In Praise of Disposable Mobile Apps

It used to be that when you flew on shuttle from Boston to New York (or vice versa) you'd see a bunch of magazines laid out for you to pick up at the gate - all for free. That's the only place in the US where I've seen that. When you fly from California to Chicago or Denver or Boston or New York, there are no free magazines. And you never see free magazines at the gate for flights between Northern California (SFO, OAK, SJC) and Southern California (LAX, SAN, BUR, SNA). But on that shuttle flight between BOS and EWR, there they were. So you pick one up, and half the time you end up not even reading it.

If that seems like strange behavior for distribution and consumption of a magazine, consider the fact that we behave the same way in downloading apps for our iPhones. If you have more than three screens' worth of apps, I bet there's at least one that you downloaded but haven't even tried yet.

People who don't have an iPhone find it crazy that people will download a good number of iPhone apps that they use for a couple of weeks before abandoning, or they end up not using them at all. The odd thing is that a surprising set of applications that seemed trivial at first have stayed on our phones as regular stand-by apps.

First of all, by calling these things "applications" we're already confusing ourselves. Because of the mobile device context, these apps must be extremely simple, intuitive and useful. So we expect to be able to pick them up without any need for a "user's manual" or even a "getting started guide." While we call them applications, they bear no resemblance to the things that we used to install by inserting multiple floppy disks into a personal computer. They're more intuitive than most websites.

Secondly, we can acquire and dispose of these apps as easily as a song. People with years of experience in the "mobile industry" like to kvetch that there have been "mobile application stores" for years. But the fact that the iPhone app store put them all to shame so quickly indicates that these mobile app mavens didn't know what they didn't know.

Lastly, we - the phone owners - are changing. For years we have consumed entertainment - especially music - and gladly discarded last year's hits in favor of new sensations. But that was content that required little conscious attention. Games are actually more interactive, so we have a more conscious, interactive engagement with them, as well as a more conscious decision when we dropped one in favor of another. But mobile applications are a step beyond games. Like games, apps are interactive, but more significantly, they play a critical role in our "real lives."

The iPhone apps we choose to keep become our companions in our daily lives, and the ones we choose to discard (no hard feelings, right?) are dropped after days and weeks of trying to fit them into our lives. I'm not kidding about this. People actively debate which weather app makes the better call on the hour-by-hour forecast, or which shopping app finds the best prices. And let's not even start with Gowalla versus FourSquare.

Forget about "augmented reality" that requires heads-up-displays and real-time 24x7 cameras. Millions of people are augmenting their realities every day through their iPhones. Grok that, and you see the seismic shift that Apple created that everybody else has to keep up with.

We arrived at this point not by careful planning and strategic selection of the best applications for mobile users, but by the establishment of a big, imperfect marketplace for mobile applications. Nothing in the future is guaranteed. But the lesson is there for us to see: the future of the mobile experience will be characterized by hundreds of thousands of options, and consequently, individuals trying out hundreds or even thousands of application experiences, most of which will be abandoned.

So here's to the disposable mobile app. It's a sign that we're going in the right direction.