Each big event inspires people to think about how it can be app-ified. And that in turn results of even more App Store junk
At some point the idea of half-a-million apps must be turned around a bit towards “less but better”. EURO 2012 soccer tournament is a prime idea of the fact. There are over 50 apps devoted to this event, and most of them – even the official ones – are pretty worthless. I suspect that this little fact will soon transform the users view on apps towards something mostly useless, ugly and ubiquitous.
Apple acquired CHOMP a while ago to refine it’s app store search, while Google relies more on users comments and ratings to filter out garbage. But let’s face it – most people don’t really rate their apps, so we can say that most of the high ratings come from the friends of the developer. And nearly everyone has some friends, so even crappy apps can jump higher.
Crapware is currently about 80% of all mobile apps. That might damage the users perception of an app as a cool and needed thing. Most games are crapware, and some are direct rip-offs or even stolen (like the infamous Canabalt HD which is in fact direct theft from the real Canabalt game). Finding relevant apps and games is now super hard, and review sites don’t really help with that much – mostly because a lot of them promote the games and apps that pay them, and any app can pay money – even a crappy one.
I see two ways the app world might go – either the app store curators (both from Apple and Google) will shrink their app stores to good, beautiful and relevant apps and games, or people will soon get bored with surfing through hundreds of crapware to find one decent app. Or they might even shift back to web-based offerings that Facebook is trying to prepare for them. We’ll see. But if you ask me which EURO 2012 app is the best I can honestly say – switch to your favorite website for the info and news. It seems all of the apps are quickly made, underdeveloped attempts to gain users through a big event. Even the official app kinda sucks and that tells us a lot…