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iPhone App Store, Part 2

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Last week I wrote about some problems with the iPhone App Store, so this week we'll take a look at some of the applications.

The Apps Themselves
So, what about the apps? Are they worth it? Overall, I am impressed. I'd give most apps a solid B. There are a few duds out there, but they get such low ratings I haven't even bothered with them. Of the ones I actually have downloaded, I am generally pleased. The apps generally work as advertised.

I've even been impressed with the technical support: I reported problems to two app developers and both of them replied within a day. One of them even said they'd already fixed the problem I reported (it was an issue with their server) and were adding my feature suggestion in their next version. Pretty cool and impressive.

Some of the apps I've used are quite incredible: Sketch, for instance, has an amazing interface and lets you do impressive things with a phone. (Though it is puzzling that it doesn't let you type text.) It also does something few, if any, desktop apps do: it supports multiple undo even after a file is saved! That's right, you can create an image, make changes to it, and then come back a week later and undo the last thing you did. That's sophisticated for a "real" app, let alone a phone!

Some apps do neat things with the iPhone's motion sensors, but except for games that use that for control, mostly that is a gimmick. Perhaps that will change over time as developers get more sophisticated. I'm very interested to see what developers do in the long run with such technology. I love the subtlety of the sensors: no onscreen interface to clutter things, etc. A perfect example is Apple's Calculator application. I'd heard it added scientific functions, but couldn't find them: it seemed like the same old calculator. Then I rotated the screen: bingo, a widescreen scientific calculator! Wow. How powerful is that? My mom would never need the scientific calculator and loves the regular one -- and she'll never find the "hidden" one, either. What a great way to implement a feature without adding clutter. I love it!

All that said, that doesn't mean things are perfect. With most apps, I have found things that need improvement. Some apps are seemingly so simple there's just no way to customize it or make it do more than the bare minimum. That can be annoying, especially for a paid app. For example, I bought a simple Shopping List app and I like it -- it has a nice look and it's simple. But one disadvantage I discovered after using it is that it only lets you maintain a single list at a time. I'd like to support multiple lists. For instance, I always keep a Costco list going, but the items I buy at Costco are not things I want on my local grocery store list. The same goes for other esoteric items, like things from the hardware store or pharmacy. I'm sure multiple lists will be added in the future -- but it's a bit frustrating to see a paid app so limited from the get-go.

Another more serious problem is inconsistency. A big one is preferences or application settings. Some apps allow you to set these within the app. That makes the most sense to me, because when I'm in the app that's when I'm thinking about the settings. But others use Apple's method to add settings with the Settings application (similar to the way Mail accounts are set up). For Apple apps that isn't so bad as they are the most prominent on the iPhone and some of the settings are complicated, but for simpler apps it's weird to have some settings in the app itself and some in the Settings app. There's also no way to tell if an app has settings -- when I went into Settings recently I was surprised to discover several apps there had installed settings I didn't know about.

Another disadvantage of separate-from-app preferences is it makes it a lot hard to tweak and test out various settings. If I'm within the app, for example, I can create a visual change and see the results immediately in the app. But it's ridiculous to have to switch to the Home screen, find Settings, go to Preferences, find the app's preferences, make a change, go back to Home, find the app again, and relaunch it to see the change. The free Flashlight is a perfect example of how horrible this is: it has several flashlight "modes" (of various brightnesses and colors) but you can't set that within the app, only within Settings. Lame!

Other inconsistencies also abound: many games and apps only work in one rotation of the iPhone and don't support auto-rotation, which is lame. Others override Apple's iPhone "standards." Like one game I have has a slider control for zooming instead of using Multi-Touch's "pinch" gesture. Others use the wrong controls or implement them in a weird way that doesn't feel natural.

This reminds of the early days of Macintosh, when developers did whatever they wanted and didn't always follow Apple's interface guidelines. The market eventually forced everyone to comply, but it took time. I had thought that Apple's genius in releasing the iPhone for a full year before allowing third party apps would have solved that problem, but it seems some developers have hardly used an iPhone and don't know how to set up the interface properly. I'm sure this will settle down, but it's annoying right now.

Help is another area of inconsistency. Apple doesn't include much (okay, any) help with its apps, but developers often want to include game instructions or other details. But every developer's doing it a different way, with different sized screens, different fonts, different backgrounds, etc. It's confusing. There's a card game I like but it displays the instructions on every launch, which is tedious. Other apps have instructions but how you find and activate those instructions is different. Apple needs to come up with a universal and consistent help feature so that help is presented the same way in all apps and activated via the same icon, menu, or gesture.

