Right. I’ve given myself 15 minutes to get this out. No editing, just a brain-dump of a thought I had at lunch today.

My feeling at the moment is that the app marketplace is, for the most part, comprised of applications that are not valuable. They’re not worth paying cash for, nor are they worth the time spent developing them at all. Their worth should be a measure of how helpful they are, but if you have to try hard to integrate them into your life or workflow, then they are not helpful. A good tool is indespensable and proves itself by use.

So what does that mean for iPhone/iPad apps? I guess it means that the app marketplace is an essentially (brute) capitalist market. The validation is purely a matter of whether someone will buy the app, not whether the app is useful, or valuable by any objective measure. Are we alright with that? For developers and designers of these terrible apps, there must come a point - pre-launch, of course - at which they realize they are creating useless junk. Yet they proceed anyway, not out of any malice, I imagine, but just out of a desire to make something and hopefully profit from it. But how unsatisfying. For consumers, I get the sense that people consider apps to be throwaway purchases. They’re mostly so inexpensive that if the app doesn’t become indespensable to them, the loss isn’t a concern. But what about in the aggregate? I’d love to know how much the average apps marketplace customer has spent since it’s launch - both in terms of cash and in terms of the number of apps downloaded. 

My worry is that this structure degrades critical thought, creativity, care for objective value, and a whole host of other things pertinent to regard for humankind. It certainly can’t be sustainable.

What do you think?

Posted at 1:23pm and tagged with: apps, ethics, design, mobile,.