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What Isn't There an App For?
An anonymous reader writes: "There's an app for that!" It's been both an educational comment and a joke for years, now. There are so many small, single-purpose pieces of software available that it's impossible to keep track of everything apps can do. Indeed, when I'm looking for more usefulness out of my phone, I tend to browse the various app stores for interesting software, trying to figure out what more the phone can do for me. But a recent article turns that around and asks: for what tasks does the software have yet to be written? Though most of the article itself doesn't focus on that subject, it got me thinking about apps I'd like to see. (Which was harder than I expected.) I'd like an app that'd help me diagnose bad noises my car makes. I'd like one that can aggregate all my communication channels into one screen. I'd like one that can easily pick up program states from one PC — like an IDE session — and carry them to another PC. What apps are you still waiting for?
At least on the iOS platform part of the reason is that Apple does not approve some types of applications, mainly for political reasons.
they are made to collect your data for later liquidation by means of selling or exploiting them. While usage statistics (with opt in!) are ok, for app improvement and good, I don't think there is really an user respecting app for everything.
For us myopics, an app that used the autofocus feature of the camera to adjust text size on presets by me such that I can read the fine print.
The idea of filling up my 'device' with a large number of nefarious, insecure, data-thieving, location stealing, mutually incompatible, crash causing, cross-selling little craplets that put me in touch directly, without choice to corporate hell, fills me with horror. What was wrong with the 'web' and 'choice'? Oh, I know, choice, although, in principle one of the tenets of capitalism is so annoying, much better to press the button on the craplet and get a Big Mac directly.
Actually, my mobile is normally switched off and in my kitchen drawer, anyway.
Quite frankly, I don't care about small single-purpose apps. The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens. In most cases, you bump into limitations as soon as you start using it. In many cases, you'll use it a handful of times then never use it again.
If you are looking for anything that is even moderately sophisticated, chances are that no one has made an app for it. There will already be an app in many software categories, but they provide basic functionality at best. Consider what passes for word processors and spreadsheets, or even web browsers and email clients these days.
If you are looking for anything that doesn't lock your data into an unsupported proprietary file format that is hidden in some unfathomable directory on your device, or forces you to use a network service to access your data -- well, good luck. While there are usually options for content consumption, content creation is hit-and-miss.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one is profitability. Very few people want to make a cheap app that takes a lot of time to develop. A lot of people want to translate the sale of cheap apps into more profitable online services. So what we tend to end up with are a bunch of apps that go after the low hanging fruit and sound revolutionary, when in reality they are little more than toys that you could easily accomplish with a single generic application.
Not this Luddite bullshit again. When I'm on the road, I'm on my way to a destination. When it's for work, I don't care about new places, I just want to get my appointment via the most efficient route. When I'm on vacation, there's a bit more leeway but I still have a destination to get to. At the end of a long journey, I no longer care about the scenery and just want to get to my hotel or campsite already.
The cost of making a mistake is high in lost time and aggravation. Without GPS I'd have to resort to maps, and have you ever driven solo while navigating from a map? You end up either a menace on the road, or having to stop to consult the bloody map every 5 minutes. Not to mention having to buy the map in the first place.
So if you enjoy getting lost, fine. But stop whining about people using GPS.
Ideas are like assholes. Everyone's got one. They're worthless.
The ability, time and effort required to turn an idea, whether new or old, into a polished user-friendly app, and do all the other non-development tasks such as creating content and marketing. Those are the things that are worth money.
On iOS, alternative browsers cannot take advantage of the same Javascript runtime that Safari does, so they end up with pretty lousy performance. Unless they changed things in the last year or so.
Indeed it has changed. Nitro used to be limited to Safari, for security reasons, but from iOS 8 the Webkit available to apps uses exactly the same Nitro engine that Safari does.
And here's the thing - Javascript works the same on in all apps and all browsers in iOS. In Android, that's far from the case. At work we have an app in development that opens a 3rd party web page with a video embedded. On iOS the video zooms to full screen, and plays. Always. On Android, the behaviour is different on different phones. Some zoom to full screen, some don't, and some don't play the video at all.
I should note that for reasons such as this, the development team for iOS is 2. For Android it's 5. With iOS development still always outpacing Android.
As to data-mining, that's also an advantage on the iOS side. CyanogenMod might pull some Google spying out of the OS, but Android apps are far freer to spy on users than iOS apps. Such is the benefit of the "walled-garden".