The IB Times just posted an article suggesting that iOS6 will be released before the iPhone 5 – this is not impossible as the timelines have been messed up a little bit by the late launch of the iPhone 4S but I do take issue with one of their predictions.

App Store Shopping Cart

Every time you finish buying a new app from the App Store on your iDevice, iOS gets you back to the home screen. You have to visit App Store again in case you want another app to purchase.

If a feature like an App Store shopping cart is added to iOS 6, the user would be able to purchase several applications and download them at the same time.

While I whole-heartedly agree that the current mechanism of finding an App, buying it, returning to the homescreen and then having to re-enter the store is really quite poor, the answer to this is definitely not an App ‘Shopping Cart’ – at least I, as a developer on the store, hope not.

A large majority of purchases on the Store are impulse-purchases, that if given multiple steps (and multiple opportunities to question whether it’s a must-have or a want-to-have), users may abandon their shopping carts. I would predict a pretty solid 20-30% drop in sales the day that feature launched.

So, what to do instead? Just do what the Store does when you redeem a promo code… it silently downloads the App to the home screen while you remain in the App Store. Perfect.