Today’s (hugely) Stupid Example of a Useless Series of iPhone Apps
I’ve been wanting to lay off posting on the growing (and awful) trend towards producing large sets of iPhone apps that all do the same basic thing (and charging for each one), but I keep seeing worse and worse examples of this dodgy practice. Last night I saw an example that just leapt off the page, in all the wrong ways.
The TapFinder series offers no less than twenty individual apps, each of which promises to help you find a specific thing while you’re on the road – from a bed & breakfast, hotel, or hostel, to coffee shops, book stores, banks and so on. And each one finds ONLY one thing, and each costs $0.99!
So … you can spend nearly $20 to end up with twenty icons polluting your home screens, and between the twenty of them they still come nowhere near matching the Google Maps app, Earthcomber, or any number of other solid programs that could help you find everything covered by TapFinder, and a whole bunch more. That’s just what you need when you’re out and about – 20 stupid apps to wade through when looking for a post office or a hotel or similar.
We’ve talked before about how it would be nice to see a ‘Novelty’ section added to the App Store, so some of the bizarre, useless looking apps could be housed there and other categories would hopefully stand a better chance of being populated with more useful programs. When I look at the TapFinder series, I don’t even believe it fits in a Novelty section though. It deserves another section, one that should perhaps be labeled ‘Only For The Criminally Stupid’ or similar. I mean seriously, $20 for 20 apps that don’t match up to several free single apps – just ridiculous …
I’m sure developers of these shitty apps are more than glad that you give them free advertising on this blog… Good or bad, advertising is advertising.
You say “I’ve been wanting to lay off posting on the growing (and awful) trend towards producing large sets of iPhone apps that all do the same basic thing”, so please do!!!
As I commented before on this blog (btw, that comment wasn’t published…), just ignore these stupid apps instead of focusing on them. I don’t care about what’s bad… I wanna know what’s good!!!
Hi Sebastien – Firstly, sorry about the blocked comments. That was not intentional on the part of anyone here – Akismet had caught up two of yours for some reason – just approved both of them, including the one you refer to above, which is at:
http://tinyurl.com/8c7cwy
On the main gist of your comment, I appreciate your thoughts, even though I disagree with some. I guess my thought is movie critics write about terrible films, not just great ones. Sportswriters write about bad players / teams, not just great ones. And bloggers (not just Brandon and I, but lots of bloggers at sites large and small) write about things that interest them for good reasons, and for bad.
I definitely agree that I don’t ever want the focus of this site to be crap apps, but I do want to write about what interests me, or in this case stirs me up. Heck, I know we’re not amongst the big-name sites – but I even hope that in some small way, our rants against these crap apps and crap practices may eventually help to make headway against the practices and lead to improvements in the App Store .
I will do my very best to make sure the focus stays on good, interesting apps as much as possible though …
Hi,
Unlike the olden days where it was just Windows Mobile and Palm, now a days there are plenty of choices for iPhone users. If anyone spends a little bit time researching the applications, there are enough applications almost all of them free for iPhone users.
I have more than 150 applications downloaded all for free. All of them do a good job.
So, such applications no one is going to buy even if it exists in iPhone app store.
@PatrickJ – thank you for getting my comments out of Aksimet. And thank you for sharing your insight. I do understand where you’re coming from on this, and as an iphone blogger myself, I should have known better. I guess I just have no tolerance for crapps (crap apps) so I don’t even bother mentioning them on iDB.
@nsivakr – 150 applications!? I’m curious to know how often you use all these apps?
@ Sebastien – my pleasure on the comments rescuing – still not sure what Akismet had up its nose on those
I think these crapps get us all very stirred up lately. I may be way over-optimistic, but I imagine Apple will figure some of this out before too long, and maybe we’ll have to wade through a bit less of it.
@nsivakr – nice to see another huge apps fan – and I agree of course, there are tons of good apps out there …