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….
I completely agree to your reaction. It obvious the App Store is too big a hit to be effectively managed. I read a piece today about some developers hiring people to write positive reviews.
Truth is, when you have something really popular, its not easy to come with a way to protect it from all those who just want to make a money the immoral way or take a ride with the hype.
I give Apple credit for giving everyone a chance. After all, who is a better judge of a good piece of software – some guy at apple or 30+ million users.
Exposing stuff like that helps. Apple seams to be focused too much on the big picture to notice stuff like that, or do they? I think there is another business out there stacked with millions pieces of software for people to buy. Its called iTunes and it sell songs. They have free songs too.
But how do you find a good song among the millions of songs you will probably don’t like. You look for composers, bands. There are celebrity playlists and recommendations. Other ways not seen in the App Store….for now!
The problem with the App store if you ask me is not that Apple is allowing garbage in. It’s that they are falling behind with introducing ways for us to find the good stuff. Ways you have in iTunes. But Apple said it themselves. This thing is growing faster than everybody expected. We have to give them more time to get it right.
Its funny. When the SDK was announced, the first one, everybody was concerned with the many types of restrictions there were. And now, it seams there are not enough.
I think the quality does come on top even now. I think the bad developers will lose interest in the platform eventually and the good ones will come up with a ever better Unit Converter
I completely disagree.
You are coming from a ’scarcity’ mindset, where everything has a cost. You’re assuming that for every Fart app there is a decent Spreadsheet app that goes unnoticed.
It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if there was a £50,000 app called ‘Home Screen’ that simply returned you to your home screen. Why? Because no one is forcing me to buy it, or even look at it for that matter!
Not everything in life has to have a purpose or some *higher* value attached to it.
Perhaps it’s a trend from Apple this week – they featured John Cage’s 4’33” as a free Discovery Download on the US Store. In case you hadn’t heard of it, it’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence…
And I have to agree with James – stick them all up on the App Store, let the customers decide. At least Nothing costs nothing!
Why are steves articles generally complaint based or down on the iphone yet on allaboutsymbian his articles are generally pro nokia. I do wish this site had as bigger following / articles as allaboutsymbian so please steve please warm to the iphone and start pumping articles out here!
@Nick: Oh, I rant enough about Nokia and S60 as well, though Apple are definitely a much easier target at the moment, being so behind in many ways. I suspect things will change quite a bit once the next-gen iPhone, with OS 3.0 onboard, plus A2DP, 5mp auto-focus cam, etc, appears.
“..Or amongst 100 different bodily noise simulators..”
Its funny I remember the outrage when the iFart application wasn’t accepted, now your complaining because it is in! – I thought for a second this was an April the 1st things, but hey …
Seriously, rubbish sinks, good stuff will float and have a QC on the entries would be great as long as it wasn’t one mans view … I want more for less and competition is the way to go …
@Gerry: You have to be kidding me. The outrage wasn’t from my direction. Quality rather than quantity should be an adage for all walks of life. And the Apple App Store is a prime example of what can happen when the adage is ignored. And no, good stuff doesn’t always float – I know of many pro iPhone apps that have never even received a single review because they’ve never made it into the top 25/50 because of the abundance of $0.99 novelties…. 8-(
@Nick
I wish this site had a bigger following too! We’re working on it
Symbian has a mature OS with so much functionality built in that I often wonder how much more it can do. In contrast, Apple started from scratch quite recently with iPhone OS, so it’ll be a while before it has as many features. So there are some things missing. Plus Apple is dealing with running the whole iPhone OS ecosystem, including the App Store, and there will be some teething troubles. I’d really recommend reading John Gruber’s latest feature article “Complex“, on beginning iPhone OS simply, before adding more and more stuff (rather than starting by including absolutely everything).
Matt, thanks for the link. It’s a great article.
It’s interesting to note that resent sucess in OS X share is probably because Apple started simplifying things, making all it’s new software not feature full bit feature nessesary.
@Steve.
I know it wasn’t from you, I just recall the big protest that it wasn’t quite open enough, i.e. if you spend months working on an app and for some reason Apple decides they don’t like it, well it might not get in, suddenly apple relaxed it and any old bodily noise machine was allowed.
Personally I would like it open enough that I can make up my mind what I would like to install on ‘my phone’ there are apps that just apparently aren’t allowed on which would ‘make’ the iphone something else and, as you said above these would fix issues that it has that maybe the 3.0 would update. These include tethering and the awesome “TomTom” which I used to have for my Nokia N95 (or N80 come to think of it) … A combination of A2DP and TomTom would make the perfect in car “computer”…
Review sites such as this one are critical in helping the better stuff float!
Keith, you’ll be pleased to hear that TomTom have already demo’d an iPhone app, and I’ll bet it’s going to be released pretty soon after iPhone OS 3 comes out.
Keith ? – I had heard there was only a licensing issue which stopped it from being released … It is definently something which I would buy!
Gerry – there was only one problem:
Apple wasn’t allowing turn by turn GPS driving apps. Now that they are, there’s no problem for TomTom – they sidestep any map licensing problem by not using Google Maps.
Yes, thats what I heard as well, I wasn’t sure if I believed it at first as it seems an odd thing to restrict…
As for the original thread, I do think the currect store model is good and right, so maybe the solution is to have an editors review within it? for example “Apple give ‘nothing’ 1 star” clearly thats a bit more work though, but as they do get serious cash from the store, maybe it is something they should invest the time in…