App's App

As iPhones and iPads further consolidate their monopoly in the smartphone and tablet PC market, more Apps are available in App Store as well. I used to check App Store once in a month, and always found the same games ranking in the Top 25. But now the market is much more competitive, with new popular games emerging every week. Especially as the format of App Store changes, more opportunities are offered to new games. But how to direct consumers to "good and cheap" ones? That's the job for App's App. Several App's App serve as categories for the hundreds of thousands of Apps in the store. They rank Apps in the same category by reviews, show the price change of paid Apps and recommend similar or complementary Apps by detecting users' current Apps. They are helpful in choosing Apps, but now people obviously find out that App's App has become a big market itself, thus more and more App's App are developed to cater different customer groups.

I have more than fifty Apps in my iPad, and less than 20% of them are used frequently - as a woman staying with a WiFi-equipped laptop for the most of the day, I don't need to use iPad that much. Every time I came across a new App, I said to myself "this is fancy" or "it must be useful", but it always ended as a disposable App whose function I couldn't even recall after a week, let alone using it any more. Over time, my iPad and iPhone are packed with Apps and I have to clean them periodically. App's App improves my addiction to downloading new Apps thanks to their luring introductions, but also speeds up my cleaning frequency. Sometimes I find myself an idler who are more fond of exploring new App ideas rather than finding really useful Apps.

When I reckon how much iPhone and iPad reshaped my life in the last two years, the change was silent but obvious. Now I can't think of traveling without a "map" App (well Apple's map almost pushes me to use paper maps other than that in iPhone), or waiting in the bus station without checking "Facebook" or "twitter", or failing to take photos when seeing something funny around. Now I'm used to checking emails, taking photos, recording information and playing games everywhere - at home, on bus, in shopping mall, at a coffee shop, etc. I also believe I'm not alone. People used to talk or read on BART, but now they play iPhone. When demands are created, they won't vanish until better replacements are found.

In the presence of booming Apps, people can easily get lost when they have too many options. App's App is hardly the solution - itself is getting into trouble because of the large numbers, and neither is App's App's App. What truly serve the customers' interests is a better categorized App Store, with a review ranking system and detailed introduction of each App - some of them have such fancy names that you can figure out their true functions until downloading them. We are just dumb consumers who pay for anything that looks good in App Store, so please at least make our shopping experiences better.