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Slashdot Asks: Is the App Boom Over?
Quartz did a story in 2014 in which, citing comScore's data, it noted that most smartphones users download zero apps per month. Two years later, the data from Nomura reveals that the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20% in the United States. While there are exceptions -- Uber and Snapchat continue to attract new users worldwide -- it appears that developers are finding it increasingly difficult to get new people to download and try their apps. Recode reports: But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones.What's your take on this?
That is a sad rehash of their website. I don't need access to a diluted version of your content SO BAD that I'm going to store an icon for it on my phone. Maybe if people started releasing apps that were AT LEAST as fully functional as their webpages (hopefully more) people would actually download them.
It's kind of difficult to find the good apps in the app stores as there's so much bloatware promising the world. I imagine there's a fair few apps that haven't come around as the tech/new thing to inspire it doesn't exist yet.
I'd be far more willing to install new apps if the permissions weren't so incredibly invasive.
This is your story dude!
Apps are for luddites, etc, etc
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Seriously, after the initial phone setup, why would you go out of your way to try and find apps you probably don't even need?
All the rest just clutter the screen on my phone.
There might be a link between the slowdown in app installs and the sale of new smartphones. I have no data to back this up. Just spitballing. I know when I got my phone I installed pretty much everything I thought I might use within the first few days of getting it. I hardly ever install anything else on it now, having had it for at least a year.
There is too much junk in the app world. I personally don't want to sort through all of it. I have the apps I know I need/want and never search for new apps without a recommendation from a friend.
My most recent app download was Microsoft office lens, I had no idea I needed it until I took a picture of a whiteboard and my coworker told me to use office lens instead.
Basically I don't know I need any new apps so you have to advertise it well or it has to be recommended by a friend.
" Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones."
Not much more to say. Galaxy Note 2, only 2GB of ram and 2012 tech, runs totally fine, quite happy with it, considering I paid $100 a year ago for it used... but I don't see the need to get a heap of pointless apps. I probably regularly use no more than 10, including the ones that come on the phone.
Web apps have all the same benefits over native apps that web apps had over desktop apps 10 years ago. Native apps are just shims until web apps are good enough. They are getting good enough.
I know everybody just LOVES it and I am alone on this. But micro payments / in app purchases killed the games for me. I don't mind paying for the games and I used to buy new ones every month. But I haven't spent money in any "app store" in over 2 years now.
A lot of users nowadays consider apps as spyware and rightfully so !
And even when I am seriously interested in some app but, say a tasklist manager, wants access to my photo's, contacts, call list, sms, and what not I just don't install it.
Has advertisements in it ? No thanks.
I am using a few apps, like 5 or 6, that really bring something usefull for me and I don't mind paying for them as long as they don't have adds and use me as the product
I can deliver a wonderful interactive user experience with HTML5, especially because of the Web Audio/Video interface which makes the microphone and camera available to a Javascript program, the HTML5 2D canvas (I've not done anything with HTML5 3D canvas yet) and Websockets for a session-based connection. The Javascript language and the web APIs are kludges built on top of kludges, but they are well-optimized and they work across three widely-available browsers.
That is, except on iOS because Apple insists that web browsers use their handicapped rendering engine instead of the browser's native one. Apple needs to catch up. Right now, I just don't support them. You need to run Chrome, Firefox, or Opera with their full rendering engine, not Apple's handicapped one. This even works on Mac, just not iOS.
Bruce Perens.
nt
From time to time I look into the list of new apps available on f-droid.org, but it's a long time ago I saw something new I really wanted to have. And certainly, I will not register an account with Google or use any commercial app store.
I'm continuously running into space issues on my Samsung S5, so I avoid downloading new apps unless I absolutely have to. It's a huge pain this seemingly arbitrary limit on spp space quotas.
most of the apps are worthless. I rarely enjoy looking at apps unless it is after jailbreak, or rooting new Android. Otherwise the apps are for tools, not tools themselves.
And what is it that these Apps do?
* How many Apps just wrap webpages up into a local mhtml type binary (that has native-like controls|ui), that I have to store on my device and allow insane permissions that not even the most trusted website in my browser has access to.
* Feeds you advertising, cuz we can never have enough advertising.
* Constantly runs in the background, even though you never use it anymore.
So aside from a MP3 player, and PDF|e-book Reader, what is it we need?
Unless you root your phone (SSH Tunnel), it certainly seems like these Apps have more rights to your own device than you do.
The excess permissions are an issue.
But the real road block is larger apps that require the limited phone memory and which won't / can't use the SD card.
I've had 29 gigabytes of free memory and apps that couldn't update or install due to lack of space.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
because there is no need. i got the best
1. Launcher
2. Camera app [foss]
3. helper [tasker]
4. photoeditor
5. note taking app
6. mobile 2D cad and viewer
7. sketching and drawing app
8. car obd app [foss]
9. car mgmt app
10. music player
11. a few utilities [foss]
13. spreadsheet player [and simple data editor] app
14. ebook reader
15. maps and like apps [foss]
years ago already
and i dont need anything else.
