Your app story: Is it quality or quantity?

[rockstarzzz]

I came across this article when Cortana woke me up - Smartphone users stick to limited mobile apps: Report - The Times of India

It talks about how most of the smartphone users use only a limited number of apps from the App Store. It says somewhere about 42% only use/open their favourite apps even if they download tons of apps on their phone.

There was an argument about app gap a few days back. With WP8.1 and its new APIs we have more powerful apps and we have most first party or third party apps (minus banks). I prefer quality apps over quantity. I don't want 35 choices for Twitter clients in the Store, I want may be 3 that do almost everything and don't look like a 7 year old made it during his lunch at school.

With WP Store nearing 280k apps (same number of apps as paid apps in iPhone store reached at the end of 2010) - I have found everything I wanted in my app collection.
What's your app story? What is it that you desire more from the store? - Quality or Quantity?

 

[Maaz Mansori]

It's not a simply question of quality or quantity. It's more about meeting needs. I don't care whether there are 1,000 apps or 1,000,000 apps. What I care about is the ones that I care about are available and that they have adequate functionality. For example, a particular banking app might not be available or it might be available but it lacks an important feature such as mobile deposit that is available on other platforms. Now let's take a look at another app - Facebook Messenger. The WP version doesn't have chat heads nor support for voice-to-text but I could care less about either feature so the app meets my needs. New products come out and they have an associated app and only support iPhone and Android or even existing products like Honeywell security systems (there is a third party app with very limited functionality available). This is the kind of problem we have. Whether we have 5 Twitter apps or 100 Twitter apps is irrelevant as long as an official one with adequate functionality is there. Flashlights; we don't need 500 apps; we have more than enough that are sufficient.

 

[Guytronic]

Me=quality

I'll say I'm not an app collector although fun to see what's out there.
I am a photo app junkie even though the base Nokia photo apps in my opinion excel for my personal use.

The linked article pretty much profiles me exactly.

 

[Dk92]

Half and half for me. I really wish there were some credit union apps on here. I've been content with the selection of apps we do have though.

 

[rockstarzzz]

It's not a simply question of quality or quantity. It's more about meeting needs. I don't care whether there are 1,000 apps or 1,000,000 apps. What I care about is the ones that I care about are available and that they have adequate functionality. For example, a particular banking app might not be available or it might be available but it lacks an important feature such as mobile deposit that is available on other platforms. Now let's take a look at another app - Facebook Messenger. The WP version doesn't have chat heads nor support for voice-to-text but I could care less about either feature so the app meets my needs. New products come out and they have an associated app and only support iPhone and Android or even existing products like Honeywell security systems (there is a third party app with very limited functionality available). This is the kind of problem we have. Whether we have 5 Twitter apps or 100 Twitter apps is irrelevant as long as an official one with adequate functionality is there. Flashlights; we don't need 500 apps; we have more than enough that are sufficient.

Okay lets not talk about "personal" apps because each one of us banks differently and has different sort of needs for those apps. But then there are a few things as that article suggests that we all do.

For instance, photography, social, news, weather, emails, messenger apps - we have TONs of these lot. If most users have their favourites in these categories, of course we have more than enough apps. We have zillions of twitter apps, weather apps and photography apps, don't we? We have some real good quality apps for photography and weather, some even exclusive to WP!

Talking about Facebook Messenger - I think it is a perception issue we all have coming to WP. Chat heads for example, we all think, it is the app that lacks it but in reality it could be the OS that limits it. Yes, we could do with some call functionality and generally function-parity.

 

[Laura Knotek]

I'm generally satisfied with the quantity of apps, especially since many apps I wanted have arrived (Instagram, Cinemark, 3rd party Starbucks works great). The only ones I find lacking in quantity are shopping apps: I have 7-11, Home Depot and Walgreens; however, I don't have Walmart, Target, Lowe's, Macy's, Sam's Club--all of these are national chains, not local/regional stores.

In some cases, which shopping apps are available has affected which businesses I patronize. For example, I have both Walgreens and CVS in my neighbourhood. Since Walgreens has an app, but CVS doesn't, I order my photo prints from Walgreens. I'm not going to mess around uploading photos to my PC, and then uploading them to the CVS website when I can just upload directly from my phone to Walgreens using their app and then get an email when the prints are ready. I can do this on the go. I'll take pictures, upload them using the Walgreens app, pick them up on the way home--no separate trips or extra work is needed. The fact that Walgreens has an app makes me choose them, rather than a competitor.