Technology.Design.Creativity.Web 2.0: {UPDATED} Why do I buy so many iPhone apps and what can other smartphones players learn from this?

I was sitting next to a passenger on the plane when I took out my iPhone to put it on airplane mode. The passenger asked my opinion about the iPhone and he was interested to take a look at the apps I installed on the iPhone. He was rather surprised at the number of apps I have on my iPhone and suddenly it just dawned on me that I had never bought as many apps on other smartphone platforms - whether it's windows mobile, symbian or blackberry. See the recent screenshots on my iPhone. These are not all the apps that I have bought. I have not installed all the apps on the iPhone.

I started to take a closer look at the apps that I have bought over the months on iPhone. I realised that while I have some free apps, most of the apps that I have on iPhone are paid apps. I also start to figure out that over time my spending threshold and risk appetite on iPhone apps have increased. In the past, I would do a more extensive search on the app before I made a decision to buy the app and most of the apps would cost $0.99 to $2.99; nowadays, as long as the app is not more than $5, I will be willing to fork out that money to try that app (of course, I do still read the reviews just to make sure I don't get a lemon!). In fact, I realised that I have bought quite a few apps of the same category. The low price simply removes the entry barrier and increases my willingness to take risk to buy the the app, particularly if you become comfortable with the general quality of the apps that appear on appstore over time.

Now, the interesting thing is I don't really often use most of the apps that I bought. In fact, I have bought some games because I thought the games might just come in handy if I need to kill time and after a good 2-3 months, I have yet to play more than 5 minutes on the game before quitting them. I'm just not into games (that I knew even before I bought the games. I have Nintendo DS Lite and PSP. DS Lite is collecting dust and PSP is given away - together with a few hundred dollars worth of games that I bought). Well, I figured out that it's better to just buy the games from iPhone appstore that cost not more than $10 than to spend a few hundred bucks on game consoles. But games aside, I also have quite a few photography-related apps such as PanoLab pro, Camerabag, Picoli, Photogene. I hardly use them as well. I use twitter on my iPhone and I had tried out quite a few Twitter apps and were not happy with most of them as I often had the error message on host connection. Twittie is now my latest Twitter app.

Other than the pre-installed apps on iPhone, There are not more than 5 apps that I use regularly (by that I mean more than 3 times a week). They are: Newsstand, Speakeasy and Twittie, MProfs, Bloomberg. As the Appstore does not have a trial use (except for some apps which have the lite version and that's entirely at the discretion of the developers), I tend to try out many different apps for the same kind of functionality. Just take the Twitter app for example, I had tried out Twitterlator, Twitteriffic, Twinkle, Twitterfon (you won't see all these in the screen shots now as I've discarded some of these apps) before Twittie. I decided to try out Twittie because of the rave reviews and also because the app is affordable (below my $5 threshold). If Apple really takes customer experience seriously, I would urge Apple to work with the developers to have have a "lite verion" or "trial version - with limited functionality or time limit") for the apps and to review the current rating system (see my earlier post on Appstore rating system).

Perhaps, Google or Blackberry can learn from what Apple has done right (or not so right) for the Appstore. I believe that it will be applications and services on the phone that will create the stickiness. That's why we have Android Marketplace for the G1 phone, Blackberry Application Centre for the Storm. This also explains why Nokia has invested billions of dollars to acquire resources and technologies to create the Ovi services and its Nokia Music Store. When Apple first launched its iPhone 2G more than a year ago, critics were doubtful of Apple's success in the market given that the mobile phone market was already saturated and highly competitive. Well, Apple did not compete in the same playing field. They changed the rules. Instead of competing with the smartphones manufacturers head-on, Apple chose to avoid direct competition by positioning the iPhone as a fun, all-in-one entertainment handset for consumers. A year later, Apple raises the bar with the the introduction of Appstore as a key differentiator for the iPhone 3G.

{New}Whether G1 or Storm will be the iPhone killer, let's see. But one thing is clear: if the phone is not user-friendly, forget about the apps. I had tested Storm for a few days and quite honestly, I was not used to the touch and click. I literally had finger-ache. I could not type using holding the Storm in portrait mode because I was not used to the SureType keypad. I had to tilt the phone to a landscape mode. Storm provides the SurePress keypad in full Qwerty form. Holding the Storm in landscape mode and having to press on the screen was just not my cup of tea. G1 is gaining speed with its Android Marketplace. In fact, Wikitude which uses Augmented Reality has been made available on G1 and not on iPhone. At least for now the web-based cut and paste function Pastebud is made available by using javascript bookmarklets. Not exactly ideal - but at least it's a workaround. For that matter, another app SaveMyDocs is another workaround using javascript to allow you to save documents opened in Safari for offline reading.