Monthly Archives: July 2009

Access to a wide range of third party applications is seen as crucial to any mobile platform, and has gained more perceived importance since the arrival of the iPhone and the huge success of the App Store. We see numbers thrown around which are perfect fodder for marketing material and adverts- “1.5 billion downloads in a year”, “50,000 apps available already” and so the big numbers continue to wow prospective customers.

The problem is that the number of applications available bears little relevance to how people will use their devices in the long-term. I like the fact that there are so many new iPhone titles released every week, but this phenomenon has exacerbated a problem that many smartphone power users have fallen foul of previously; the number of apps and games which are purchased and then rarely used.

I use eReader, CashFlow, Todo, Twittelator Pro and something else (which I can’t talk about) every day, but no other application gets any serious use. I play some games regularly- HomeRun, WordPop!, Wordulous and Touch Cricket, but again none of the others get a serious amount of game time on my phone. The more complex games such as Real Racing and Terminator are great, but once played for a while the novelty wore off and they have not been touched for weeks.

I have never found an action game on a mobile device which has kept me involved for as long as PC or console titles do and we still seem to be some way off closing that gap. The word and card games can hold their own on a phone though and still receive continued use.

The pricing on the App Store also create an impulse buy culture like none before and this is largely responsible for the number of dormant apps and games sitting on, or off, people’s iPhones. I have seven pages of apps and games on my iPhone and rarely get past the first two pages…

Don’t get me wrong, I would rather have the continued new releases and the level of choice available now through the App Store, but the point may come when many more people start to feel the way I do. I am much more wary when making a purchase these days because I do not want to waste 59p- it’s a trivial some of money, but these purchases can soon build up and waste is waste.

The problem is not only on the iPhone platform, but the cost of titles on other platforms is higher and so the purchaser is more careful. Also, there are more trials available on other platforms which gives the user time to test an app first. The Lite versions on the App Store are useful, but they tend to follow a release that is not doing as well as expected and so the delay offers little option other than to pay to play.

It sounds crazy to complain about the low cost and high level of choice and I am definitely not complaining. However, reports suggest that most people only use the majority of their titles a few times and this will eventually lead to a slow down in app sales as customers become more wary when spending their pennies.