Having poked around a bit in the iPhone App Store, I have some news to report. I was excited at first, imagining all sorts of apps that will make my phone that much more a piece of my daily life, and becoming even more of my outboard brain than it already is.
Almost 800 applications so far, of which i think about 200 of them are freaking E-books… But aside from that, the astounding amount of utter shit is enough to make the party feel more like a car crash. It’s exciting to see a possibility, a product that might actually make your day, and then blamo, it sucks.
There are the infinite number of Flashlight apps, some free, some not so much. Seriously, the pseudo-code is this:
display(whitejpgorgif)
set screenbrightness=100%
Yet, some of those apps even fail at that…
The interfaces are painful on some, like the the photo above, though there are even worse ones. Many apps are not ready for primetime, crashing constantly, though the apple release methodology may be getting in the way of updates from what I understand.
Sorting of the store is bizarre at best, though some of the reasons are known, such as putting spaces in front of your app name.
One glaring problem is the lack of return policy. The reviews of these apps can be easily gamed I sure, so in the end they really have little to no value. It would seem smart to offer a refund policy of even a couple of hours, like 24 or 6 even, so that you can download the multitude of suck, and decide if you want it or not. However, that would of course lower the bottom line, which is certainly not Apple’s normal M.O.
There are some gems in there, and many very user specific apps that one person might find brilliant, and others might find meh. And quite a bit of competition, which of course is great for weeding out the trash, and rising the cream to the top. An example will be the fight between the assorted web radio apps, AOL radio, Last.fm and Pandora. Though they do tend to cater to different user types, 1 will end up coming out the winner, which will just push the other two to be better.
All in all, the app store is off to rocky start I think, but there is some great potential there. The one thing it did for me is to encourage me to install the SDK onto my extra Mac, and start tinkering. I have identified a few apps that don’t exist, but should. Simple ones, but still, they should be there yet they are missing. So we will see, maybe I can be part of the wave of less-suck.
SWEET JESUS! It