Nokia is not doing very well right now. The future success and profits depend on the high-end phone sales, which is why the new Lumia Windows Phone range has been analyzed a lot.
I haven’t tested one, so this post won’t be for or against Nokia or Microsoft. It is about the strange application focus that many on the smartphone market seem to have.
Almost all Lumia reviews I have read list as a major fault that there are “only” 70 000 or so applications available for the Windows Phone platform, when iPhone and Android users could choose from about half a million.
Does it really matter?
Firstly, most people don’t care much about apps.
I have been working with mobile phone technology for a long time and have used tens of smartphones, so I believe I know something about phones. Yet, I am not interested in the size of the app stores.
I only want a few things to work on my phones: uncomplicated access to all my email accounts, a good web browser, smooth Facebook and Twitter clients, an easy way to upload photos, something for short meeting notes and occasional video viewing, a little navigation, a music controller, and IP calls maybe. Ability to view work files would be nice, but I can do without editing on the go.
That’s it. I don’t need real-time pictures of public traffic in cities I'll never visit and I don’t want to know how many calories I drank last Friday. I don’t have any interest in fine-tuning the phone’s battery life with widgets, nor in bonding with the local McDonald’s. I don’t play games on my phones. I don’t even know what Instagram actually does.
For what I have seen and experienced, most smartphone apps are poorly written uninteresting crap (crapps?). A billion unnecessary low-quality apps in a store only makes it more difficult to find the few interesting ones that really add value to everyday life.
Secondly, a lot of people don’t care about apps at all.
If the phone companies want to keep on selling smartphones at current pace, sooner or later they will have to sell one to my mother. I can tell you right now that she will never go to an app store. If the sales guys at the local phone joint will use the amount of compatible apps somewhere in the web as a sales argument, they have totally missed the point.
My father-in-law is a happy iPad user. He never goes to the App Store. The few apps he has on his device (a newspaper, a TV recording service and Skype for talking to grandkids) have been installed by the IT department. If he ever needs something more, he will probably ask me again, but I doubt he ever will. A web access device with a good screen is enough.
Thirdly, apps are a complex system for accessing simple web content.
Creating, testing and distributing several apps for various platforms is a pain and causes a lot of unnecessary work for developers. As a result of the divided efforts, most apps aren’t well-designed or optimized. Often, the user experience can’t compete with a good mobile web site. For example, Facebook’s mobile pages still beat many Facebook apps in speed, functionality and ease of use.
Sure, there are some great applications that make life easier, but finding, downloading and installing the right apps requires time, interest and capabilities most users don’t have. I sincerely hope that the development of web standards will get us past this stage. Some new HTML5 implementations I have seen look promising.
What I would like to hear in a Lumia review is how quickly you can switch windows in the web browser, how easy it is to view photos, videos and comments in Facebook, or how well data connections and roaming can be controlled. I really don’t care about the apps.
Am I alone in thinking that most nerds who write reviews about smartphones have lost touch with the reality of the normal user and criticize phones for things only very few users would really be bothered about?
This is the reason why there is a divide between generations.
;-)
"Right" is being re-written all the time. What matters is what a significant portion of people think.
Most of my colleagues who have started to use Windows Phone have said that it is easy to use but some of their favorite apps from other OS's are missing.
Furthermore, it is easy to see why developers want to make apps: if something proves popular, it is straightforward to switch on charging. This is not possible in the web.
One billion nerds aren't wrong: crapps are good.
Posted by: Antti Vihavainen | April 13, 2012 at 11:34