the onda

As the count of App Store applications climbs from 15,000 to 20,000, one of my favorite pass times has become going to look at the new types of applications being released. While all of the numbers are climbing in the right direction, there is one metric where we seem to be a little stuck: the types of innovation that new apps are introducing. And by innovation I mean new types of interactions, with Shazam being the perfect example of something so cool (and previously impossible) that people who see it are left with afterimages of the future bouncing in their vision.

Is this apparent lack of this type of innovation due to the straightjacket of what the SDK allows developers to do or is it just representative of the kinds of things that a mainstream market expects from a pocket computer?

Charles is keeping a good progress report on how the iPhone platform is growing over time, but looking at the big pie chart in the middle of his post, you'd think that the iPhone is all about games, entertainment, and various different kinds of verticalized todo lists. Where are the new Shazams? How about more applications that combine the GPS with the various sensors on the device to help people contextualize their activities with the net in a better way?

Another observation: as the platform attracts more developers, the overall quality and "snappiness" of the apps seems to be going down. This is to be expected, but the result is that I've seen a few native apps as of late that actually seem to take longer to get to functional than it does to load webpages in mobile Safari. If this trend continues, I'm sure that folks might get to the point where they become afraid of installing yet another gas tracking application.

Video capture. Background processing. Multi-tasking. API access to the Bluetooth radio. Notifications. I'm going to guess that opening up 50% or more of these avenues for interaction will unleash a new class of apps from developers. I just hope it happens soon.