This is not a rant, it’s a legitimate beef with the numbers Apple is representing. The other night my wife and I were playing with our iPhones and downloading apps. I said to her, “you know, for 10,000 applications, there sure doesn’t seem to be that much to download.
I was having that conversation with a friend at work today and I said, “seriously, search checkers and see how many checkers games come back, I bet it’s at least a half dozen.” I was way off, it was almost 30! To Do resulted in over 20. Wikipedia another 25 and movies was a whopping 50 applications that did nearly the same exact thing. To be fair, a lot of this is the paid vs. free versions of the same application, but let’s dice this a bit.
The average of 50,30,20 and 25 is 25 and to be really generous to Apple, we’ll divide that in half in case ALL of them have free and paid versions, and even round down to be extra nice.. so 12. That whacks 10,000 to about 833.
I am not saying there are only 833 unique applications on the App Store (Nor am I saying there isn’t less) I am just saying that navigating the iTunes store for apps is getting ridiculous. Explain why they have no problem allowing the 30th version of Checkers, but we still haven’t gotten the Nine Inch Nails application that promises to be very unique.
Fuzzy math man, Fuzzy math……
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Finding applications is one thing, and I agree it is a major pain for the most part.
Quibbling about the number of applications is another.
So there are 30 checkers implementations? So what is the issue there then, other than more choice?
The situation is massively worse on Windows for example, and there is not even a central place to look there, you are limited to google and all the spam-crap that gets picked up in your searches.
They ALL have differences, and while the rules of the game are the same in all cases, that is true for every Chess application in existence as well, as well as the basic behavior in every Word processor if you want to go outside games, but that does not mean there are not USEFUL differentiations between every implementation.
I have two different paid Twitter applications on my iPhone. There is not ONE that does everything I want, and I would rather the choice than have to suffer with someone ELSE making the decisions as to which was “best for me”.
If Apple put arbitrary limits on how many of a given type of application can exist they will simply drive developers away.
The same goes for prioritizing application approval in anyway other than first-come first-served.
Counting Lite and Paid versions of the same application as discrete is rather less defensible, since the Lite stuff only exists because Apple does not presently allow a pay-to-upgrade/make a demo a full version model.
Maybe that’ll change with the OS 3.0 in-app purchase model.
The app store in that respect is a failure. It’s a giant mess with apps from every idiot who knows how to handle xCode and Apple just kinda randomly keeps approving the same apps.
I don’t see this fixed anytime soon. I’m sure there are 10000+ entries in the app store. Note, entries. not unique/separate apps. And with the current setup its easy to get that. Yesterday somehow the game Mafia got into a search result and it was listed over 7 times on the first page alone. All different versions rating from a free one to paid ones starting at $.99 up to $14.99. That’s just ridiculous. And in my world doesn’t count as 7 apps. But one.
Apple might differ and call it a success because so many “apps” are available.