We’re getting lost in the rubble of useless apps

12 April 2012

It started innocently enough, with the odd glance at Facebook or a furtive tweet or two.

However, along with iPhone and iPad owners across the globe, I'm now suffering from a very real and time-consuming problem — app overload.

It may seem a hi-tech affliction up there with comedy classics such as "BlackBerry thumb" or "Wii elbow" but the root of the problem is quickly becoming a serious issue for Apple — there are simply too many apps out there, the majority of which are truly awful.

As we addicts like to say, finding the good stuff is getting harder and harder.

The best apps are genuinely brilliant — the Sonos app that controls my hifi at home, for instance, or Sky's, which lets me record TV programmes to my box at home from anywhere in the world, and of course the Standard's own chart-topping news app.

There are also the "time sinks" — massively addictive games with bizarre titles like Doodle Jump, Angry Birds and Paper Toss. I'm the first to admit that throwing a virtual rolled up piece of paper into a bin really isn't a productive way to spend an afternoon but it's got me through many a Tube journey and even the odd transatlantic flight.

However, for every gem there are hundreds of absolute howlers whose sole purpose in life is to irritate those around you by reciting lines from films, or a seemingly never-ending selection of flatulence-related sound effects.

And there are dozens which do exactly the same thing, all with different prices and wildly different levels of professionalism in their execution.

Among the Apple faithful, finding the new killer app has become an obsession, with Twitter and Facebook on the frontline in spreading the word about the latest underground app that could hit the big time and turn its programmer into an "app millionaire". It is, put simply, an addiction — whenever I see an iPhone whipped out, there's a nagging doubt that maybe, just maybe, it contains the "killer app" you've been waiting for. I've even found myself looking over people's shoulders in bus queues just to see what they are using.

There's also the Russian roulette of the endless upgrades apps seem to go through: every time you visit the app store, there's a chance your favourite has been updated with new features.

The Apple store has been a success on an extraordinary scale — more than five billion apps have been downloaded, and 225,000 are available to choose from. As the ad says, think of pretty much any task, and "there's an app for that".

However, it is this vast success that is strangling the app store for the average user. The sheer number of apps now makes it incredibly hard to get noticed: this is beginning to hurt the people who write the apps, who get 70 per cent of the revenue.

Unless it can find a way to organise its online store more effectively, the app store is in real danger of becoming a victim of its own success. The current system of user reviews and download charts simply isn't working, and Apple desperately needs a new way to promote the best, and cull the worst. Otherwise app overload could overwhelm us all.

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