So Apple’s bandying about the fact that its App Store now has over 140k applications. That’s pretty impressive. Until you realise that a huge proportion of them – possibly the majority – are nothing more than “content + viewer” bundles which really should be PDFs, ebooks, or iphone-optimised web pages. Or not even that – I thought the iPhone had a proper web browser?
Here’s some examples of the “apps” making up this suspiciously high number:
Japanese Photobooks (this single company has hundreds of “apps” – nothing but picture viewers with embedded pictures)
Romance novels (little better than the above – again, this company has almost a thousand “apps” just by itself)
Go to the “books” category of the App store. There’s 20 per page, and as I write this, there’s 871 pages. That’s over 17,000 “apps” which do nothing but package one or more books. They are technically applications, sure. But on a desktop PC they would be nothing more than jpeg files, PDFs, or – even better – simply web pages.
Why all these useless apps cluttering up the store? I believe it has to do with the iPhone’s lack of a user-accessible filesystem. There’s no way for a user to, say, save a PDF of a book (or 100 books) he wants to look at on the device, and then use one app to read them all. Instead, users are reduced to the highly inefficient workaround of simply saving one app per item of content they wish to access.
So, just a couple of examples above and I’ve already cut close to 20,000 “content-only apps” off the claimed 140,000. But there’s many, many more. Have a look in “music” – plenty of filler in there too. Check out “Justin Timberlake lyrics” – the app. That developer has spammed the store with over 120 nonsense apps just like that, mostly over the course of one or two days.
Check out “reference”. Thousands more there.
The fact that you need to make and release an application to load content of any kind onto your iPhone is not a strength of the platform, it’s a weakness, IMO.