front, Ian Betteridge writes: “Mens Health has really suffered: they got lots of 1/5’s for “no free issue!” when there’s quite clearly a free (old) issue.”

Update 2: On Tap! specifically, read editor Christopher Phin’s response in the comments below.

Update 3: Tap! now has a free sampler edition, featuring content from the October issue.

The Loop quotes The Seattle Times, interviewing Gabe Newell, head of Valve:

Newell expects Apple to disrupt the living room platform with a new product that will challenge consoles, although he doesn’t have any particular knowledge of that new product.

“I suspect Apple will launch a living room product that redefines people’s expectations really strongly and the notion of a separate console platform will disappear,” he said.

I don’t think Apple will offer a new product specifically for gaming, because the building blocks already exist in AirPlay and iOS devices. Firemint’s recently showed off Party Play for Real Racing 2, which works over AirPlay to an Apple TV, enabling four-player split-screen racing on an HDTV, using iOS devices as controllers.

Here’s how I think things will play out for Apple in 2012:

• The next iPod touch revision will include an A5 chip and, with that, video mirroring/AirPlay gaming support;
• The Apple TV will retain its price point or perhaps even drop in price;
• More games devs will take advantage of AirPlay, offering TV modes and multiplayer.

You then end up in an interesting and seemingly somewhat absurd reversal of traditional gaming. With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, you have affordable consoles and fairly cheap controllers. With Apple, you have a cheap ‘console’ (the Apple TV, priced similarly to the Wii, but cheaper than an Xbox or PS3), and expensive ‘controllers’, in the shape of iPods, iPhones and iPads. The Apple system isn’t one you’d buy from scratch, but once you realise families will increasingly own several iOS devices, Apple’s system becomes less crazy.

I’m not sure Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will be significantly challenged by this model, should my three assumptions come to pass, but then people argued iOS wouldn’t get anywhere in handheld gaming, and it’s since punched the DS and PSP squarely in the face.

Earlier today, I was noting that Apple rumours tend to be bull. And then I happened across a whopper, courtesy of John Dvorak at PCMag.com:

Data indicates that early Christmas shoppers are preordering the Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet faster than you can say “Tickle Me Elmo.” Various tablet computers will top nearly every Christmas wish list. Therefore, it is very likely that—

A hack will make a really stupid guess?

—Apple will roll out the iPad 3 by the holiday.

Oh no you didn’t.

*rechecks*

—Apple will roll out the iPad 3 by the holiday.

Dvorak tries to argue his case with extra lumps of crazy, in part involving immediate part shortages forcing “lines around the block”. Um, yeah. To be frank, he could have written a slightly more sensible article by copying and pasting the following 500 times:

Argle wargle iPad bargle fargle fweeeee.

Stupid Apple Rumors:

When the “most accurate” site can only get 17% of their own sourced rumors accurate, it speaks volumes to the nature of Apple rumors.

Quite. As you’ll have noticed, we—SHOCK!—didn’t get an iPhone 5 with a curved screen, Apple didn’t kill the iPod touch, and the iPad 3 didn’t show up. And, yeah, those links are all to this blog, but they showcase one thing: if you’re smart, you’ll either ignore Apple rumours or take the piss out of them. You’ll gain pretty much no credibility for having any faith in them, because they are rumours and not facts.

Hat tip: Brooks Review.

BoingBoing on the UK porn filter:

I’ve yet to see any of them adopt a more rigorous, neutral phrasing, like “Some pornography, and things that an unaccountable group classifies as porn, will be blocked.” Instead, to a one, they imply (or state) that all porn will be blocked, and nothing but porn will be blocked. Parents who rely on this service to block porn are in for a surprise when they discover all their favorite stuff has been misclassified as porn and when their kids discover all the unblocked porn.

Still, this makes the UK government look like it’s doing something and makes a Christian charity feel all big and clever.

And in the article’s comments, ‘shadowfirebird’ says:

Not wishing to be critial—since work in this area is genuinely useful—but there is already a solution that stops your child seeing exactly what content you consider inappropriate.  It’s called “sitting with your child while they are accessing the internet”.

And ‘t3kna2007’, perhaps inevitably, adds:

My local public library blocks BoingBoing as adult content.  I was hoping otherwise, but wasn’t too surprised given the usual broad brushes used to paint blocklists.