By no means are all app providers equal although it’s true that they’re all growing pretty fast. With more than 225,000 apps, Apple, The Chimps favourite by a mile, is the titan in this market. By integrating their payment model with your iTunes account, paying Apple for your precious apps is scarily easy! Beware of ‘in-App’ purchases however! If you’re looking after the pennies, I don’t recommend playing any of the Storm8 games late at night after a few banana beers… when it’s only a couple of taps, it’s far too easy to convince yourself that £28 for 100 honour points in order to get that special weapon is a good idea!!
A number of the bigger apps require wi-fi to download. One of the best things about these iPhone apps is that Apples’s rigorous quality control ensures that the technical side of the app will be of a high standard. We think that they should really have more quality control on the actual content side as there are some really really bad apps out there… As I said, we love our iPhones, here at Mobile Monkey and we love our App Store, so all in all, you’ve done a great job Jobs.
Android is second place, but the gap is huge… with only 100,000 or so apps, and from what we hear the good ones are rarer than blue bananas. What we do like however is that you can share favourites with your mates using the HTC App Sharing widget. We don’t like however that bigger apps have to be saved on memory sticks!! You also have to go through Google checkout which is a pain and can take ages. The best thing about Android is that if you decide you don’t like an app within 24 ours of purchase you get your dosh back! I wish Apple would implement this as it would get rid of all the games that look amazing but end up being completable in an hour.
The Ovi Store from Nokia is next with a few good in-house apps like Ovi Maps, which has people chatting at the moment. The fact that Nokia has such a huge audience around the world should have led to Nokia rapidly advancing in the app market but while their own apps are pretty good, the 3rd party apps are not up to scratch.
In the final places in this race are Palm and Microsoft. Palms hardware is excellent, but hardly has any apps, although the ones it does have are top names. As for Windows Marketplace? Well we’re all waiting to see what happens here. I think we may be in for a surprise with the new Windows Phone coming out soon. It’s never a good idea to assume that Microsoft are out of the race.
Where’s BlackBerry you say?? Pah… who cares!