This xkcd states it pretty well.
I own a software company. Every week someone talks with me about the app they want built. Almost always, they do not actually need any functionality that is missing from HTML5. Very occasionally they do (such as these guys.)
Why would anyone install an app which does not offer anything above the web site? They wouldn't. Clients pay tremendous amounts of money to build apps, which have not been designed, tested, or thought about in any kind of a meaningful way. Even when those clients have money, most of the time I stay away, since being a part of something dumb isn't that great (even if you're getting paid.) Or I try and help them think about it, and then build them a webpage, if they have money.
What we really need isn't any more dedicated-to-one-service apps, we have more than enough of those taking up room and replicating the exact same functionality as at least a dozen other apps of the same time.
What we need are apps that combine multiple services again. For example, I currently have at least 6 messaging apps for 6 different services. While I know there are some apps that will combine a few messaging services, that's not true for every app case type.
Why not have an app that hooks into all the online pizza delivery place websites? It starts by giving you the option for pizza hut, pappa johns, dominoes or whatever else is available in your area. If there's one missing, you submit it to the service to get added in or you supply the web pages for all the pizza places you actually use, the app saves your login info like lastpass in a browser does and the rest is taken care of through native web apps.
I'm sure there are flaws but at least it's a step in the right direction, getting rid of so many superfluous apps that just clutter up our lives.
Here's a definitely non-comprehensive list of issues I see in mobile app ecosystem for $provider:
1. App copycats. There's a gazillion "flappy bird" knock-offs, to the point where the customer says "screw them all".
2. Horrid permission requirements. Granted, most people don't even give a fuck, but those who do slowly teach others, I guess it started to pay off.
3. Phone bloatware: it generates a certain repulsion towards downloading and installing more apps since day one.
4. Retarded ad system for apps. There are too many apps which present you with misleading / unintelligible (aka in other languages) / too flashy / clickbait / straight malevolent ads. "TAP TO REMOVE VIRUS" flashing red+white ad banner on an app with dark background is NOT the way to go.
5. Unsecured in-app purchases on apps for kids - what the fuck.
The above are off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
same thing that happened with crapware on windows in the 1990's and 2000's
its a saturated market flooded with crap that will fizzle out when people realize just because they can install something, doesn't mean they should.
Apps will still be important, and undoubtedly there will be some that become popular and some that will be economically important for either their users or their developers or both. But the novelty of an app for the sake of having an app has ended.
The app market for iOS and Android have been flooded with all sorts of money grabbing gamblingware.
Looking at the iOS app store for games, about the first 100 results are all gambling related apps which get to the top of the list by using symbols to trick the system.
The other thing to note, is that because the market is so saturated, it is quite difficult to find that truly unique app or game which stands out from the crowd.
Where Google can discontinue something at any time. Or if you have no internet access, it may as well not exist.
And you are depending on a third party.
I don't trust web apps, many of them vanish. I have applications I have had for 20 years. And mobile apps I have had for almost 5 years.
There are few web sites viable for 10 years or even 5 years and sometimes not even 2 years or 6 months.
A decent personal music player, too, and enough control over it to secure the phone from being hacked. Stereo bluetooth. User-replaceable battery. A slot for a microSD card. Wifi access to the internet that I can be sure only ever uses wifi and never the cellphone network, so I don't need a dataplan. That's about what I want out of a phone.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"Most" smartphone users run Android. Mostly because "most" smartphones out there are Android. Been that way for a long time - Android's outsold iOS 4:1 or so for a few years now. So I wouldn't be surprised that "most" smartphone users download zero apps - they got a smartphone because that's pretty much what is available.
So I'd guess most smartphone users don't bother with apps not because they are scared of permissions or whatever, but because they don't care - their smartphone already came laden with the apps they care about - Facebook, Pandora, Spotify, etc. They don't know, nor care about anything else. They got a smartphone, and damned if they were going to pay more than $0 for it.
Of course, that excludes a certain other mobile OS where developers do make money. Granted,t he gold rush is over, and there's tons of crap, but whose users do keep getting apps and all that. Of course, since they are a tiny minority of smartphone users (under 20%), well, they don't count.
Then of course, Android app users generally don't pay for apps as a whole so if a developer wants to eat, ads are pretty much the only way.
Introducing my new app, App Boom Over. App Boom over is an app available on Android and iOS that informs you about new useless apps that are available to download. Never stop downloading new useless apps you don't need with App Boom Over. Set App Boom Over to automatic, and App Boom Over finds new useless apps for information you don't need and could easily obtain by typing into the browser such as the temperature outside, the day of the week, time, how many apps you've downloaded, and...
