I've been thinking a lot about third party applications this week - that is, applications that a user has to add to a smartphone to increase the functionality in some way. My musings were kicked off by two slightly critical pieces by 'PDA power users' online, Shaun McGill and Patrick Robbe (click through to read their original pieces in full). Note, by the way, that I'm not talking about games in this article - games are a whole different kettle of fish!
Shaun was specifically looking at new applications appearing for the three major smartphone OS, concluding in the case of Symbian that "On the Symbian side things are very different - for the latest versions of the operating system third party development has been painfully slow and in some areas it always was. The majority of incarnations are not catered for when it comes to financial management and certain genres are completely non existent for the users that want them."
Now, Shaun is a veteran PDA user of the same generation as me, coming from a world (mid to late 1990s) where a handheld computer came with PIM apps (and an office suite, if you happened to buy a Psion) and... that's about it. It was also a world where, to take up his specific point, money management was somewhat easier than it is today, a decade on. Keeping track of your finances might mean a handful of bank accounts and a credit card, and committed souls like Shaun (and many other) knuckled down to the task of entering every last money transaction from their lives into a third party money manager application, reconciling the totals at the end of each month. Quite a lot of work, but for some people it was felt to be worth doing. Fast forward to 2006 and most of us have twice as many accounts, twice as many credit cards, various ISAs and other savings schemes, and quite a lot more work to keep track of. We're also busier, I'd venture to suggest, leaving less time for fiddling around with money micro-management. Most importantly of all, though, our banks are all now online. Who needs to enter every transaction when it's all done for you, debit by debit, by your bank and you can check everything they've done, any any time, from any location, from your smartphone?
This same phenomenon can be applied in other areas too, with online web services of various kinds taking the place of what might have had to have been a standalone 'local' third party application in times past. With the advent of Wi-Fi, 3G data and several really capable web browsers, it's possible to interact with the world in ways that just wouldn't have been possible ten years ago.
In Patrick's piece, reviewing six months with the Nokia E61, he first quotes silly numbers of third party applications, such as 'only 575', implying that this is considered laughably low. Er... I consider myself a power user of the E61, E70, P990i or N93, or whatever I happen to be trialling that month, and (games aside) I've only found a need for 3 or 4 third party applications at most. '575' sounds plenty to me...
The fact is that the in-box software bundle supplied with most smartphones these days includes just about everything most users need. Just as Windows and DOS on PCs developed to includes all the little third party utilities that grew up around their early versions, so S60 and UIQ 3 have also embraced a lot of little usability enhancements and functions (e.g. Calculators, note pads, clocks, file viewers, image editors, GPS software, unit converters) and (for most people) are essentially 'complete'.
In my case, just as an example, using the Nokia N93, the third party applications I use are TomTom Navigator 6, Handy Safe, Opera Mini and TimeTrack. Oh, and Screenshot for grabbing screens for AllAboutSymbian. If any sane user was to examine the '575' apps for the E61 or the '10,789' applications for Palm OS, they'd see only a tiny fraction of these were professional, useful applications, with most of the number for any platform being made up of games of varying quality, ultra-niche apps from hobbyists and Java apps that are heavily resource-hungry and could in truth be run on anything with enough oomph.
In short, I just don't believe that any handheld platform needs ten thousand third party applications. Who could have time to navigate to a fraction of these and use them day to day? Now, I'm not knocking third party developers, heaven knows I'm one of them from time to time. But I'd like to raise up a voice of sanity. You can't judge the health of a third party developer scene from sheer numbers of 'compatible' devices on Handango. Aside from the huge amount of functionality already built into S60 and UIQ, rendering many traditional third party functions obsolete, the old adage of 'quality rather than quantity' has never been more apt.
Now, Patrick's well-written post does make some good points about specific E61 firmware niggles (and I'm sure many Sony Ericsson P990i owners could make up a much longer list), but comments like "So here I am, with a nice E61 but no adequate software on it" are melodramatic to say the least. I guess Patrick's using the decade-old definition of the software set that makes a handheld 'adequate', but back in 2006, I'd like to suggest that this definition is out of date.
As many of you will know, I used to run the Psion shareware library (that's where the name 3-Lib came from), and so have a pretty good handle on the way the third party software scene worked for machines from ten years ago. Eventually 3-Lib grew to house over 2000 items, a staggeringly high number and comparable with that for Palm OS. However, there were huge numbers of 'duplicates', over ten unit converters, for example, a dozen file managers, two dozen clocks, 20 or so bank account managers, almost 50 graphics utilities, and so on. All functions which have gradually been embraced by Symbian OS (née EPOC), S60/S80 and UIQ) or rendered unpractical in 2006.
So both Shaun and Patrick's posts are worth a read, but ultimately I believe they're not typical of the man in the street. As an ex-Psion geek myself (I had the obligatory full Extras screen, with well over 40 third party applications installed), I know only too well how power users of the time thought. And it was OK to be a geek in those days, most Psion and Palm owners were by definition power users and enthusiasts.
But time and operating systems have moved on and I suspect most S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 users would much rather just have a handful of quality applications that complemented the already huge functionality in their devices and didn't misbehave...
Steve Litchfield, November 2006