Battery experience and MobileMe syncing aside, the new iPhone goodness package has been a joy. Thus far I have gone a little application store trigger happy and have downloaded a slew of games and applications to my heart’s content. And thats when I began noticing something going awfully wrong. No, it was not updates failing or applications freezing my device.
I began to notice that 1) the App Store was becoming more and more tiresome to navigate (i.e scroll) through and 2) my once clean iPhone interface was now cluttered with page (slide to the left) after page (slide to the left) after page (slide to the left) after page of mobile applications without any seeming rhyme or reason.

What was once my clean iPhone interface with just the few basic essential widgets (does Apple Mobile use the term widgets anymore?) was now an application organizational nightmare.

I began to try and make some sense of it. For starters I put all my games on page 3. I put all the applications I am experimenting with on the last page. Updates kill my structure as the applications do not update where the old version resides but rather in the next place where there is space. Hey, Apple, I put my Facebook app second on page two for a reason! sigh.

It made me yearn for my Nokia’s. Could you imagine if Nokia just dropped every Symbian application you downloaded onto the home/idle screen. What a mess it would be. Instead Nokia allows you to choose 5 applications to have on your idle/home screen (albeit not in the easiest manner). Symbian applications get downloaded to applications folder and, if you use the application a lot, can be brought up to the idle/homepage.

I understand that immediacy of use is an important issue when it comes to mobile but that is really important to a few chosen applications. I mean, honestly, how many people use more than 5 applications on a regular basis.

That is of course if they are not already overwhelmed by the application store to begin with. As I am writing this there are 126 applications in the Entertainment category, 147 in the Utilities Category, 93 in the productivity category and a whopping 367 applications in the Games category.

All of them seemingly alphabetical somewhat rate based dumps.

Now do not get me wrong, the iPhone application store has proven that the mobile application is not dead. That all it needs is ease of access. And in the beginning “ease of access” is exactly what the iPhone application store was. But what happens when 367 turns into 500 or 1000. When the “Featured” and top “25″ section gets repetitive the only alternative is the exhausting search/slide of game after game after game. Maybe it is possible to have to many developers.

If they are not going to categorize within a category they should at least let you flag games you find interesting as you look at the other 366 games.

Anyways, it occurred to me that sooner or later Apple is going to have to deal with this iPhone real estate problem. In reality this is a problem across the board and on both sides of the equation. Categorizing things under many layers also creates a user interface nightmare. To many clicks divided by the smallness of the screen is a recipe for disaster. But so is an application dump (even if its on several home screens). Having loads and loads of applications getting dumped on the home screen not only looks ugly (very un-Mac) but also gets confusing and less user friendly. It also overwhelms the user and probably leads to applications getting forgotten about or used less frequently.

Perhaps this will lead to people only downloading what they need and thus forcing the market to shrink. Perhaps mobile widgets are the answer.

What is needed is a happy medium which, I can only imagine, will come about via the combination of a killer cross-functional app and mobile user-ability studies.

Hopefully we are not to far away. The fact that Apple had it right in the beginning is a sure sign that they will be one of the firsts and figure this mess out.

Technorati Tags: iphone, nokia, symbian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Apple Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.