640 apps oughtta be enough for anyone. -Gill Bates
Yes, the hype is over, save for perhaps the occasional "viral" game. What we see today is nothing more than users wanting or needing extensions to their favorite websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), which is rather expected given people's attraction to live and breathe the web through their smartphone. It's also a rather finite list, validating the theory here that app usage has fallen dramatically.
What I don't get is the attraction to using a smartphone for seemingly everything these days. It's really weird how an 65" HDTV will hang on the wall in a home, and yet you'll find that same home filled with people watching Netflix on a cool smartphone they bought because it has an "HD" screen. Logic that defies all...
Seriously, who? I mean, there are a select few valuable applications for specific purposes, but even so, I've literally never purchased a smartphone app, ever. Most apps are useless, or have a free alternative that provides most of the functionality.
I can see how games might be compelling to purchase, if the price is low enough, but I still haven't ever been tempted to buy a phone game. (and I like games). I do occasionally buy games on Steam, for a real PC, but don't see the point on a phone. I find that I would rather have my phone battery last longer to support it you know, being a phone, than drain it playing games anyway.
My smartphone browses the web, gets email, runs Netflix, does gps mapping and driving instructions, and plays music and podcasts. There's enough entertainment built in that I don't feel the need to buy additional distractions for it, and as far as productivity goes, I would rather not use a teeny tiny screen with a clunky touch interface to get anything real done. I will however take advantage of free value add apps for other devices I own, like the app that lets me view the security cameras in my home remotely, for example.
This goes well the story below about Apple changing its App business model on split 85-15% and requiring at least yearly subscription service to the App Store [even if the subscriber does not down a single App, Apple still gets some money]. The "Horse and Wagon" era (not only Boom Times) of Apps and iPhones (Android too) is over.
India with a potential sales market of 139 million is just too few to sustain Android phones (80% market) and iPhones (15% of market) to matter.
Amazon can cut through the India "Made-In-India" laws by selling India-made consumables (groceries and clothing for instance).
Apple's business model is the new Bismark just sitting the water.
The core problem here is that apps are a bad idea. Webpages provide a reasonable interface to do everything most apps need to do but with a more standardized experience.
Given the option most users will default to using mobile websites over mobile apps, this is because most users do no require the native power of an app. App maker make apps because it's easier to make money than making a website. Apps can be quick and dirty revenue, often filling holes in the OS left by Google and phone makers.
Some Apps need the full power of the phone, most do not. Most of the top apps would be just as usable and offer lower cost of ownership as mobile websites as well as providing a superior experience to users. This is because most people do not want to leave breath and eat on their phone. They want to sit down at a desk and use their 20+ inch monitors, keyboards and mice.
The mobile platform is not a replacement to desktop and laptops large screens and superior input devices. Developers needs to stop pretending tablets and smartphones are the future. IoT has money making potential, but it will turn in on itself. Having lots of gadgets doing redundant tasks will not scale up well and people will demand integration through more constrained portals.
Mobile gaming didn't fail because of pay to play. It failed because the games mostly suck and the limits of the platform are the obvious causes. I just don't want to play games on small screens AND as a devleoper I don't want to write games for such a non standardized platform. Android makes PC look really good as a platform because Android is extremely unorganized, unproductive, insecure and lacking hundreds of key features people expect in a phone, no less a personal digital assistant to help automate our lives. The entirely unfulfilled promise of smartphones.
I think smartphones clearly lower productivity in most fields. Mobile platforms are bad time management for most tasks. It's better to queue up work and sit down at a real computer to get things done fast. Mobile computing is not focuses on what it should be doing.. automating and organizing our lives at the phone level.
Smartphones needs to first learn to be good phones and then move on from there. Currently they are not even good phones. Most phone based tasks actually take longer on a smartphone than a flip phone and the smartphone is far more vulnerable to the elements. It's harder to use in noisy and bright conditions and it's much easier to break.
If the phone was smart it would have tasks automated easily instead of having the potential to automate tasks and basically no apps to do the job correctly. It makes no sense that all these years later Google still doesn't have basic voice commands working well. They are they and they sorta work, but they are very far from working well. People ignore a lot of potential of smartphones because Google consistently fails to prioritize the right projects. Then they go back and try to fix things and everyone ignores the fix because the initial offering was so half baked.
It would be so easy to make Android a great OS and it would cost so much less than Google is spending to fail at that goal. Focus on core apps... dear sweet lord.. just focus on core apps until the thing actually works well as a phone and digital assistant. AFTER than you can move on to entertainment apps.
Doing it the way Google has wasted billions of dollars, exposes billions of people's private information and just so happens to make Google and developers the most money before the mobile market is exposed for the scam it is. It's s horrible platform that has really wasted a lot of people's money, million of those people who really didn't have money to waste, but they don't want to be left out of the social trend. The phones just don't even remotely live up to their hype.
