Is Apple iPhone losing its app advantage?

Thursday, Jan. 14 2010 | Author: Andy

When Apple opened up the iPhone to developers and launched the App Store, it was a wake up call, and set a benchmark for other mobile phone manufacturers to aspire to.

Yes, it’s a much more closed system than the likes of Android, for example, but an iPhone user’s experience of purchasing apps via iTunes, either from the phone or on a Mac or PC, has still been much better than many other systems.

What has let the side down is the quality of apps available in the Store, made worse by the sheer quantity of them.

New analysis from the Facebook mobile app store Mplayit has found that consumers don’t really care how many apps a certain platform has, but what they are and whether they’ll fulfil a certain need.

‘How many apps?’ is the wrong question,” said Michael Powers, CEO and founder of Mplayit. “People just want to get the job done. It doesn’t matter if there are 50 different to-do list apps on iPhone, because Android or BlackBerry just need a couple of good ones to make consumers happy.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, apps that can work across various platforms tended to do particularly well in the popularity stakes, with top apps including Evernote (Lists and Notes category) and Pandora Radio (music category).

mPlay it, which uses Facebook to display a range of applications available on each smartphone platform, is aiming at those people who may wish to switch mobile platform without giving up their favourite types of application.

It seems many consumers just want to do a few things on their phone, and to do them well. Sure, us geeks probably tend to examine every aspect of a phone and its software, but the masses maybe care rather less.

Apple may try to convince the general population that there’s an app for just about anything on the iPhone, but most just aren’t after that many.

The handset itself is still pretty important. I’ve used similar apps on an iPhone and a BlackBerry, and let me tell you the BB experience was horrendous. That’s why manufacturers need to ensure their hardware and interface is as good as it can be so users get a good app experience.

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Category: Apple
Tags: app, App Store, Apple, Applications, cellphone, iPhone, mobile, usability

3 Responses for "Is Apple iPhone losing its app advantage?"

Martin Hill

January 15th, 2010 at 00:10
1

One of the major reasons that Windows has been so successful is the large number of programs available for the platform. If you want to get a computer that has by far the most games, most specialist medical, scientific, engineering, financial or entertainment programs etc, you get a Windows PC (or these days, a Mac running Windows).

The same applies to the iPhone. Android’s game section and so many specialist niches are barren in comparison to the iPhone App Store. With major developers like Gameloft deserting Android because they make 400x as much revenue on the iPhone platform, all other app platforms are at a significant disadvantage.

The most important segment for consumers – games – tells the story in black and white. Top tier games as well as so many fantastic new ideas from small devs are missing in action on Android, Palm, RIM, Symbian and WinMo.

Quality is the other issue and comparison after comparison has demonstrated that the quality of Android apps is severely lacking compared to iPhone Apps. Twitter clients are a prime example with no Android Twitter app being as good as any of the top 5 Twitter apps on the iPhone.

With 75 million iPhone OS devices out there, 133,000 apps, 3 billion downloads, 100 million active credit cards, 30,000 developers and the sister iTunes music, movie, TV Show store along with iTunes U and hundreds of thousands of podcast feeds, the iPhone ecosystem is Godzilla to the Bambi app stores of Android, RIM, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

The only ones trying to tell everyone that the overwhelming size and activity on the iTunes App Store doesn’t matter are those with a vested interest in the other platforms. Note that Mplayit’s survey is self-selected from users of their own app store – of course they would say it doesn’t matter – their financial survival depends on people believing that.

Of course size matters. Duh. :-)

-Mart
Darwin

January 15th, 2010 at 04:50
2

Saying the app store and number of apps availabe isn’t that important means you are entirely clueless about one of the major factors behind the iPhones success.
Neil Anderson

January 15th, 2010 at 05:19
3

‘How many apps?’ is the wrong question,” said Michael Powers, CEO and founder of Mplayit. “People just want to get the job done. It doesn’t matter if there are 50 different to-do list apps on iPhone, because Android or BlackBerry just need a couple of good ones to make consumers happy.”

Ha ha. That’s exactly what we’ve been saying about Mac apps all these years!