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Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

> Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already.

I had to double-take to see if this was really a statement from Apple... It was.

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And apple calls itself an innovative company. They say no more lightbulb apps forgetting it took Edison 5000 filaments to find the best one.

Naturally if you trust one dev for one job, and not to ruin the app, you will likely trust them for another, category saturation be damned. I don't see much benefit for users when the manufacturer dictates what developers are not to build for users based on some archaic first in best dressed system from 2008.

In many cases it would make sense, but flashlight apps? They're literally an on-off switch for a single system resource. There's nothing that you can add to them to improve the experience.

How about a timer that switches the "flashlight" off after a configurable period of time? :-)

Or an app that switches on flashlight based on ambient light sensor or phone movement gestures using gyroscope

Using the screen as a light

Dimming the screen

Different colors on the screen

Calculation of how long light will last

SOS signaling

Strobe setting

Light in response to some kind of input, like audio or camera

Blinking light with adjustable frequency

Yeah, there's probably more features that could be put into a flashlight app.

Yes, those are features you could add to a flashlight app, and you'd likely concentrate on those features instead. I would argue that each of those is very different than a flashlight app which turns the camera light on/off and would be unlikely to be even called a "flashlight app".

There's tons of flashlight apps which only do the on/off switch and the only differentiation is how they try to get money off of you or what data they want to steal.

It took quite some time to find one that wasn’t an enormous bloated mess filled with ads.

These days they’re not necessary anymore but this one was a great one:

https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/flashlight-by-rik/id384021568?...

Exactly. This is my problem with most apps. They are ad-ridden craps. It took me some time to find a music player that looks the way I want it to, support what I want it to, and not display ads or pause music to play ads.

I had to install my flashlight app outside of the playstore walled garden as it wasn't approved yet. It was a shakelight that used heavy background processing and went against google's background task shakedown. The app gave those of us without it the Motorollo detection chip functionality at the expense of battery. And there is still room to improve. It needs sunset+X hours and off-if-left-on-for-too-long feature to save even more background battery life. The ways innovation happens is not predictable or else it wouldn't be innovation.

Edison did not test 5,000 filaments himself, and a team of his size would always get their app through review.

You're not helping

Before Apple added the flashlight feature into their OS, flashlight apps were flooding the store. IIRC, this is the exact text they added at that time

On Android, it's guitar tuners.

My MIL still uses a flashlight app on her iPhone, because she doesn’t know the difference between a feature and an app, and because each time she gets a new phone all her apps are ported over. Whenever she turns on her flashlight a huge ad blazes across the screen (and the screen doesn’t seem to turn off), and I keep meaning to tell her she doesn’t need that app.

Introduce her to the built-in flashlight (“It’s right on your lock screen and a long press on the symbol turns on the flashlight”) and remove the third-party app.

Maybe you can introduce it to her for me.

Apple hired/acquired the developer of one of the top flashlight apps in in the app store.

Proposal: When a new app is submitted in a saturated category, poll the oldest N apps for usage and developer activity. If one of them is below a threshold of relevance then mark it for removal and allow the new app to replace it.

This is a really good idea -- I have apps in the store that I haven't touched in 5 years that still get downloads but I have no idea if the app even works any more and I don't care to check

Do people a favor and remove the listing for them.

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