The other day, I happened to stumble on a YouTube video where the creator explored the problem of “discoverability” of video games on platforms like app stores, Steam, and Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo’s shops. That’s something that has been bothering me for a long time about the Apple App Store.

By pure coincidence though, this morning, as I was browsing through the “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of a game that I am interested in, I began to go down a rabbit hole where I ended up finding a good handful of games I had played on Steam that I wasn’t aware were available on iOS/iPadOS as well. It’s quite sad, because these are games that I really enjoyed, and I paid for them on Steam, a platform that Valve (understandingly) neglects on macOS, whereas I could have played them optimized for iOS/iPadOS.

The creator in the YouTube video didn’t really have a solution for this problem, and it seems to me that as the industry grows, and more and more “slop” begins to flood these platforms, it will only become harder and harder to discover the good indie games buried underneath it all.

I feel this intense urge inside me to start some kind of blog or website to provide short reviews so that at least some people will discover these games. We definitely need more human curation.

I’m also appalled that so many of these games on the Apple App Store have little to no ratings. No one makes an effort to leave behind a few words so that other people can get an idea of whether it’s worth to invest their money in a game.

I guess that there isn’t really anything that can be done about the issue of discoverability. As an indie developer and publisher, you just have to do the that best you can to market your game, and hope to redirect potential customers to your website or socials, where you should clearly list all the platforms that your game is available on (surprisingly, a lot of developers don’t do this). But that’s about all that you can do. The rest is luck.

This is a bit of a round about story, but bear with me.

I like PowerPoint, I love using it, it's intuitive to me. Google slides is okay, (I never delved into OpenOffice or any other offshoot really), but when I have a choice, I like using PPT.

I consider myself a comfortable Apple user as well, I prefer it for most of my computing needs, but not all, so it's not like I am not capable of using the Apple ecosystem.

However, whenever I have tried Keynote or Pages or any of the "office" tools, I don't like them.

I cannot tell if this is because these products or projects were killed off because of lowspread adoption at their onset, and thus did not get any development or improvement. Apple often does not release things and then just let them die, it usually waits a long time before it releases something, so they don't release things with potential failure (maybe I'm wrong, my memory doesn't recall anything like that other than this very example lol, and I guess their camera, but I digress).

I guess my rambling is, is PowerPoint just good and Keynote just bad or is there some more interesting story to it?

While not the same website, this reddit thread from several years ago is the only thing coming up on Google for me and everyone in there has had the same thing happen to them: the Screen Time settings in iOS showing some website being up 24/7

It should be noted I don't have Verizon, have never been to verizon.com, and don't even use Safari as my browser. I have -0- idea how in the world this is showing up, and so it automatically makes me assume my phone has been hacked somehow (but try to remind myself that tech is also just wonky).

I set the screen time limit to 1 minute, and it has not showed up again as an app that has even been used. This is on a iPhone XS on iOS 15.4.1

Does anyone have any idea what this means or why this would happen?