Welcome to the (Cr)App Store

Whenever I hear someone exclaim enthusiastically: “There’s an app for that!”, I go a little ballistic inside. Yes, there very likely is an app for it – and that is exactly what’s fundamentally wrong with the concept of “developer-friendly” software platforms like iOS or Android. They’re supposed to unleash the floodgates of human creativity, one would hope. Yet they opened the doors to infinite uselessness and chronic downtime.

Obviously, supporters always have a great argument to dismiss critics: that these platforms are perfect examples of a competitive market in which the good apps get downloaded a million times and the bad ones die an unnoticed death. Unfortunately, the opposite is true: it’s a market failure of colossal proportions. Never in the history of mankind has so much garbage been produced for a profit as in the age of the App Store and Google Play. Clearly, the invisible hand doesn’t work when it comes to this stuff. The quality of apps is not even the main issue. What’s really alarming is the sheer amount of time we’re wasting using them. Even the coolest apps don’t deserve nearly as much time as we spend on them.

I readily admit that I’m susceptible to tinkering with random apps all the time. Earlier this week, I came across a new game called “Quiz Duel”. Sure enough, within an hour or so, a bunch of my friends had jumped on the bandwagon. We’ve been battling each other head-to-head with trivia questions ever since, round for round, game for game, across fifteen categories. Thank goodness I get bored easily, so hopefully the excitement will wane in due course, which should limit the damage. But I’m not kidding myself: an endless supply of other addictive apps is already waiting to grab my attention. I’ve also noticed that developers are quite conscious about making their games neither too long, nor too difficult. That way we keep returning to the feeding trough that is the App Store, in search for the next distraction.

The magic of retail is that a large product shelf gives the illusion of choice. Consumers act very predictably under these circumstances: as long as they think they have a choice, they feel great. But that’s totally independent of the quality they’re receiving. If they manage to pick one decent item out of a hundred crappy ones, the sense of satisfaction will be infinitely greater than from picking one out of five. Effectively, the consumer has only one real choice in both cases – but the bigger range of alternatives makes that selection more valuable. Which is totally irrational. The point is: certain things simply shouldn’t exist! Just because they’re on the shelf doesn’t give them any intrinsic value.

Let’s add a bit of perspective to app mania, shall we. There are currently 1.1 billion smartphones in use that run on iOS or Android. The average user has 25 apps installed on his phone (interestingly, the Swiss have 40 apps on their phones on average, which ties South Korea for the highest figure worldwide). If those users spend one minute per day on each app, that adds up to 458’333’333 hours per day. That’s an equivalent of roughly 270’000 man years. In other words, it’s the total amount of time that all employees of Bank of America spend at work during a year. The loss of productivity is just staggering. Even if users only spent one minute per day on five apps, that would translate into 54’000 man years. Think about it: you could run a company the size of Google for a year on five minutes’ worth of collective fiddling around with apps.

There’s plenty of useful apps out there that arguably save us a lot of time. That is certainly true to some extent, but compared to games and entertainment, the “productivity” category is a drop in the bucket. That’s why, in the age of open access and open everything, the curator’s job is so incredibly important. The barriers to entry are simply too low for markets to regulate the constant flow of apps and other stuff that’s being churned out as if there’s no tomorrow. If the invisible hand fails, the curator becomes the visible hand that sets certain minimum standards. The unchecked and indiscriminate production of garbage needs to stop. It stifles real innovation and snarls up resources, physical and mental. Most of all, it’s not fun.