OK, so maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. Or maybe it was the chocolate cake that my daughter upended onto the kitchen carpet. Or maybe it was the frustration of wading through another couple of hundred applications, new in the iPhone App Store since yesterday. Either way, it’s been a bad day.
Of the 20,000 applications in the store, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that only around two to three hundred are actually any good at all. Add the same number again which are so niche that only a dozen people across the world might want them and you are left with over 19,000 apps which are completely and utterly pointless. Or rubbish. Or both.
But one app caught my eye today: Nothing.
That’s right, an application which does nothing whatsoever. Here’s the blurb.
How is it that Apple let so much rubbish get through their approval process? How is it fair that a talented developer can put hundreds of man hours into a slick app and have it disappear amongst trash like this? Or amongst 100 different bodily noise simulators? Is there a guy at Apple who sits there and loads up each submission? What must have gone through his mind when he got the submission for ‘Nothing’? “Yep, another valid iPhone application, lots of people will enjoy this….” Gah, I despair.
If I were in charge in Apple’s App Store team, I would enforce a certain minimum quality. Yes, it might end up being partly subjective, and would thus attract some criticism, but wouldn’t the end result, of having 1000 or so apps to choose from rather than 1000 apps to find among 20,000 bits of digital litter, be far, far preferable?
It makes my blood boil. And I’ve still got the kitchen carpet to shampoo….