User Experience Issues with iOS's App Store App

Not long ago, iOS 4.3.3 gave us the ability to easily re-download past app purchases directly on our iPhones and iPads. While I’ve long clamoured for this ability, as it has existed on Android for quite a while, I was just happy to finally get this.

Here’s the issue though: from a user experience perspective, it has a ton of issues — problems that simply should not exist, and certainly not something we would come to expect from Apple’s design and development teams.

If you open the App Store app on your iPhone for example, you can tap on ‘Updates’ and then tap ‘Purchased’ to get at your previous app purchases. You have two options here: either show ‘All’ or ‘Not On This Phone.’ The problem with using this feature is not the pure convenience factor of being able to easily download past purchases again. The issue is this particular web view is extremely slow and not very responsive.

Here’s a typical flow many will take:

1. Tap on ‘Not On This Phone.’

1. Start browsing by scrolling through your list of app purchases.

2. Find an app you forgot that you purchased, and tap the cloud icon to start downloading it to your iOS device.

3. The download starts by booting you out of the App Store app and to your next available home screen. You wait patiently for the app to finish downloading and install.

4. You go back to the App Store (either by taping on the icon or multi task and fast switch).

At this point, you run into a huge colossally stupid problem. Instead of remembering your scroll position in the web view, you are taken straight to the very top of the list!

Not only does this waste a huge amount of time — forcing the user to keep scrolling until they find where they were, but the problem is compounded by the fact that the scrolling performance is herky-jerky (tested on my 16GB iPhone 4 with a clean install of iOS 5).

I really would like to see Apple fix these two problems, sooner rather than later.