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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, do we really need so many apps? Yesterday I prepared the new phone (Galaxy Nexus) for my mum. I don't think I installed more than 7 apps from the market: Chrome browser, Google Sky Map, Rail navigator (for German railway tickets), Google Authenticator, Kindle reader, Öffi (public transport for a lot of cities), Google Goggles.

Did I miss anything important? Honest question - I'd like to prepare the phone as good as possible, it is her first smartphone. Perhaps some kind of news reader, but personally I don't use them, wouldn't know what news sources to set up.

"We need 1000s of apps" is just something Apple marketing has installed in our brains.

If Windows 8 comes with a decent browser, calendar and email app, they are good to go.

As for desktop PCs - I think only few people are still interested in creating desktop apps? Not counting games.

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Individuals don't need that many apps. But since individuals need different sets, we need a large total. Your Mum needs rail navigator for German railway tickets. I need the Dublin Bus app. If you're exhibiting at the Munich Design Conference, you might need their useless lanyard scanning app.

Sometimes users need specific apps that are otherwise interchangeable. Kindle, for Kindle owners. Kobo For Kobo Owners. Gmail for Gmail people. Viber for friends of viber users. Whatsapp. LotusMessenger. Skype. Expensify for people who use expensify. You don't want your Mum to have to tell her friends to use Skype instead of LotusMessenger because her tablet doesn't have LotusMessenger, especially if she already uses it on her laptop or phone.

Raw numbers implicitly assume that the ratio of crap/important is the same across platforms. You could use the number of apps X each app's userbase to get the idea. The platforms are probably look more level if you look at numbers like that.

It's more critical now that people already have smartphones and they'll probably want the 5-10 apps they use to work on whatever tablet they buy.

Skype is actually an idea, wonder if I can install it without messing up the whole experience :-/

Öffi also does Dublin, btw (in beta, though).

You said yourself that the lanyrd app is useless (haven't tried it).

I get your point, but I still wonder how many of those apps are really necessary.

I made up the Munich Design Conference, so their app is doubly useless :)

I'm sure there is a large percentage of apps that are completely useless or interchangeable for most users. But, at 2000 there are probably plenty of useful (to some people) apps missing where the appstore has dozens.

The app the made me get apps was a chess clock.

Maybe it's just me, but the Skype "upgrades" for Android and Linux seems to have gotten progressively worse. Whereas they both used to run smoothly for years, the Linux version now doesn't recognize my webcam (on hardware it had no problems with before, and with no OS upgrad in between) and the Android version stutters and randomly garbles video...

I'm actively looking for better alternatives now. Barring that I'll have to hunt down older versions of Skype..

Agreed on all points. I haven't allowed Skype to update itself in years. You can download an older version of their desktop app for yourself here. if that helps: http://www.oldversion.com/Skype.html

What you don't have that I would miss

- Screen Filter

- Flipboard

- games/books/drawing apps/learning apps for your kids

- games for yourself

- music apps: cbc music, rdio & tunein radio for me

- off line reader: pocket or similar

- weather app

- justpictures. A flickr/picasa/facebook/many more picture viewing app. Provides notifications when people have uploaded new pictures, which is its killer feature.

- mx player

- aldiko/fbreader for reading books outside of the kindle walled garden

- atm locater app

- qrcode scanner, which is mostly used for installing apps from outside the store

- good calculator (droid48 for me)

- connectbot (ssh)

- good alarm app (double twist for me)

- skype, voip app (I use Bria)

- shared grocery lists: our groceries. indispensable.

- todo app (i use got to do)

gimmicky apps that are worth installing if you have lots of room: (granted, I paid 10cents for much of these)

- star chart

- sound hound or similar

- flight track

- camera app a la instagram (camera zoom fx, paper camera)

And that's just what's on my front screen. There are more, but most could be easily uninstalled.

p.s. how do you format lists on HN?

Thanks, I will check some of them out.

I admit the one thing I miss is good games for my kid (toddler age). It seems most serious publishers tried the iPad first for such things, Android is lacking behind.

Not a concern for my mum atm, though.

Discovery of apps is actually a real problem for me. I don't have the time to follow app review blogs.

