Quality, not quantity, is the real mobile app problem

Apple caused a bit of a stir this week. In an apparent change in its App Store policies, it has banned apps using social networking and other gamification techniques to promote other apps, websites, and content from within them. The Candy Crush game is the most notorious example of an app that uses its popularity to become a sales mechanism for other apps and content.

Apple wants apps and content to succeed on their own merits, not through aggressive house ads in popular titles. Developers say that with a more than a million apps in the iOS App Store, they need a way for users to find their other apps and the App Store is too crowded to accomplish that goal. The same goes for the smaller but still huge Google Play app store for Android.

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I understand the developers’ dilemma: There is an overwhelming number of apps in the iOS App Store and Google Play store, and it’s a struggle for potential buyers to find them. But in truth, not enough apps are available — that is, not enough good apps.

Bad apps, unnceessary apps, and me-too apps fill the app stores. In-store mechanisms like user ratings, Apple or Google editor recommendations, and popularity indexes can help, but they tend to reinforce the same set of core apps — nothing succeeds like success. Newcomer apps rarely rise to buyers’ attention. It often takes an app store editor or a buzz-generating review at a magazine or website for a newcomer to break out of the app pack.

That’s because, as I said, there are not too many apps, but too few good apps. Many amazing apps are available for iOS in all sorts of categories, from productivity to photography, but few new ones seem to reach that stature. In the Android world, there are fewer amazing apps to choose from and even fewer new compelling titles coming on board.

Instead, we get dozens of me-too apps. For example, how many email client apps basically replicate the native functions of iOS or Android and add a trivial feature like social-networking lookup? About a dozen, which is way too many. Multiply this me-too effect of marginal-improvement apps by all the app categories, and you can see why most go nowhere.

Of course, me-too apps are easier to create — it’s simply easier to copy than create. Often there’s room for a couple apps that do essentially the same thing but differ on soft factors like user experience, which matter to people. But if a handful of such choices are already available, developers should move on to another idea rather than pile on with more of the same.

Bad apps are also easy to create. It’s no sweat to create a basic wrapper to a website or to use core iOS or Android libraries, to produce very simple apps like calculators, flashlights, fart generators, news feeds, and so on. Many nonprofessional and semipro developers can start there, and many do. They get the same chance as a sophisticated app’s developer to be listed in the iOS App Store or Google Play store. Thus, they fill up the app stores.

When you start warping an app to turn it into a marketing mechanism instead of its original purpose, you know you’ve gone off the rails.

It’s a classic problem called the Tragedy of the Commons, in which people’s individual actions, legitimate in their own rights, combine to create a bad situation overall. Each individual (developer, in this case) is focused on his or her needs and goals, not the overall environment. The more crowded the commons, the more aggressive you become to get attention. Think about what’s happened with advertising: As people get better at filtering out the barrage of ads, advertisers find new ways to get in your face, creating more ad “noise pollution” we learn to ignore, leading to more advertising “noise.”

That’s happening in the iOS App Store, except that the App Store is not a public commons, but a private space. Apple decides when the individual actions get out of hand and changes the rules to stop undesirable behavior. It’s the same approach a theme park uses to manage the overall experience at the same time as the individual experience. Apple, like any other entity, doesn’t always make the right choices, but it’s understandable why it does decide to make a choice.

Ideally, developers would self-regulate, submitting only good apps that don’t overwhelm their category. Of course, the individual’s imperative is to push for his or her immediate self-interest, even if the long-term effect is negative. That’s human nature, because you want — and may need — to win now.

Still, if developers want to get their apps discovered, they have only one path to take: Be much better than their competitors or create valuable new categories, so the opinion makers will take notice and call attention to their gems. Those who try to find new ways to make noise for the same-old same-old will continue to drown.

This article, “Quality, not quantity, is the real mobile app problem,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.