They are decent cameras and pretty bad phones. They are horrible email readers, horrible webpage reader and generally horrible for any use that involved inputting data into the platform. The
With a million apps in the store, how is anyone supposed to figure out which apps are worthwhile? News stories about "great apps" usually turn out to be just one media outlet whoring another outlet's apps, etc.
These days, I grab iOS's app-of-the-month to build up some throwaway game inventory for my kids if I must distract them, but everything else is purpose-installed. Need to get to Nagios remotely? Google search for "Nagios iOS app" and read reviews. How often do I do that? Pretty rarely.
Then again, I'm no millennial. :p
Most apps intrude too much into my privacy.
I disable nearly everything.
I'd rather my privacy than having a really useful device in my hands.
I want an phone running Linux, just like my pc, where I have full control.
Go well
Most apps are trash -- free to buy, but crippled and requiring more work to actually make work, tied into network cloud / validation, etc.
If you want me to put it on my phone or tablet, here's what you need to do:
1) write something useful
2) charge me reasonably -- I'll pay up to $10 without flinching if it's actually useful. More if it's fabulous
3) no nickle and diming. None. I buy it, it works. I'm not doing "in-app purchases" and that's bloody final
4) no network ties for continued operation or validation or any such shit. I paid you, it should work, period
5) no ads. No Ads. NO ADS. NO FUCKING ADS.
6) Make sure you make both Android and iOS versions for games or chat or other device-to-device applications.
7) interoperable - if it's a game, for instance, make SURE the iOS and Android versions interoperate.
8) did I mention no ads? Because, FFS, no ads, please.
9) If you think you need the "cloud", you should probably rethink that. Hard. Because the cloud sucks. If your app uses it, your app sucks.
A) Is it too much to ask that your shite actually WORKS? (I know a lot of this is Apple and Google's fault.)
More on #6: Carcassonne is a poster child for this. The Android version doesn't talk to the iOS version. So you want to play a game with someone, but you aren't using the same OS... can't do that. This happened, BTW, because the original game authors sold some part of the rights to a completely different company. Now they both have a crippled product. It's just data, you idiots.
More on #A: I bought Fieldrunners for the iPad. Really like it, great game, grandkids like it too; so I bought it for my Galaxy S6. Money up front, yay. Right? No. Crashes on startup. Every. Fucking. Time. So this year, when I moved to the Galaxy S7, I thought, I'll try it again. Crashes on startup. Every. Fucking. Time.
One reason I stopped buying apps for iOS is the stream of broken apps Apple leaves behind by constantly breaking the damned operating system. Probably a third of the apps I have on my iPad no longer work because iOS got API cancer. Again. And again. All kinds of stuff is broken. For instance, Plants vs. Zombies just crashes when I start it. Used to work fine. I hardly use my iPad any more because of apps that don't work.
Another reason I stopped buying apps for iOS is the disappearance of apps from the store: Apple requires devs to pay a fee just to keep an app in the store, and at the same time, prevents sideloading. Reminds me of the mafia's business model. Repulsive. Makes me actually not LIKE to buy apps. My S6 lets me install apps from anywhere. Which means devs can maintain apps and keep them available without having their blood sucked constantly, regardless of sales level. Much better.
Finally, sometimes I simply can't find anything. For instance, for my Galaxy S6 and now S7, I can't find an app to give me audio control; all I want is a decent EQ system, 10 bands or more, with some decent range. I have looked for this multiple times in the Play store and Amazon's app store and all I can find is the very worst kind of junkware, from being infested with ads to crashing to working then stopping. It seems that no one actually wants my money. Seems a shame, as I'd actually like to give it to someone.
Bottom line for me is that it seems that in the rush to monetize the living shit out of everything, producing quality applications for a straightforward exchange of value is no longer what I typically find. The blame goes in many directions. But part of the solution is pretty easy. Stop writing shit apps, and you can have my money. I don't know how you can get Apple to behave, that seems like a lost cause to me (and we own a crapload of Apple hardware here, so that is in no way a smug observation), but under Android, the door is wide open to my wallet. I would LOVE to buy your app if you would just write a good one that does something useful or fun. I could buy a hundred apps today without impacting my budget in any way. And I'd LIKE to. For me, fo
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm a UI designer, and I find it amazing that almost very business I've worked for is happy to fling huge amounts of cash at creating native apps without even wanting to answer the obvious question their customers will ask: "Why should I download this?"
So far in pretty extensive customer research, the best that anyone can come up with is an offline condition (eg MailOnline's news app allows you to download news and read it 1995 style), speed (they think it's somehow faster) and a kind of ragged notion of better aesthetics. After that it's a grab bag of slightly better maps integration, the convenience of a shortcut on the desktop, and (for the business) avoiding the Google tax that your web app will have to pay if you want to sell anything online. Statistically, it's also known that some apps (mainly news ones) will get huge usage from a tiny (and usually numerically static) fanbase.
