TL;DR: iTunes sucks
So I'm going to be acquiring an ipod touch in the near future so I decided to investigate iTunes. I don't plan to buy music or movies but I do want to check out the games and apps. The first challenge was setting up a account without a credit card on file. I followed a little guide and got it going. So, hooray!
The best part so far is everyone falling over themselves to just give games away. I currently have 70 titles downloaded, and another 30 more in my queue. I didn't pay a dime for any of them. 2-3 were some promo codes I scored on various forums, some are just plain free, only a couple are demo versions, but the rest are games that they let go for free for a day at a time. Thats the majority of the games I have. They all seem pretty interesting, too. Not just a bunch of tetris clones or something. But I won't be able to actually try them until later. I'll make a thread on the gaming board about that when I get to it.
So...the problems. These may or may not be issues you see, but I felt like venting.
The store is impossible to navigate or browse. Games are just lumped together...maybe you can narrow it down by genre but nothing too specific. I don't see any kind of detailed filtering or sorting options. I want to find a turn based strategy, less than $4, sorted by average review score...nope, can't do that. I found a site called AppShopper where you can do some of that, and there are other sites as well. Yes, to properly browse the iTunes app store you must use some other indexing site to do it.
The actual buying and downloading seems to work pretty well, except for a few things. The queue is...dumb. Its apparently controlled server side, from what I've read. Every time you launch the program it goes and grabs the list for you. I can see a reasoning for this since I could want to download something directly onto my ipod via wifi, so being able to use the same queue on there as on my desktop is a good feature. The problem is the server doesn't take your modifications or updates.
For example, I have 30 items on my list. Some are bigger than others, some I might want to download first compared to another. Reordering the list is a simple drag and drop. Perfect! Except this information is not updated on the server end. So if I close and reopen iTunes the queue is back to its original ordering of "what did you buy first?". Wouldn't be an issue if I left iTunes open, but after 3 downloads the program asks for my password to start a new download...and for some reason it doesn't accept my password. I know its correct, but it wont take it. I have to restart the program to continue downloading. So I'm constantly restarting and reordering my queue. The asking for password is double annoying since I can't just queue up my whole list and let it download while I sleep or go out. On those occasions I just have to pick the largest download I have to do and thats all.
I imagine these issues aren't a concern for most. 10, 20, 50, even 100MB apps only take seconds or a couple minutes to download for most people. It only hits me hard because...it takes me longer. Most people won't have a queue of 30 items that they have to pick and choose which ones to grab.
Oh yeah, it also turns out that if you decide later on that you no longer want to download a particular thing...too fucking bad. The queue has a "delete" option, but that only hides the download in that current session. Restarting iTunes and its back and ready to download! To get something removed from your download queue requires contacting support. The mind boggles.
There was some promo video for the show Castle I saw on the store. It was free, so what the hell, right? Well, its over 100MB for the HD version. 50MB for SD. Too bad I've decided I no longer want it but can't get rid of it. And downloading the HD version automatically adds the SD version as well. Yes, you have to download both!
Not to mention the technical issues I've seen. Itunes is up, browser is behind it. I click on the browser to bring it forward and iTunes sort of "ghosts" on top. Have to minimize and then enlarge the browser to see it properly. Or slide the browser window off the edge of the screen and back to clear it off. Who programmed this thing?
And now my recent trouble. I've only been using this for about 2 weeks. The other day there was an update, and I was amazed it actually asked me if I wanted to download it right away or later. Also I could bitch about how going from 10.0.0 to 10.0.1 requires you to redownload the entire fucking 70MB program...but I digress. All of a sudden iTunes was giving me an error about the store being temporarily down so I can't retrieve my download list. I let it go for a day, but it still says the same thing. Even after updating. The support forums show a few people with the same problem and they said that they got support to fix it by basically emptying and then reloading their queues. So its all server side and...what, gets corrupted? Those people had called support and it took an hour to get it going. I sent an email, and hopefully it gets fixed that way. Like hell am I going to call.
So now I'm VERY interested in jailbreaking. The only reason I even use iTunes now is to get these apps all nice and legal. But if its going to be this pig of a pain in the future then fuck it, ahoy mateys! All my stuff has been free anyway. I'll be saving Apple the bandwidth.