I think Google Goggles also does QR Codes. Not sure if Connect is also an offline reader? I ended up being too lazy to mark articles for later reading, so I just keep some ebooks on the phone for boring situations without internet.

You missed farting app

"A lot of software developers are seduced by the old '80/20' rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

"Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features."

-- Joel Spolsky http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

Hm, I don't quite buy it. Reducing features is still a good idea. Complicated software creates headaches for everyone.

Otherwise by that logic every software should tend towards infinite feature count.

I think in general every supported app does trend toward infinite feature count.

> "Did I miss anything important?" Yes. These problems apply to Windows on the desktop as well.

And Windows exists as the 800 lb gorilla on the desktop for two big reasons:

1. massive numbers of legacy enterprise apps with mind-boggling levels of customization. (e.g. plugins, forms, scripts, macros, etc)

2. games

Making life easy for developers in updating/supporting those apps on new versions of Windows has been a huge part of maintaining their dominance. If Microsoft makes an upgrade even nearly as difficult as porting to a brand new platform, they're making a huge gamble that developers won't hedge toward cross-platform solutions and web apps.

Which, while great for consumers, would be disastrous for Microsoft.

Sure, but I think people are getting tired of that kind of lock in, and it seems difficult to recreate. Granted, most iPhone users are probably tied to the platform for life because they spent 100s of dollars on apps already. Then again, most of them probably aren't as essential as MS Office.

Also I think the professional companies will simply hire people to port their apps to every platform, no matter how painful it is. Some indie games might be missed, but even then - if they are successful, they probably make enough money to pay for a port.

iCloud is even bigger lock-in. Once you have two years worth of documents there, you will never be able to leave the Apple universe

> To be honest, do we really need so many apps?

Absolutely not, and I don't get the fascination with app number counts. I often hear people say "I got a new phone, what apps should I get?" Well, what problem do you need to solve? "Oh I just want more apps" is what they usually say. Then everyone wonders why their battery only lasts 7 hours.

I haven't looked in the Windows 8 store, but as long as it's not 2000 complete garbage apps like the pages and pages of ones you sift through on Play, I don't see the issue.

I used to think that but I switched to WP7, found the two apps I needed the most (Campfire client and a decent bus timetable app) weren't available (or rather there were a couple of each, but they were awful) - and so switched back to iPhone.

How many other people want a Campfire client on WP? Maybe a few thousand. For how many people is the lack of a decent one a deal-breaker? Maybe in the tens. But for me, it's a deal-breaker. Now swap Campfire for some other app ...

And that's why the breadth of the App Store is important.

The issue is that if they only have 2,000 apps, how likely are they to have the random app that solves the specific problem I want solved. The more apps they have the (generally) more likely they are to have the 1 I want.

Well, the problem is that beside the most popular apps 'used by everyone' there are niche apps, used by just a bunch of people. And these make the difference.

Classic example of 80/20 rule.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking the whole time I was reading this article. "Only" 2000 apps? I'd rather have 200 well-designed and useful apps over 20,000 useless spam-ware ones any day of the week.

I've owned an Android device for a year or two and I can say that I have under 30 apps installed on the thing from the app store (and probably 5 of those are superfluous, I'm just too lazy to get rid of them). Yet, it has all the functionality I require. As nice as it is to have thousands upon thousands to choose from, honestly I think fewer can be better in some cases, especially from a consumer's perspective: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/your-money/27shortcuts.htm... Based on that article (I know it's NYT but it cites a good source or two), fewer apps might even result in more purchases overall.

No platform can survive without 300 different "Fart button" apps!

How many of your 30 apps do you think make the cut for 2,000 most popular apps.

> do we really need so many apps?

Said every Mac user in the 90s (myself included).

I suppose what was missing for Macs was games (still kind of the case).

I know a lot of people who don't play games on their phones.

Games are still generally missing on Macs relative to PCs. It's also increasingly irrelevant given how much game playing has shifted to consoles and mobile. (Arguably, this--along with the iPod/iPhone/iPad halo effect--has helped fuel the Mac's gain in share. Breadth of desktop apps doen't matter as much as it used to.)

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