Most iPhone applications gathering dust | Hacker News Reader

Most iPhone applications gathering dust

news.cnet.com

Once again it's worth clarifying the stats driving this article only reflect FREE apps. I really wish someone would print a more fact-driven, less-sensationalized article on the AppStore. I know I'm expecting WAYYY to much our of popular media, but I can still hope can't I? :)

I get the impression most companies trying to make a business around app's are actually in a "purgatory", experiencing enough success to keep them interested but not enough to write a letter home from a resort in Tahiti. I suspect 80% of the companies in this position will die off or become very small 'part time' gigs in the next 6-12 months, the existing 20% will benefit from a maturing product (a barrier to new competitors)... hopefully they'll see fiscal rewards for their time, energy, and risk as Apple fixes the AppStore economy. Lots of developer churn nonetheless...

I look at the Top 100 sales charts for iTunes religiously, it's saddening to see a lot of the crap that overshadows the premium apps. The 24hour volume-driven charts discourages educated and affluent shoppers who would pay $4.99-9.99 for a quality app, while attracting gum-stand development and crap novelty. And search sucks.

This has been stated time and time again yet Apple seems to not care — not because they aren't doing, but because they aren't responding to dev concerns. I imagine this type of application-churn is fiscally rewarding and so Apple currently lacks any real incentive to do otherwise.

I was looking at Skype's developer zone and something similar seems to happen there: like Apple, their documentation is well done and clear and they seem to really make sure all the info is there to build some plug-ins and stuff like that around Skype.

But if you look at the "Extras" section (the equivalent of the App Store), almost all of them have a rating of 3 out of 5 with thousands of votes for only hundreds of downloads and rarely more than 5 comments. It just doesn't make any sense and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to find the good ones.

Apple is doing a little bit better on the ratings side but still, there have been many complaints about how difficult it is to get out of the pack for a developer and nothing seems to be done.

It's too bad to make the whole development easy but not making the last step as polished as the rest.

One thing too is that it's bad for the developers who are trying to have their work recognized but it's also bad for customers who don't really care so much for the one-shot apps.

Not that surprising. Most popular iPhone apps are built (and priced) to be treated like junk food.

That's a really great analogy. Additionally, all the press seems to think that everyone who writes an iPhone application will become the next McDonalds.

A serious case of selection bias by the media...

Just because I don't use my Wok every day, doesn't mean it's not useful to me.

What we need are apps that plug into commonly-used programs. An example of what I'm talking about is Google Talk: it's a chat program, and I use it from time to time, but I never run it. It just happens to be there when I have Gmail open, so if I should need to send an instant message to someone, I can just do it. If I had to remember to fire up a separate app just for that, I probably wouldn't bother.

Or look at Zotero: it's a program for managing bibliographies, for filing away papers and notes when you're doing research online. It also happens to be a Firefox plugin. When I have a research paper open in my browser, I can just click an unobtrusive icon to save the citation for later. The extra burden of opening a separate app just isn't there.

I'm sure there's money to be made from this idea.

I know from my personal usage this to be true for most of my application. There are a couple I use repeatedly, (Units) I guess that's the one only one.

If it wasn't for extended bathroom breaks or my kids are using my phone when we go out to eat, my applications wouldn't get used at all. Less than a year ago there weren't any apps and the phone sold just fine and was just as useful.

How is this data being collected? (I looked at the "pinch media" website, and it looks like they are some sort of ad network. So I doubt their analytics cover the apps that don't request ads from their servers, making this data very close to useless.)

They also provide tracking service completely independent of the ads. http://www.pinchmedia.com/developers/

So while it doesn't cover all apps in the app store, it covers more than just apps that use their advertising platform.

I think the scary thing is that in the almost-always-network-on world of the iPhone - per-user app tracking (albeit aggregated anonymously) is so easy to integrate that most users don't know it exists (PinchMedia's SDK).

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