Another problem with iPhone apps is that some apps take a long time to launch. There's nothing wrong with that, per se -- a complicated app is bound to take a while to load -- but the problem I've run into is that this is a phone, not a computer, and the way the iPhone works is that when you receive a phone call the phone call takes priority over the app. That means the app might, instantly, at any time, be quit and the phone take over. When the phone call is finished, the app is relaunched (if necessary). For larger apps this seems to always be necessary (there's probably not enough memory in the iPhone to do both the app and the phone call at the same time), so I have to wait while the app is launched again.

This is particularly irksome in a game. I'll be right in the middle of a play and suddenly everything fades away for a phone call -- Murphy's Law guarantees it's a wrong number or something useless and lame -- and then you have to wait while the game reloads.

Developers need to figure out ways to make apps load faster. I have some apps take thirty seconds or so to load, and it is extremely annoying to wait that long after a phone call interruption. I'd be willing to have less impressive graphics or sound for a faster launch time.

Another factor is lack of undo support after the game is quit. While that sounds odd for a desktop app, but an iPhone app is should be a necessity. I was playing a solitaire card game (Spider) which by nature of the game requires you experiment by going down different "paths" of cards. If you reach a dead end, you undo to go back where you started and try a different path. This worked fine during the game itself, but once I received a phone call in the middle -- and I was horrified to find that when the game relaunched, I could no longer undo: I was stuck at my current location. That totally effects the strategy of such a game (I'm afraid to make moves in the game since my plans could be destroyed at any moment by a phone call).

Another serious issue is battery life. I'm not sure what drains it, but I have seen a difference between apps, so it's not just screen use. Scrabble, for instance, drains my iPhone in less than two hours, while other games like Majong let me play for hours. Both are visual and interactive, but the battery drains much faster in Scrabble. Why? It's not an action game -- for an arcade-type game I might expect that kind of battery usage. (And yes, before you ask, I turned off the annoying music.)

I'm sure that developers will figure out things like this with experience, but for now it's an interesting thing to note. Eventually it might even be a selling point of various apps: "This app is more battery efficient than that one, so buy it!"

Speaking of the battery, I belatedly noticed that some apps (games, in particular) remove the phone's status bar from the top of the screen. The status bar tells you how strong your network signal is and the current battery state: important information. With that gone, it's easy to play a game too much and run the battery down to nothing. The only time you'll know is when you're given a "20% left" low battery alert, which could be too late. I don't like that. At first I thought the only way to find the battery level was to quit the game and check the Home screen, which takes time. But then I discovered that if you simply sleep the iPhone when you wake it up but before you unlock it, the battery icon is on the screen for a few seconds before it goes back to sleep. So that gives you an easy to way to check the battery state without quitting the game. Now if I know that I need phone power because I'm traveling or expecting a phone call, I can make sure I don't overplay a game (if I'm killing time I'll pick a game that doesn't use much power).

Other Problems
Some other things I've noticed about apps: some are little different from web apps, or even worse. For example, I'm a movie buff and go to movies all the time. But I'm in a rural area so I need to check local theaters and theaters 30+ miles away. On the imdb.com website I can do that easily -- but both of the native apps for checking movie times don't support that, which make them useless to me. (I have worked around it by setting one app to be my local theatre and the other to a far-away theatre.)

Speaking of web apps, many native apps are simply interfaces to web services. As native apps they are more powerful, more featured, and faster, but they still depend on the Internet for their function. While for some apps, for instance Twitterific, which lets you post to your Twitter account, that is clear and obvious, for others it is not: I downloaded a number of interesting-sounding apps only to discover at launch that they don't even run less I have an account with some website. If it's a website I'm familiar with that might not be a problem, but many are unknown to me and the services aren't essential -- yet I can't even try the app without creating an account. That's too large a barrier for entry. I wish the apps that require accounts would say so in the description on the App Store as I wouldn't even bother downloading them!

Another issue is Apple's location system. I don't have an iPhone 3G, so my phone can only approximate my location via cell towers. That's fine. But it can take a long time to "find" me, which is not fine. It's infuriating when an app insists on looking up my location on every launch. Why can't it default to my last location unless I tell it to update it?

Worse, Apple has implemented "security" that make the phone ask you for permission every time an app wants to access your location info. It's annoying and smacks of Vista: didn't Apple mock that feature of Vista in an ad? Why can't there be a global "it's okay to access my location" setting I can approve once and be done with it? Even if I had to approve it once per app it'd be better than now: like one of those aforementioned movie time apps asks me on every launch and it drives me crazy. I prefer waiting for the IMDB website to load!

Conclusion
Overall, Apple has done an amazing thing. The iPhone ecosystem is obviously a platform for the future and in just a year is shaking up the planet. But it's certainly not perfect and Apple will have some growing pains over the next year or so. It'll be fascinating to see where the iPhone goes and what kinds of things applications can do in a year. I'm confident everything will get sorted out. In the meantime, us early adopters will suffer some minor issues, but the iPhone is still worlds better than any other device out there.

macopinion@designwrite.com