The other day my wife said: “I don’t get this app. How am I supposed to mod the forum if I can’t even create a thread?”
I hate questions like this. It’s not out of ignorance. I know what a forum and a thread are, and I know how to mod one, although I’d rather fight off a roomful of angry weasels than actually interact with most of the people you find spewing their opinions on forums these days. I hate the question because the answer I will give will make me sound like an idiot.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Try a different app.”
Lame answer, I know, but of the hundreds of thousands of apps out there, I have no idea which will work as advertised. Five years ago, this wasn’t a problem. Back then apps where just clunky bits of code that allowed you to do a few basic things until you got back to your computer, where there was a Microsoft or Adobe product ready to do the real work. You tried something complex on an app at your own peril.
However, in today’s increasingly tablet and smartphone-driven world, apps are increasingly the way to get things done, which, in general, I’m fine with. I’ve formed a rather unhealthy relationship with my iPad that is app-dependent. Games, news, movies, music, surf reports (and no, I don’t even surf), major league baseball, comic books, stock reports, a virtual tour of Disneyland and at least 10 different social networks. The cumulative price of all those apps wouldn’t pay for a bootlegged version of Vista. Why would I ever want to go back to those days?
Because, with very few expectations, I end up deleting most of the apps I download after about a week. Sure, there are a few gems out there i.e. the occasional bit of innovation code that actually makes people’s life a little better, but the majority of it is hacked together rubbish that was rushed into the app store in the hope of becoming the next “Angry Birds”.
After five crazy years of hypercompetitive app development, we are stuck with wasteland of hundreds of thousands of piles of steaming bits of Angry Bird droppings that crash, don’t work as advertised, or find some other way of wasting my time.
This isn’t just the result of home-based app development either. Even well-known brands managed to put their names on digital car wrecks in the rush to get their apps out. Example: The San Francisco Chronicle had one of the best apps for a newspaper I’ve seen so far. It has great galleries, well-written stories, and a user-interface that works just like a real newspaper. Problem was, it crashed every three minutes. EVERY. THREE. MINUTES. It was months before they finally fixed the problem, but how did a company that seem so driven to succeed manage to put out such a turkey?
It would be better if there were any reliable way of avoiding the land mines. Consumer reviews are often worthless. There is always some troll who will give a nasty review regardless of a program’s strong points, and there is always some sycophant who will praise an app no matter how poorly written it is.
Oddly, I’m looking to Microsoft to help fix this mess. Over the years Microsoft has certainly put out questionable bits of software, but today Microsoft is expected to announce a new tablet based on the Windows 8 OS. What I’m hoping for is an app store populated by well-designed, stable, usable apps.
I’m not hoping for miracles, but I don’t think it’s too much too expect that the world’s biggest software maker can raise the bar on app development and give the tech world what it really needs: competition in the app market. Google’s app store, recently renamed Play, has never really given Apple a reason to up its game.
Yes, I know we’ve heard the same thing from a host of other wannabe iPad killers, but none of them really had the resources that Microsoft does. If the company can bring half of what it offers on X-box to a tablet, it may have a change.
Hey, I can hope.
Four things apps do that drive me crazy:
1. Open a web browser. If you’re a web developer, please don’t ever make your apps do this. Ever. If I wanted to visit the web, I wouldn’t have downloaded your app. Sending me to the web is the same as saying “Hey, we know the apps should do that but we can’t figure it out. So go away.”
2. Don’t crash. From what I understand this is a hard one to fix from a developers’ standpoint. I don’t care. Fix it.
3. Update your apps. An app that is never updated has all the novelty and charm of roadkill. If you think your app is perfect on release, it’s probably causing mass insanity.
4. The app needs to work just like your website. The days of lousy apps that let you do only a fraction of what you can do on the web needs to come to brutal halt.