But that's about it.
It's all so weird. So wasteful and strange - but I'll design 'em if they want 'em (I've given up pushing back).
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
1. Good enough: devices come with the best versions of most everything you need. An Android device comes with Google maps, Google drive, Google Inbox, Google Calendar, Google Chrome, Google music etc. You don't *need* anything else.
2. Saturation: There are so many apps for every purpose it's hard to know what to install. The novelty is gone. In the early days I used to just page through new apps to see what people had done. Now everything is done 10x and I've seen it before in one form or another.
It is hard, especially in developed countries, to even find non-smartphones in stores. Even people that have 0 interest in any of the "smart" features such as the expandability via apps. are by in large forced into the smartphone market
I predict an uptick in clean apps that provide functionality people need. Likely leveraging or completely open source.
I tried to get some programs for my work-issued Blackberry and was shocked by the garbage.
I also predict an uptick in third-party collections of apps and reviews; there's lots of analogs to what happened with shareware back in the olden days.
..don't panic
Apps are for consuming services. There is only so many services a person with limited time and money can use.
We at at a more mature stage of the app store, where people may not go looking for apps much - but they still LIKE to download them, if they know the app exists.
So now we are at the stage where marketing really matters. People will not just find your app, they must learn it exists somehow and then they will go get it.
That also means the first launch experience better be pretty damn awesome, or else they'll just open the app , hate it, and dump it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There was an app boom? Really? I hadn't noticed. But then, I'm sure nothing of value was lost.
most smartphones users download zero apps per month
Wow. Am I somehow expected to "download apps"?
What would I do with them? Probably App developers or sales companies don't produce Apps that users want/need?
When I suddenly have a new interest, I look for Apps. That might be once a year, or 5 times a year.
But I'm not browsing the App-Stores for new Apps, I rather browse the Books-Stores ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
My personal opinion is that application developers are generally misguided and developing stupid applications. I make a point to occasionally look around at what apps are available on different platforms, and with all the glut of apps, they're generally not aimed at solving problems that need to be solved. There's always another runner game, or someone trying to make the next Angry Birds. For some reason, there have been a lot of new mail clients for OSX/iOS recently. There are a bunch of task/todo list apps that don't offer distinct features. Every once in a while, you'll see a bunch of apps released that seem to be taking aim at a particularly successful app-- Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever.
So you take an existing app, rehash it with some gimmick, and hope to sell that for millions of dollars. Sometimes the existing app is actually useful (e.g. email), but often enough the app is silly and gimmicky to begin with (e.g. Flappy Bird). But in any case, the app doesn't add any value, and doesn't solve the problems with the existing app. And then a month later, some other developer has a newer more gimmicky app that also doesn't solve any problems with the original app. Or maybe it does solve some problems, but creates new ones.
Now, there's a very good argument against my complaints: Even though I'm saying these apps are silly and useless, they seem to be what people want. The reason there are so many Flappy Bird clones is because so many people are buying them. However, if the problem now is that people aren't buying the apps, then I have a new counter-argument to that: No, people aren't buying them.
It all just makes me sad because I work in IT, and I see problems every day that need to be solved. There's so much work that needs to be done, and all our money and development talent is going towards trying to make the next Snapchat.
This is why apps are not downloaded these days.
https://youtu.be/pAEAbqrE5Zw
My phone updates 12-20 apps a day. That's more than enough to keep up with.
2) charge me reasonably -- I'll pay up to $10 without flinching if it's actually useful. More if it's fabulous
For every one of the "pay up front" customers, there's literally a dozen who will prefer to be nickeled and dimed. This probably goes double for games.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Most people I know look for new apps only by reputation of late. Basically only if someone they know tells them about it.
Yeah, I know an anecdote is not a trend, but my feeling is the app market is simply saturated, which forces people to rely on other sources than the app store to decide and get one.
App Search is terrible on all OSs. On Android you have to worry that a popular brand may have a bunch of me-too apps some of which are malicious. On iOS you just get unusable garbage floating to the top.
I'm amazed that neither Apple nor Google have made App Stores more social. That's a strong use case for social networks - even if it's twitter-style where I "follow" devs or other luminaries and get their recommendations.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Apps merely went along for the ride when the smartphone market exploded.
They were new, everyone just HAD to have one and the apps followed in their footsteps.
Now that smartphones are ho-hum, so are the apps. I really don't care what the next generation of Android or IOS will be.
I'm likely going to switch back to a dumb phone next time around. It will make calls and do basic texting and that's it. When I even bother to turn it on, that is.
I am done with the $600 advertising and surveillance platform that masquarades as a phone.
It's now about AI-voice type stuff, like Amazon Skills.
