One Appstore developer's tale--Appcubby

David Barnard, the Head Honcho over at Appcubby, has put together a great article on his firm's experiences with marketing and income as a small developer on the Appstore. Apart from being fascinating, it's also a fine example of the sort of openness and honesty that characterises, or ought to characterise 'Web two point oh'. Check it out here.

How my old Windows phone still beats my iPhone

Don't get me wrong. I love so many things about my iPhone, but I am not a deluded fanboy that believes it's perfect in every way, and the ways it falls short are all part of Apple's master plan for global domination. I freely admit that there are many areas in which the iPhone pales behind Windows and Blackberry offerings. Indeed, my iPhone journey is still trails my former Windows Mobile experience on a Samsung Blackjack smartphone in several areas:

• The native iPhone Calendar and Contacts functions trail 3rd party apps on Windows smartphones by a large margin, and we have no built in To Do functionality at all. Sure the windows native calendar was equally primitive, but we had been spoilt by apps such as Pocket Informant, AgendaFusion and AgendaOne, that had powerful Calendar, To Do and Contact management equal to or better than desktop apps
• There's still no true Microsoft Office compatibility on the iPhone. The third party app Documents to Go had provided the ability to view, edit and even creat office docs on the smartphone for years
• Powerful email fucntionality was at hand through the application Flexmail. I still don't believe it was a match for the Blackberry, but it was eons ahead of the basic mail apps built into Windows Mobile or the iPhone
  
• On the Windows phone I could customise my start screen with applications such as SBSH's Facade, in order to have all my Calendar and ToDos display on the home screen, without having to dig to find out the rudimentary things I needed to know for the day
  
• Profiles let me set volume, ringtone, and system characteristics quickly, a basic function of phones on other platforms for years. Instead I know have to dig into settings every time I get in and out of the car to adjust brightness, screen locking, etc. A veritable pain
• Windows phones have file systems that can be accessed, like any computer should have. Another "Doh" to Apple there
• On my Windows Mobile phone I could sensibly organise my apps into folders on the home screen for ease of access. On my iPhone I have 8.5 screens of icons which can't be put in folders, and life just isn't long enough to organise anything beyond screen 2. Apple's thinking here might have seemed good at the time, but that was before the AppStore encouraged us to run 150 different apps
  
• My Windows smartphone could do true multitasking. I could run Palringo in the background and be alerted in real time to incoming messages. I could keep my GPS running all the time or have a web page load in the background. I can't do these things on my newer, faster, more advanced iPhone.
• To be a serious road warrior, you need to be able to type without restriction. That's why I own a wonderful Think Outside Bluetooth Folding Keyboard. Only it won't work with the iPhone. Neither will my stabd alone BT GPS unit, because Apple chose to give us crippled Bluetooth. Can I say "Doh" again?
  

The good news is, solutions to at least some of these functions are coming, they're just taking their time. PocketInformant is coming to iPhone, and the developers, though they seem to have been pushing the delivery date back for some time, are hoping to deliver before MacWorld in early Jan. Documents to Go is also under development for the iPhone and I anticipate will give excellent MS Office support if my Windows smartphone experience was anything to go by.

As for customising your start start screen to dpsplay agenda items, that is already possible through a third party app on the iPhone, but only if you jailbreak. That's close to a killer functionality for me, and if such an app isn't mooted soon through Apple-approved channels, I will probably go down the jailbreaking path as well.

As for Profiles, I have not heard of anyone working on this functionality. Does anyone know of a solution in the wings?

So many people complain about the absence of Copy&Paste on the iPhone, as if that's earth shattering functionality. It would be nice, but it is far less important that multi-tasking, a file system, folders for organising icons, a decent Bluetooth implementation and profiles. If Apple would address these issues, or allow 3rd party developers to do so, then maybe the world's leading smartphone would be as smart as those dumbass Windows smarphones have been for years.

10,000 apps. 9,000 are crap! It's the crap app rap!

The iphonosphere is has been sizzling with celebration over the fact that the Appstore has reached 10,000. I don't want to be Scrooge at Christmas time, but frankly, what's to celebrate? If there were 10,000 intelligent, well-tested and useful applications, that might be something to write home about, but the vast majority of the programs available are rubbish, and not worth paying even 99 cents for (or $1.19 here in Australia).

And no, I am not being so petty as to classify Zippo Lighter or Lightsaber as useless--these are clearly applications that belong on every iPhone. I refer instead to the myriad of half-baked shopping list applications, to do lists, wikipedia apps, time managers, iPhone interfaces to other websites that don't need them, weak games, Christmas trivia, the list goes on. Of course, there are good apps in almost every category, but the vast number of mediocre apps gives the Appstore a very low signal to noise ratio, and makes it hard to find the apps worth having.

This situation will only get worse, of course. If there are two or three apps worth looking at and only one worth keeping for every 10 uploaded (as I would contest) the noise levels are rising interminably day after day. Does Apple have a mechanism for dealing with the chaos yet to come? I doubt it.

Of course, more and more professional developers are seeing the potential of the iPhone so we can expect continued growth of quality merchandise, but will that be drowned out by the noise of the crap apps?

What do you think? Is this a problem of my own imagining? Will the Appstore market self-regulate and get rid of the crap apps, or do they need to be liberated into a separate store or even into a world not regulated by Apple? Should the iPhone world create a model similar to free/shareware that can be distributed through sites such as Handango with the Appstore just focused on more commercial offerings? I look forward to your comments (though I've been blogging for long enough not to hold my breath in anticipation :-)

Forget Android and Storm. Here's the real iPhone killer!

Oh dear, my shiny new iPhone is about to be knocked off its perch as the smartest smartphone. This isn't out yet, but I want one!



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