The reports of Windows Phone lacking in apps are greatly exaggerated | Hacker News Reader

The reports of Windows Phone lacking in apps are greatly exaggerated

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11 pointsjoshuacc15 comments

I own devices across the 3 major platforms, and have been using a WP7 for a couple of months. The problem with the apps isn't that there isn't enough, its that the isn't enough GOOD ones. Sure there may be equivalents of your iOS and Android apps, but chances are they won't have feature parity, or be as polished as their counterparts. And why would they? Until there is a good market share it's hard for developers to justify anything other than an obligatory WP7 app. Time is better spent elsewhere for now.

WP7 will grow, at present there is no disputing that the app market place is inferior.

I wrote my blog post because I believe, for the apps I use, there are good enough, or better, alternatives. That may not be the case for everybody, but it's sufficient for me.

I have a Windows Phone, but I strongly suspect I'm going to return it tomorrow. Most of the important apps I need are there (excluding Words With Friends, my guilty pleasure) but some of them are horribly broken- Rdio, for one, doesn't even play music I sync to my phone. The maps app is also utterly atrocious.

It's not so much the apps that are missing, but the OS hooks. WP has a super-slick integration of Facebook/Live chat into the Messaging pane- it's how every phone should do it. But I use GChat, and AFAIK there is no hook for another service to add itself to the Messaging pane. Instead I have to make do with a pretty shoddy third-party app.

I don't use much in the way of Google-branded apps, so that category of integration isn't important to me. I know for others, like yourself, it is and I recognize that gap.

Alright, I searched the WP Marketplace for the apps I use most often on my iPhone:

Reeder, Instapaper, Evernote, Highrise, Dropbox, Nebulous, Bento, Pages, Numbers, Delivery Status, Soundhound, Articles, IMDb, WhatTheFont, Roambi, WolframAlpha, Tax Pro, PCalc, Soulver, MailChimp, myPantone, Prizmo, PicTools, Skype, Colloquy, Instacast, TextExpander, OmniFocus, and 1Password.

Out of those 28 apps, only four of them (!) are available in the WP Marketplace: Soundhound, IMDb, 1password, and Evernote (which, according to the reviews, is unstable).

Microsoft's approval process isn't perfect either, I noticed some pretty dodgy apps. For instance, there's an app that uses the Tumblr name but doesn't work (according to the reviews) [1].

Sure, there must be some replacement apps on WP7 for writing, calculation, and editing spreadsheets and databases. But not the apps I like, and which are the result of 3 years testing and learning many different apps.

Oh, and from the article:

"TSN Mobile: On iOS, you can install an app. On Windows Phone, just go to the TSN website and pin it to your start screen. Internet Explorer Mobile is a terrific web browser this way.

CBC News: Again, you don't even need an app. Simply go to CBC News and pin it to your start screen."

That's hilarious. In an article that promises to show that WP Marketplace has more native apps than is widely believed, the author ends up trying to convince us that web apps are better than native apps. In Internet Explorer, no less.

[1] http://www.windowsphone.com/en-CA/apps/37bdda4e-1c03-e011-92...

You're right, you got me. As I'd mentioned in my blog post, these aren't crucial apps to me and so I've been fine to just pin the mobile web version to my phone's start screen. I've since updated the article to include apps that I've previously used and enjoyed: ESPN ScoreCenter, ScoreMobile and Globe & Mail. All solid choices.

And by the way, IE 9 Mobile is pretty darned sweet, as is the desktop version.

This is a pretty weak-sauce blog post to go on about how Windows Phone is actually really good, yet simultaneously posts only iPhone screenshots.

WP7 does not have inbuilt screenshot functionality.

Edit: The spartan design of Metro apps generally doesn't look that impressive in screenshots. The polish is more apparent in both the animations and UI elements (like the panorama view) which don't translate into static screens. This is the reason most WP7 ads feature "screen shots" that look like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wp7_musicvideo.jpg

Maybe there is an app for that?

What else is missing from the phone? Microsoft simply doesn't care enough to provide the polish that Apple is overly neurotic to care about. It just has to be good enough.

Hopefully, Android goes the extra mile. It's getting better minus the crappy browser. Google has the best browser in the world. Why it's not on the phone is beyond me. Over the holidays a couple of my relatives had traded in their Android phones for iPhones. The details really do matter.

> Microsoft simply doesn't care enough to provide the polish that Apple is overly neurotic to care about. It just has to be good enough.

Have you ever used a WP7? It is very well polished. The parent you're replying only mentioned the polish is more clear when there's animations since that's a huge part of the design.

There are plenty of junky iOS apps to prove otherwise. And it's not that Microsoft doesn't care about polish - the default, built-in Windows Phone apps are gorgeous and highly functional - but rather many of the app developers care more about quantity/speed to market rather than attention to detail.

You can fault Windows Phone for the lack of apps but not for the usability of the OS itself. The OS is very polished. Use one for a couple weeks before you make a judgement call.

It is "lacking in apps" because the iphone has more apps, plain an simple. There is nothing that can be done to change this. App count is the CPU score for phones. Users buy iphones because of it and developers make apps for it because of that, cyclic hell. What I don't get is why no manufacture has tried to avoid this arms race. There are a half dozen different ways you could go about this, but _change the discussion_ so it isn't about the total number of items in an app store.

Even Blackberry's AppWorld has a lot of apps these days (or in Blackberrry management speak tonnage), so is BlackBerry lacking in apps greatly exaggerated?

Disclaimer: these thoughts are my own and not my employee.

I think a much better post may have been tell people to check for their apps in the marketplace first because there are a huge number of common apps.

But, they might not have _your_ apps, if your apps include Pandora, Uber Cab, or Bump, for example.

It's like using a text editor with an "emacs keybindings mode" --- it's not inferior if it doesn't have all ~1200 bindings from my default org-mode. It's inferior if it doesn't have the particular subset that I use daily.

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