Instead of apps, we're now building skills, tasks, context aware software that usually has a voice or touch interface.
I have a good-sized set of apps that make use of the capabilities of my phone and tablet. As those capabilities increase, I add apps that use the added features AND which I find useful. Coming soon: it will be interesting to see what that two-lens camera can do.
... that's been "updated" in backwards compatability-breaking ways to "get with the times", without really adding anything of substance.
So you have two ways to be worse off, and none to be better off than before.
Coincidently, that's around the same time they started pushing really shitty unplayable/unusable apps, with In App Purchases down our throats... Bring back the old full-on apps and I'll gladly pay and use them.
I've got better things to do with my life than fight with Android's broken permission system.
Need my phone state? Fuck off.
Need my address book? Fuck off.
Need my location and you're not showing a map? Fuck off.
There, I just told 90% of the reason to own a smart phone to kindly fuck off.
Welcome to my new dumb phone with the touch screen that constantly ass dials, because there's no proper switch on the dumb thing to lock this out.
You'd think that was enough, but then I realized the audio quality is less than half as good as my old land line (1/4 as good when both ends are skanky connections).
"But what crazy person uses these stupid things to communicate carefully?" I can hear you say. You're quite right. Recently I read Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle. I was actually disappointed in this book. There are good bits where she focusses on her primary research, but too much of the book is not like this.
One of the best things I read in there was the abject terror that many who are just now becoming adults express about having face to face conversations. Over and over it was "God grant me the ability to converse in person, but not yet." She interviewed these sorry young adults by the dozen.
That goes a long way toward explaining why the device works the way it does, but it doesn't explain why we still call these things "phones". As a phone for actually talking to people, it's pretty shitty. My brother is on the road a lot, and he often calls me when he's driving. We seem to spend half the call navigating half-duplex. Next time he calls I might recommend we try old-timey radio protocol.
ten four
over
come again
This doesn't even get into the likelihood that my device has an open back door for CSIS or the NSA to listen in whenever they feel like it, for example to capture the audio of me keyboarding my passwords, soon to own me in every dimension. Help yourself guys. After you waste enough taxpayer money, you'll discover that my peccadilloes are painfully vanilla. In fact, I'm so boring, I don't even know why I bother to resent this. Yet I do.
Cars used to represent independence / freedom from parental supervision. You'd complain that if your parents didn't give you enough access to the car you'd be ruined socially for life. It seems to me that nothing else could explain the Android security model. Give away your privacy to every app developer on the planet, but so long as my parents are excluded, I'll buy a new one every year until I turn thirty (the last five years on pure momentum).
I admit that sometimes Swype is kind of cool, in a crippled kind of way: it lets me input text at about 1/4 the speed that I can type on a regular keyboard. I used Runkeeper with my Pebble watch for one summer, and it was okay. Then this happened:
Fitness App Runkeeper Secretly Tracks Users At All Times, Sends Data to Advertisers
Now FitnessKeeper is on my "fuck off" list, too.
My wife and I lean toward environmentalism, so we make it a point to own only one one vehicle, and sometimes we have to juggle our joint transportation. We often exchange text messages to make this work. That task is now 90% of the "smart phone" use case I've got left, and valuable enough that I haven't thrown my smart phone into the trash can. I'd suffer a fair amount of inconvenience not to carry this lump of disappointment around with me all day long, but not so much as to require a second vehicle. Planet comes first, the voluntary hair shirt of disgust comes a distant second.
My smart phone is the most disappointing impressive thing I've ever owned.
Most apps are like shifty browsers where you can't zoom in.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There is so much shit in the app stores that you can nolonger find any good apps. The only way to find them is through a recomendation from a friend or some website. I don't download because I can nolonger find any apps that are worth bying (and the only things that are "recomended" are in-app pruchase money suckers or AD tornados).
There are a lot of mickey mouse apps that won't get downloaded, but think of it this way:
Your smartphones sensors are useful - Touch, fingerprint, accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, camera, microphone, speaker, screen
These have been used in every conceivable way, often in tandem to create innovative products. There was a slashdot story recently about hacking these sensors to get them to exceed their specifications recently but it's a bit ad hoc.
Apps like Shazam make sense everyone can relate to hearing a song and wanting to know the title etc. in real time.Using the mic to help tune a guitar was very neat. Countless camera apps like barcode readers, 360 stitchers, measuring tape etc, audio processing through the mic, using your phone as a neat little musical instrument, countless apps where touch helps, like music production, drone control,
Then there's all the API stuff, access to other peoples sensors via API's - weather, flight data etc. etc.
There was a big sponge created by Apple in the beginning but that sponge has become all but saturated. And because it's such a big market now, it's well fed with supply so there are many counterparts to every app, also reducing overall downloads.
