Apparently the Apple iPhone app store has been open for a year now. It has not been quite a year since I have been using it, but nearly so. It is not really anything new in itself as most smart phones allowed you to download new applications, but it does present the available applications in a very usable way.
The ease of use (which is something Apple are very good at) is sufficiently good that other smartphone vendors are effectively copying the concept. But that is something that is well known, so lets have a look at some of the warts.
The most obvious problem is that there are so many applications available that it is hard to find anything. Browsing for anything and you will find yourself in an endless list of possibilities. Searching is a little unsophisticated and has one very irritating feature – after searching for something, getting a list of applications, you will obviously touch an application to get a closer look at one of the applications. The search then changes what you searched for to the application name! This makes it very difficult to compare applications.
Some observers have criticised the number of applications by saying that they only select a small number – perhaps 4 or 5 that they use on a daily basis. They imply that all those “excess” applications are a waste of space because they do not use them. However they all overlook one thing – everybody’s list of 5 “daily” applications is likely to be different!
Besides which there are applications you load “just in case”. For instance I have “Vicinity” not because I need to know where the coffee shops are where I live or where I work. But because I am sometimes away from home and will need that information. Similarly I have an ssh-capable terminal client installed, because it may be useful in an emergency.
Apart from improving the search function, one other thing that would improve the app store is some method for allowing reviews of applications to be viewed. The easiest way to pick the best application out of a category of similar applications is to resort to what somebody else has discovered. Add a tab for reviews, and allow organisations to publish their reviews to the app store.
But more serious is Apple’s draconian policies on what applications get into the store. I am not talking about “adult content” here (although those who wish such, should be allowed it) but rather more ordinary applications. Applications seem to get rejected for seemingly arbitrary reasons even though very similar ones get allowed through.
That gets more than a little irritating when Apple releases an update to the operating system that breaks certain applications, and then refuses to allow an update to that application to be released. For an example, see here.