Taking out the Trash

With spring apparently just around the corner, I have the sudden urge to sling out loads of all junk and make things shiny and fresh for the new season.

Of course I could spend hours going through the attic and taking old carpet squares, dried up paint and more to the tip, but a much easier form of spring-cleaning is going through my old apps from when the AppStore was just a novelty, and seeing what horrors have managed to survive on my phone since then.

Over time I have lovingly streamlined my phone so that I have one page of core iPhone functions, and my most cherished apps, then a page of stuff I use a lot myself or for demo purposes, another page of branded apps, and then 6 more pages of apps of highly questionable utility or quality.

Pinch Media’s recent excellent study into app usage over time shows that the vast majority of apps, even paid ones, are unused just 30 days after they’re first downloaded, so of the 800 million or so that have been downloaded since the AppStore launched, there are an awful lot sat in people’s recycle bins… In reality this is a process that millions of users go through every day and apps hit the dust based on a range of different criteria.

Anyway here goes:

Personal favourite keepers
My favourite apps are generally music ones, so the brilliant DigiDrummer, Bebot, iShred and IR-909 all keep their prize positions, as do top-selling racers Banjo Kazooie and Cro-Mag Rally. Then there are the totally useful ones: TubeDeluxe, Facebook, Twitterfon, Lastminute’s FoneFood (better than UrbanSpoon!) and Vicinity.

Great brand apps I demo a lot
Walkers Flavour Racing is a great app that integrates perfectly into a great overall campaign, and I also like both the VW Polo Challenge for its awesome graphics and the BMW Z4 app I wrote about last week. BA Flights is also a great example of a brand delivering a tool of real value to its customers.

Less good brand apps to get rid of
Coke’s approach is to create small throwaway apps based on simple well-known ideas. However, their Magic Bottle (it’s an 8-ball but with very unsatisfying answers) and Spin The Coke are just that – throwaway. That can also be said for the Recycle For London ‘Evil Bin’ game. While the cheap’n'cheerful look and feel matches the light-hearted branding of the overall campaign, any game worth its salt should really have more than 2 minutes or so of gameplay before the novelty wears off. Still, at least I can feel good about recycling it… And finally I can get rid of the Audi A4 app, which with its impossible to control car, questionable design (a black car on a black background?) and rejection of most of the basic features of a driving experience, is a classic example of an iPhone project gone wrong.

Stuff I had to download for work…
I’m no fitness fanatic, but my phone is jammed full of health and fitness apps such as BMI calculator, iPosture, RunKeeper and, erm… FMC… Another client looking at the racier end of the market means I also have the oh-so-classy Bikini Blast, iWobble, and the disturbing iGirl…

Crazy sports apps to get rid of
Much is made of the iPhone’s accelerometer, and in some cases – too much! SGN Golf and iBowl are hopelessly optimistic in trying to recreate the action of the sport, while Soccer Kick-off, Vegas Pool (you can win every time!) and the woeful Darts should really be on the Wii to succeed at all…

iPhone ‘classics’ I just don’t like
Tap Tap Revenge – it’s such a hit that in the future albums may be released purely as Tap Tap updates, and Coldplay’s bank-manager rock seems a perfect first target. Bubblewrap has surely passed its sell-by date, while I could never get JellyCar to stay the right way up, despite its awesome physics and perky soundtrack.

Movie apps for films I will never see
There’s nothing particularly good or bad about the apps, but Fast&Furious, Aliens v Monsters and The Unborn clearly have a limited lifespan, especially as international movie houses seem to be filling their apps with ‘Buy Tickets Now’ links that only work in the US… Surely it isn’t so difficult to remove these links for overseas users?

Quite apart from these I have shed another two pages of apps in total. I hope this shows a couple of things:

- With over 25,000 apps in the store there is a lot of competition, but a lot of it is rubbish, so focus on quality

- The dream is to provide something so cool or useful that it will live on users devices indefinitely

- Failing that, there’s still a lot of benefit in providing an app with just a few minutes of pleasure. This still applies to TV creative so why not digital?

This article was first published in Revolution, Apr 18 2009.