It's a matured market now, not bust. There are companies that owe their very existence to the smartphone app stores so you can't say it's over. It's just reached some sort of critical mass.
I would also say it's a more established market. Big companies will pounce on any new sensors as they become available better and earlier than the small guy.
There is a problem though. The market is too bloated. Because there's so much supply now, there is too much noise. There ar hidden gems that get lost as a needle in a haystack.
The app stores haven't evolved to cope with increased volume, evolution and maturity. It's still just a lame app store. It needs to be a veritable super smart hypermart at this point and it certainly isn't.
Yet another problem is that there are few if any app suites, partly due to disparity in early days. There's opportunity to cut the bloat and have a larger coop app that is the sum of many simpler ones with yet has more room to innovate by pooling resources.
If anything is wrong, it's the model of the appstore itself and the disassociation of app and phone.
The handset makers and carriers also share blame. They pre-load crapware apps at every turn. I envision a smarted ecosystem whereby professionals are polled as to what apps they use in their jobs -> The carriers then offer the most popular apps used by such professionals to new customers when they buy their phone. If I'm a land surveyor, what kind of apps might I want preloaded on my phone. Or at the very least, guess what my appstore should be recommending me instead of Kim Kardashian photos.
Yeah, it certainly can't be that most new smartphone buyers actually replace their ageing dumb- or feature phone and uses it just like the old one. IOW without "apps"
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And it has nothing to do with the lack of storage space on currently shipping, top of the line devices...such as Samsung's Galaxy S7, whose makes think that USAsians only really need 32GB of on board storage space, and Europeans / other parties might want just a tiny bit more in the form of 64GB of storage. True, you can use a MicroSD card to increase storage, but it's not Android storage...unless you use a hack / enable that special feature, at which point, you lose the ability to transfer files to and from the phone the MicroSD slot (as the slot / card is now 'welded' together, so far as Android is concerned). As a bonus, on this particular model, it's dual SIM, or SIM + microSD...so, still juggling stuff if you go abroad.
We have 10TB HDs, 2TB SSDs, 200 GB microSDs...and the equivalent of 640KB or 8GB of RAM as storage space as the shipping standard for Android devices. "No one is downloading any more apps!" -> "Plants vs. Zombies 2 eats like 1 GB of storage space on my phone!"
There are websites which I would like to access my location but not all of them. Some I would allow access to my camera but not ever website.
This does not reflect in the permission settings. For an app I can easily restrict this on a per app basis.
6) Make sure you make both Android and iOS versions for games or chat or other device-to-device applications.
Say a hobbyist or bootstrap-funded startup wants to launch on one platform and use the revenue from users of that platform to fund a port to the other platform. Should such a developer instead just stay out of the market?
I got a Nexus 7 tablet several years ago originally as an eBook reader. Then when I discovered it had a gps I got a hiking app (off line maps). 95% of the time I'm still only using those apps. I use the browser every one in a while. I had downloaded a few other apps mainly to support those two but I really never use them. Like PCs people spend most of their time using an app or two.
May daughter works for a company where they had apps and dropped them in favor just a really great web interface tested everywhere. She said they felt it was a lot less work to allocate their expertise to one framework instead of three.
HTML is progressing and covers most of peoples needs.
Appstores should always allow me to download the version I paid for.
And then watch the version not work once it tries to connect to the Internet service on which it relies:
In the desktop world I would have an install CD or I would burn a backup copy
But when reinstalling from CD or restoring from backup, the copy would try to activate itself as a condition of use and apply an update as a condition of activation.
The problem with mobile in-app purchases is not the try-before-you-buy model as much as consumables. Entitlement IAPs, which persist on a user's account after having been bought once, resemble the "shareware" model used for Doom and the "expansion" model used for Warcraft II. What irks experienced users are "consumable" IAPs that need to be re-purchased after having been used, causing games to be balanced to not be fun unless the player continually buys "gems" or "smurfberries".
I was trying to find some weather widget thing for my old phone on the play store because the android widget stopped working, and dozens of them were at 10Mb+ just to display some text and icons.
Well, cellphones are arrived.
You will have to compete to earn your money based on the merits of your software, now.
'Best get started.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Is that something my Mom used to have?
Adobe could have broken out support for camera API into a separate app that exposes a service to the main app. This way, users of Android pre-Marshmallow who don't want to use camera features can opt out of the camera permission by not installing the app, and those who do are taken to Google Play Store to install the additional features.
Apps for my bank and credit cards.
And for those who say a website is good enough for that, it's sort of hard to scan the front and back of a personal check that a relative wrote you without using the camera.
Looking for new apps has become a thankless, useless task, now that everybody has stopped actually selling them, and instead is putting out what amounts to an empty box with a bunch of BUY IT NOW links inside, under the pretense that it's FREE FREE FREE.
Features and quality.
