Never one to rest on its laurels, Apple is piling on following its record Q3 with a big push for the holidays. Today, it launched its opening salvo for the season with “Gift” (above) and “Song” (after the jump). The former, in typical fashion, starts with something immediately relevant (using the Target app to get gift recommendations) before going off on tangents (photo editing, “Monopoly,” Zipcar?).
“Song,” meanwhile pretty much just goes full-on for the “There’s an app for that” mantra, touching on real estate, The Sims, Facebook, and Shazam. And honestly, in both cases, it’s pretty effective. There are more than 100,000 apps, after all, even if there’s no Google Voice. The campaign works because it’s welcoming and says you can find what you want to do easily. (via MacRumors)
Unfortunately, that selling point is actually pretty different from the real experience of using the App Store. Once you hit 100,000, discoverability becomes the killer app, not any single product within. This isn’t that big a problem yet (except for developers), but it will become an increasing one over time. What good are 100,000 apps when I struggle to use more than 10 on a daily basis?
Consider this: iTunes offers more than 10 million songs, but lots of users have several thousands of songs (I have nearly 5,000 and add more every year). Assuming that the average for a power user is around 2,000 songs per user, that rounds out to there being 5,000 songs to every one that most people download.
With apps, by contrast, there are 100,000, but I would guess most power users carry fewer than 30 on them at any given time (I’m actually closer to 20 beyond the initial set). That’s 3,300 apps per one download, a ratio that starts to get really dramatic as the app store grows toward a million choices but people install no more of them. It’s already pretty rough trying to break through as an obscure band on iTunes — it could get much worse as the ratio grows increasingly unfavorable for apps.
Fortunately, problems tend to highlight opportunities to innovate. Everyone knows that a more robust Springboard app is needed to help us sort through our many apps to find the one we want when we want it. Apple could also come up with new forms of App Store search to better surface apps better suited to you (imagine if Genius for Apps worked!), or it could take note of developers whose work you’ve enjoyed previously and recommend those. Moreover, Apple could even offer different ways to market oneself on the App Store. We’re used to bundling on the desktop side; why shouldn’t there by an iPhoneHeist next year to bring together rock stars with rising contenders on the fastest-growing platform ever?
The growth of the iPhone has been fascinating. OS 1.0 was about defining a new kind of mobile experience. OS 2.0 was about opening the platform to true development and making it more than just a product. OS 3.0 has been about fixing the most-requested problems, including MMS, copy-and-paste, and tethering (not that AT&T has implemented the latter). OS 4.0, it seems to be, would be an excellent time to figure out how one might actually benefit from owning a couple hundred different apps.
