A Year of the App Store: Successes and FailuresS

One year ago, Apple opened the doors to the iTunes App Store. We've been wowed with some of the apps, left longing for others, and we've got a (relatively) small wish list.


At this point, the quick availability and utilities of third-party apps can be worth more to iPhone and iPod touch owners than their standard browser/email/media tools. The best of those apps, at least to our productive-minded eyes, are those that make use of the always-in-your-pocket nature of the iPhone/touch to help you keep everything in sync—your tasks, your money, and every random thought. Here's a few:

Note: For the rest of this feature, we'll be using the term iPhone, but all apps, unless otherwise noted, also work on iPod touch models.

A Year of the App Store: Successes and Failures

Remember the Milk: Not free, but probably worth the $25/year (or just over $2/month) for the Pro account to use this intuitively-designed app. As we noted in our Battle of the iPhone Task Managers, the app syncs to your web-based task list, maintains a badge of your overdue tasks (or just tasks from today), shows you what you can get done nearby with geo-awareness, and has one of the best interfaces we've seen for iPhone apps. This isn't smooshing a platform to fit the iPhone; it's using the iPhone to expand the platform.

A Year of the App Store: Successes and Failures

Evernote: Note-taking app Evernote's whole thing is universal capture—or, put another, more Pash-ian way, expanding your brain. Like the desktop and web-based extensions of Evernote, the iPhone app manages all your clipped text and links quite handily, whether you're online or not. With the camera and voice input of a phone, however, Evernote expands into a tool to capture literally everything you're thinking or seeing. Got a pitch concept that gets bogged down in writing? Just say it and listen to it later. Inspired by the colors and design on a beer label? Snap a pic, and you're one tag search away from pulling it up later. Or take a camphone pic of the note you wrote out on a paper napkin at lunch, and Evernote's OCR abilities can probably translate your scribblings into search-able text. Oh, and there's a free account for anyone who can get by with 40MB of uploads per month and slightly slower OCR scans.

A Year of the App Store: Successes and Failures

Mint.com: Some banks and credit cards have jumped on the iPhone platform and released their own proprietary tools for checking balances and, maybe, making transfers. Mint.com's app, however, puts your whole financial life in your pocket. After filling in your accounts, budgets, and doing some expense tracking at Mint.com, you'll get alerts when credit cards are due or balances are low, if you're running over-budget on restaurants for the month, and if you've got enough in the bank to cover the rent check you just dropped off. When pundits used to talk about the convenience of the future, this is kinda what they were getting at. You can also disable the app's read-only access from your account settings at Mint.com, in case you misplace your gadget or don't want your dinner guests scoping your cash situation.

A Year of the App Store: Successes and Failures

Kindle for iPhone: What Kindle for iPhone actually does—display commercial ebooks on your screen—isn't revolutionary, per se; we'd already been digging on the Kindle-esque Stanza app two months before Amazon's app dropped this week, and the Amazon app could certainly use a few more features. But it does show how far the App Store has come in terms of relevance and allowance. Amazon could easily have walled off its ebook offerings for its own much-touted hardware; the success of iPhone apps, both silly and serious, led them to think the better of pretending there wasn't another portable screen in town. And ebooks is definitely an arena one could imagine Apple carving out for themselves and, at least in the platform's more restrictive period, taking weeks and weeks to approve, if at all. But Kindle for iPhones dropped just two weeks after the Kindle 2 hardware, and works pretty seamlessly with Amazon's store and syncs to Kindles to set page locations. An unexpected triumph of customer service and business sense over the content delivery walls commonly seen around the Cupertino fortress.

Honorable mentions:

  • CheckPlease (direct iTunes link) is one of the better "Ooh, helpful" apps. This one splits up restaurant bills around tables, tips and tax included.
  • Wikipanion doesn't do a ton more than provide auto-complete searching of the massive group-edited encyclopedia, and provide large, landscape-capable text of the results with bookmarking. But in a lot of situations, that's exactly what you're looking for.
  • Other freebies: We've rounded up what was free and good in the app store at launch time, eight great back-to-school apps, and the best apps for keeping your resolutions. And we've always been impressed with the simple, powerful search from Google's own search app—now with voice recognition.


Most of the iPhone's real app problems are self-inflicted by its creators, the folks at Apple—which makes them all the more frustrating, as the solutions seem just a few executive meetings and code re-writes away.

A Year of the App Store: Successes and Failures

Apple's own restrictions: We could understand, if not exactly love, the need to activate and manage your phone's music and media content with iTunes. And if the designers really know their hardware, maybe forbidding multiple background processes makes sense. But forbidding copy and paste functions? How is that actually helping anybody who owns the device? And refusing to let audio, other than the native music player, work in the background kind of kills the fun of the great audio apps out there like Last.fm, Pandora, and the like. We've seen some clever work-arounds, and some jailbreak solutions, but it's hard to believe there aren't secure, stable ways to work both those functions into a phone with all this technology dropped into it.

A Year of the App Store: Successes and Failures

Finding the apps you want: As noted above, Apple's come a long way in opening up its approval process—so let's see some focus now on better search and discovery powers. The iTunes App Store features a host of duplicates, also-rans, and, as more than five minutes of browsing will reveal, lots of useless crud. You can't have open development without some openly awful apps, of course, but a web-based search utility with big results windows, powerful search tools, and visible ratings—something like Appulo.us—would make getting one's apps a much less arduous task. Or, as CNET suggests (near end of article), create a kind of "Genius" recommendation system for the App Store.

Missing push notifications: Our sibling site Gizmodo has been covering this beat since it started ... well, back when the App Store was announced. Push notifications, which let any software firm's servers publish data updates to your device, were initially due in Sept. 2008, and they're still not here. Nobody knows quite what the problem is, or how big a fix it requires, but allowing your IM client to notify you of new messages, or Google to let you know about your calendar appointments outside of email Edit: That's already possible through Google Sync, but you get the idea—the possibilities (VOIP call alerts!) are rich and deep, and we've been left hanging too long.

The little things: We'll keep saying it until it's fixed. It's ridiculous that a phone that can remotely control your computer and work as a WebDAV server can't be made to monitor a folder full of text notes and sync its own Notes application to it. And while we dig apps like TouchType that let you write your email in landscape mode for more thumb room, why isn't that a built-in feature?

Your take

What have been your favorite App Store discoveries over the past year? Which apps are you still waiting to see, which utterly disappointed you in their implementation, and which other phone's app makes you green with envy?

Spill your own State of the App Store address in the comments below.