

Most iPhone applications gathering dust - senthil_rajasek
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10168694-37.html

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pxlpshr
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.

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Timothee
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.

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ja2ke
Not that surprising. Most popular iPhone apps are built (and priced) to be
treated like junk food.

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irrelative
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...

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

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sketerpot
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.

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bbuffone
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.

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jrockway
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.)

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anatoli
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.

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wallflower
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).

