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Apps, Apps, Apps

A lot of smartphone talk these days seems to center around apps – the iPhone is the best phone because it has the largest app store, the N9 is dead in the water because it doesn’t have many apps yet, BlackBerry is a waste of time because it has a small app store, and so on. But how important are apps really? Or, more to the point, is such a plethora of apps really necessary?

The average number of apps the average user installs is between seven and nine. Of these, the basics typically include Facebook, Twitter and a weather app. Some people have others either for work or pleasure, but certainly no one is installing hundreds and hundreds.  All About Symbian article explains, most of the top ten apps installed on the iPhone are natively included in Symbian phones, so the need for that app on Nokia phones evaporates. Similarly, the Nokia N900 has no Skype app, because Skype is fully integrated into the phone so users can get contacts and make and receive calls and IMs without an app. Conversely, the iPhone is extremely limited in its features straight out of the box and so is much more reliant on developers to fill those gaps.

Taking a look through the app store, though, what we see is that of the hundreds of thousands of apps, many are just free crap that are of no use nor interest to most people. There is no shortage of fart or joke apps, many apps are duplicated, others are wallpapers and themes and others are just mobile browsing bookmarks like the Guardian app. In other words, there is a huge number of possible apps to install but it is very much the minority that is worth installing.

Going back to the N900, it doesn’t need mobile bookmarks because it has the option to save a bookmark to any of the multiple desktops. Themes can be downloaded from the native repositories and wallpapers can be downloaded from any website and installed easily thanks to the fact that no proprietary software like iTunes is required to install them.

In any case, apps are largely there to allow a phone to do what it can’t do natively. Therefore, the real question of a device’s status should not be the number of apps it allows, but the number of apps it needs. In other words, the more a device can do by itself, the less the user needs to scroll through endless lists of apps to find something they want to do. Windows Phone 7 negates the need to download any Office software because it already comes bundled in. The Nokia N8 doesn’t need any photo or camera software downloaded because it’s pre-installed and the N9 will be landing with native Twitter, Facebook and RSS clients, so they will not need to be downloaded either.

Moreover, aside from a handful of apps useful to specific people based on their work or lifestyle, it’s fair to say most users spend most of their phone time on social media of some kind, web browsing, the camera, and calls and texts. If a phone can do all those things immediately then that will be more convenient for the user.

When talking about phones and app stores there seems to be a heavy emphasis on quantity of apps rather than quality. I would rather have a selection of 500 useful, quality apps than 250,000 apps of which 249,000 are garbage. I don’t want to wade through fart apps and joke apps and repetitions just to find an app to locate where I have parked my car for instance.

Apple popularised the idea of an app store and created the concept of the app race, chiefly because it was winning it and it can hand out impressive numbers about developers. The truth is, though, that it is utterly meaningless. There will be very little indeed in the Apple App Store that isn’t in the Android Marketplace, or a suitable equivalent in Nokia’s Ovi Store. I would wager money betting that no one has viewed every app in the App Store, which just highlights that having such a large number available really just makes it harder to find what you want, especially if you don’t happen to know the name of the app to do a direct search.

So if apps were created to fill the gap, then the next step is a device emerging to fill those gaps natively. And while Apple hasn’t noticed this, it is precisely what is happening. With Microsoft having Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and Facebook integrated in the phone there will be a reduced need for the apps. With all the IM protocols natively supported on the N900, there is no need for Fring or Nimbuzz because MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, Skype and Facebook chat can be set up without third-party software. The N9 is all about natural interactions with a phone, hence the lack of a home button, and part of this process is removing the necessity to install apps for certain tasks. So now instead of opening Facebook, closing Facebook, then opening Twitter and closing Twitter, you just have to swipe your finger to see notifications, Facebook, Twitter, RSS and weather all in one view. Instead of needing to install Joikuspot, the phone can be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot natively.

The bottom line is the more a device can do by itself, the less we need apps. The vast majority – in fact I’d say ‘all’ – users only install a relatively small amount of apps, and most people would prefer a device to do the things they need without an app. This would make phones smarter, more useful, and more attuned to the needs of the user.

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