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In Apple’s App Store, The Quality Is Tough To Find

I was one of the lucky few that manually downloaded iPhone OS 2.0 on Thursday so I dropped it onto my previously-Jailbroken 4GB iPhone without incident, leaving the hordes of non-techie iPhone owners to fend for themselves on Friday’s server free-for-all. Thursday was also my first introduction to the iTunes App Store, something that I’ve been anxiously awaiting since it was introduced a long, long time ago.

The concept of the App Store is fantastic and will be a revolution in mobile content, delivery, and usage, but the issue that I had been worried about all along reared its ugly head the instant I started browsing.

Most of the App Store apps are shit. Useless. Poorly-designed. Shit.

The Apple-designed iPhone apps like Maps, Weather, and iPod are interface works of art. Many Mac OS X apps sweat the details equally as well as Apple, sometimes even more so, but developing apps for the iPhone will arguably become a larger marketplace than developing for the Mac so it has attracted a wider swath of development houses, many of which don’t share the Apple aesthetic.

These non-Apple apps that are usability-challenged usually fall into the following categories:

• Clunky - Wrong interface elements used in the wrong areas, non-standard conventions for navigation.
• Ugly - Custom-designed widgets that suck, wrong colors, aka, this app and all those like it.
• Useless - Does nothing beneficial for me: not fun, not useful, not smart, not clever, just stupid.

Out of the 15+ applications I’ve downloaded so far, I’ve only kept about half, one of which I keep only because I paid for it based on user reviews and found out it sucked after it was downloaded (return your app within 24 hours for a full refund?). Apps that got nixed were deleted for falling into the aforementioned categories or because they were slow, boring, or not worth the space on the phone. Many of the apps in the Social Networking category were deleted because for them to be even remote useful, they relied upon all my friends signing up and me caring about what they’re doing and where they are at all times of the day. Lucky for my friends, I don’t really care about those two pieces of information, and if I do, I can simply SMS message them or call them to find out.

The App Store is a big win, but there needs to be more Mac-like software available or it’ll turn into a cesspool of Palm UI dropouts in no time.