App Store impressions so far
I really need demos of the paid applications, or “light” free versions, before I’m going to feel comfortable buying most of them.
Too many of the applications aren’t solving a particular need — they were made simply because they were possible, not because they were useful.
Many apps are shockingly bad or useless. Some could be made from scratch in 30 minutes. It’s clear that Apple is not filtering for quality.
Many apps are abusing or ignoring the interface standards:
- Everyone’s using far too much black. Yes, the toolbars come in blue and black, but the black is intended only for applications dealing with media (iPod, Photos, Camera).
- Despite having great UITableView examples in the SDK, many apps (including even NetNewsWire) aren’t executing the fine nuances properly, such as deselecting a row before the navigation returns from an item-view back to the list.
- Nobody seems to be able to agree on the text styling and positioning of labels around text fields against the blue/gray-pinstripe background style.
- On the “delete” swipe action (or the Edit button in lists that brings up all of the little delete circles), the red Delete button expands into the text on the right. Most apps don’t gracefully fade the text near the right edge like Apple’s apps. (I haven’t perfected this yet, which is why the delete feature doesn’t exist yet in Instapaper. I assumed that the standards for quality would be much higher.)
What bothers me the most is that so many apps are simply unnecessary front-ends to websites, such as the slick New York Times app (which consumes a huge chunk of the reading space with a banner ad), the laughable Bank of America app (which is basically a WebKit widget showing their mobile website with a red title bar), and the Google search app (which does the same thing as their iPhone web interface). This category of store entries didn’t need to be apps at all — and being an app doesn’t add much value to them. You might as well use Safari.
I want to see more apps doing things and enabling uses that weren’t possible to do well, if at all, using Safari. That’s the result I expected from the pent-up SDK demand. There are some great ones already available, but certainly not the bulk of the 500 apps launched today.