I wanted a permissions manager. There's at least 200 hundred of them, and 199 of them are crap. 180 of them are "neutered" and missing features that I want. 170 have advertising servers instead of useful features.
A simple dime-store calculator on my "smart" phone. I've seen calculators app that require an "upgrade" to use square roots and trig functions.
A note-taking application half as useful as a pen and piece of paper requires a full network connection?
I think I'll go back being a luddite.
The app boom ended years ago. The real reason why windows phone doesn't have any apps is because the app boom ended before it shipped.
Applications are the software you run on top of an operating system. This was the common terminology I recall from the 80s and 90s, and it still applies (pun intended) to today's "smart"phones.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
you mean we're going to see fewer of those apps that allow you to recharge your phone by leaving the screen facing the sun? or putting the phone in a microwave? darn.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
There are too many apps which present you with [...] unintelligible (aka in other languages) [...] ads.
Say you are using the English version of an app, but all the advertisers are in Brazil and Portugal, so all you see are advertisements in Portuguese. Would you prefer Netflix- or Hulu-style geoblocking, where an application refuses to start, instead showing the error message "The application could not open because there are no sponsors for your market"?
It's really weird how an 65" HDTV will hang on the wall in a home, and yet you'll find that same home filled with people watching Netflix on a cool smartphone they bought because it has an "HD" screen.
Of course a "home filled with people" and only one HDTV will have people watching on smartphones, unless they all want to watch the same program. The prediction in Back to the Future Part II that split-screen TV would become a common feature by 2015 unfortunately did not come to pass.
Their is a new API which is now supported by all the latest browsers:
[ServiceWorker]
For one thing, ServiceWorker requires HTTPS, and HTTPS requires a certificate from a CA, and the CAs whose root certificates are included with browsers won't issue certificates for machines on a private LAN. Do ServiceWorker tutorials mention how to test an application using ServiceWorker over a LAN, with the web server on the development workstation and the client on a smartphone or tablet running a smartphone OS?
For another, the page you linked mentions that Safari doesn't support ServiceWorker, so you'd still need a native app to reach iOS users.
Need my phone state? Fuck off.
I've read that apps request phone state for two reasons: so that a game, music player, or video player can pause when you get a call, or so that an app can start saving your most recent changes to the document you're working on to flash memory before Android OOM-kills the app to make room for the the dialer app. How would you prefer a game, music player, or video player to react when you receive a call? And would you prefer a document-oriented app to lose your latest changes, or waste your battery and wear your flash memory out continuously writing your changes to flash memory, just to avoid this permission?
Need my address book? Fuck off.
If you try four or five different email apps, do you prefer to enter your contacts manually into each?
if I can do it from a browser on my desktop/laptop why the hell do I need an app to do it on my phone?
If it's desktop vs. phone at all, then the difference is that you're more likely to be carrying your phone than your laptop on your person. Since netbooks were discontinued at the end of 2012, it has become more difficult to buy a laptop to be carried everywhere, as laptops larger than 10.1" need a bigger bag that's more likely to attract thieves.
If it's the fact that a particular task is done in a web browser on a desktop but needs a native app on a phone, the difference might be that Internet data transfer on your desktop is unlimited or nearly so, but data on your phone is tightly metered. Compare a 300 GB/mo plan from Comcast to a 3 GB/mo plan from a cellular carrier. Because Safari for iOS doesn't support ServiceWorker, native applications have far better offline support than web applications.
Oh, and a financial calculator that I need for an exam I'm going to be taking tomorrow.
I thought exams prohibited the use of touch-screen devices out of fear of cheating. I know the SAT does.
I would happily pay a one-time fee, but app subscriptions are silly.
Without a subscription, who would fund the continued development of updated versions of an app, especially one whose user base is plateauing (as smartphone sales are according to the featured article)?
If all the advertisers are in Brasil or Portugal, then the app I use in countries where this language isn't spoken should not be displayed.
Having them displayed in unintelligible languages does not add any value and is even more annoying than the usual amount.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If the ad is not displayed, then the app displays an error message and begs for an IAP to subscribe to ad-free use, sticking everything you've done in the app behind a paywall. Are you fine with this? Or by "should not be displayed" did you mean that it should not appear in the App Store or other platform's counterpart at all?
Apps other than flashlight and camera and other "must work off network" are the only apps that should exists. Apps are a great way to steal your information and compromise your privacy! However "powerful" you think your 150mb native app is, the web can or will in time do it better/faster/smaller. Besides that, even native apps use the web to make data transactions, so let's just cut out the elitist native developers and give the web the world-changing credit it deserves. Even Apple is scared enough of Javascript that they essentially stole the essence of the language for Swift. We should start looking at high level, modern web app development as the Ultraweb and get a bit elitist ourselves, as they are using the web itself to ferry their shitty privacy-stealing data.
The quality app boom is over, but the shitware boom is still going strong.