Not iAPPlicable
Last Updated on February 24, 2024 8:11 am by
Apple has pulled over 1,000 apps by an outfit called Molinker from its App Store. There are suspicions that the developer is reponsible for the highly favorable reviews they have received. You can read more here.
This whole Apps Store phenomenon fascinates me. Many talk as if Apple invented smartphone apps.
They didn’t. When I got my Smartphone, I found bunches of apps, many through a application clearing house called Handango. Others I found available directly from developers.
What Apple did was pull iGadget apps into their walled garden and find a way to profit off the efforts of third-party developers. The upside is that they can vouch for the apps in the App Store. The downside is that they limit developers’ access to the market. Indeed, they have, from time to time, been accused of refusing to approve apps, not because they were defective, but because they might lead to a breach in the wall around the garden; the fuss over Google Voice could be an example of this.
I don’t have a lot of third party apps on my smartphone. In fact, I recently removed several that I don’t use, including the RSS aggregator, an internet radio app, and a podcatcher (I think I’ve mentioned before that the issue is battery life; my iRiver podplayer is good for 16-plus hours on a charge; I’m not wasting my cellphone battery on podcasts when it has a talk-time of about five hours, just as advertised).
Just for grins and giggles, here’s a list of third-party apps I use almost every day All of these are Windows Mobile apps. I have an Android G1 on my Christmas list–I’m a keyboard kind of guy–and I’m hoping Santa is paying attention:
- Opera Mobile to browse the web (I tried the MS Facebook app just for Facebook access for a while, but it was a memory-hogging kludge).
- Resco Explorer, a great file manager.
- Docs To Go to read and edit MS *.doc, *.ppt, and *.xls files and view *.pdf files (it also includes a zipper).
- Gentimer timer and stopwatch.
I also really like the AllReader ebook reader; I don’t use it often, but it’s great for dentists’ waiting rooms and airport lines. I tried three others before deciding it was the best available for my phone.