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- guardian.co.uk, Friday July 11 2008 13.43 BST
It will be a few years before iPhone users see such a lush growth of third-party apps. Photograph: Ricardo Beliel/Alamy
So, finally, the third-party iPhone and iPod Touch apps are here. It's only taken Apple, what, a month or two short of seven years to turn the iPod from something that people laughed at and dismissed into a fully-fledged platform on which other people build applications. (I've written previously about how important these third-party iPhone and iPod applications are to Apple.) For the phone itself, only about 18 months.
And what do we find are the fruits of that labour? Courtesy of John Gruber, who's been watching what people downloaded on the first day, we discover that the most popular paid-for application was Sega's Super Monkey Ball, with 10,955 downloads (at $9.99 each) in the first 24 hours. He calculates that to be $109,440 in total, about $76,000 for Sega and $33,000 for Apple under the 70–30 revenue deal.
He also notes that when people have a choice of free vs paid apps, they split (at least to begin with) about 50–1 in favour of free. That 2% "conversion rate" is certainly interesting (though of course once people have been using the phone for longer, the figure will probably rise).
But if you thought that the first appearance of the iPhone's third-party apps would be marked by people producing fantastically clever applications that would let you calculate your carbon footprint and amortise the price of a gallon of petrol while controlling your washing machine, you'll be disappointed. And if you thought too that Apple's reputation for producing products with great engineering and user interfaces would somehow be transmitted over to third-party builders, prepare to be doubly disappointed. People have such strange ideas of what makes a good interface.
For example, have a look at the Sudoku game (with sound effects!) on the linked video. Now ask yourself: is that as legible as it could possibly be? Is it as simple to use as it could be? Why, for example, have a dark star background? Why not white? And when you're entering a number in a square, why not have the list of possible numbers come up in the square? (I'll admit to a slight Sudoku addiction – though obviously I could give it up any time – and use Sudoku Susser on my computer, which while having a quite horrendous user interface away from the grid, does at least start with a clean, black-on-white grid. Honest.)
There's also plenty of criticism of iPhone interface design: Gruber and commenters pretty much flayed the work of a company that wrote a "trip-meter" called TripLog1040 to measure your distance travelled. At first glance you might think it was acceptable. On the iPhone, though, millimetres matter. It may be the first screen where that's the case. (Other people tried redesigns: here's one, and another.
But such elementary mistakes in design are the sorts of things that you have to expect from a nascent platform. After all, what do we all remember from our first unfettered experiences of using Microsoft's Windows? Yup, discovering the games – solitaire and Minesweeper, which were designed to train people not used to using the mouse, while they thought they were just bunking off.
It's like the evolution of a rainforest: you can't have the soaring canopy of trees and the rich wildlife below without first having all the compost at the bottom. Some of the free apps are probably of negative value, inasmuch as they take up storage space you could use for something else: anyone for Yes/No (iTunes-only URL)? This app will make those hard decisions for you without your having to toss one of those expensive "coins". Or Hold On, in which you "compete to see how long you can hold the button"?
Yeah, well, don't worry. The trivia won't necessarily get washed away; it'll exist, somewhere in cyberspace. But in time we'll start to get the really useful products. Indeed, some of them may already be there. Fraser Speirs's Exposure, a Flickr client, has the fascinating "Near Me" button: click it and any geotagged photos on Flickr that were taken near your current location will be shown – because the new iPhone has GPS, of course. That's just the start. The rainforest is growing. Don't worry about all the compost on the ground. It's all just getting started.
