There’s no doubting the huge number and variety of apps available through the itunes store for the iphone and ipod touch. In fact Apple just announced that the store has exceeded 100,000 apps.
However, 99.99% of these apps are just trash. What’s left of the apps available mainly consists of some games and apps simply not required on another smartphone because they come pre-installed.
Appsfire as a company that tracks the number of installed and actively used applications on the iphone has suggested that pretty much no one uses anything more than the top thousand or so applications on the iphone. Their argument is that no one can find the good applications. In reality it’s because most of them are useless.
iphone apps can be broken down into a number of types:
The junk or toy app
This segment is by far the largest on the iphone as the barrier to entry is low and it seems you don’t need to be original. The torch, lighter, fart, lantern, buzzer, flute, piano, drum etc etc apps. There’s millions of them and all they do is entertain the purchaser for about 2 seconds until they’re left to rot. Never to be launched again.
The copy cat apps
Most of these also belong in the junk application section as developers try to emulate the success of some of the more useless apps out there. A quick search for fart on itunes yieled 400 apps. The only reason I found 400 was because that’s the limit for the number of results itunes will return.
Web shortcut “apps”
These apps just ain’t apps. They just install an icon that when tapped either fires up the web browser or pretends to be an app but really just contains an embedded web browser.
Itunes is chockers with these as every digital media publisher and blogger jumped on the iphone bandwagon. Although there’s no clear numbers on exactly how many of these there
are, it’s fairly clear that every man and his dog has got one. My guess is that there are 20,000+ shortcut apps.
News Readers
These are essentially RSS readers but customised for a site. These are usually produced from app templates in their hundreds. They are completely useless and could all be replaced by one RSS reader. At last count there were 2000 of these in the news category on the app store.
Workaround apps
This category requires some explaining. You see Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to create a great browsing experience with Safari but they forgot to include a few features that web browsers have. Like Flash and Java – Two key parts of the browser experience. Without them many of the websites you use day to day are useless. For example youtube. This is why Apple had to write a youtube app. This is also the reason why many of your favourite sites also had to write an app. I’m not dismissing the value of these apps to an iphone user but most non-iphone smart phone users simply don’t need
them as the browser will happily load third party plugins. This area is very hard to judge but there’s no doubt there’s hundreds of them.
The useful apps
When you strip away the junk this is what you’re left with. As a “smartphone” the iphone comes pretty bare so the first thing a new owner needs to do is fire up the app store and try to track down the basic apps that make a smartphone a smartphone.
When someone next tells you the iphone is so cool because it has over 100k apps don’t let the numbers cloud your judgement. They’re nothing but junk.
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