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 :-)
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 :-)
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