iPhone Applications Keep Getting Better
When the AppStore was first released, a lot of people were disappointed with the quality of the applications found there. For every solid app, there seemed to be 100 that just weren't very good.
But I don't really care, and that sets me apart from a lot of the articles I've read on the topic. Many people argue that it's the little touches that make Mac software superior, and that the apps we were shown on day one lacked the same polish. And they did. But I think we know why.
It was a new platform, with a very strict NDA, with a fixed release date that no one knew other than Apple, with an app upload process that had to be hand-approved by a human. So all you could do is build your app, make it as stable as possible, post it to Apple, and then hope for the best. Never mind if you made the code 50% better the next day -- Apple had your bits, and was going to release them whenever the store was ready.
So a lot of people had old, outdated, crappy code posted the first day. I know my app wasn't up to par.
But then the dot releases started coming. Slower than the devs would have liked, of course, but they came. And big improvements were made even in the first week.
Well, it's been months now. Apps conceived on the day of launch have had time to launch. And the results are good. In fact, I have several apps that were awful in version one, but have since updated themselves into really impressive pieces of software. Not just impressive for a phone, impressive period.
It hasn't gotten a lot of press or attention yet, but the average quality for AppStore applications is inching higher. Give developers some time and the ability to talk to one another, and they can come out with some pretty great stuff.
