The Long Tail of iPhone Apps

I recently read this article on how there are too many Apps in the iTunes App store and most of them are Crap.


This particular article is arguing that the actual barrier to entry for other smartphone App Marketplaces is much lower than Apple advertises it to be (some 100,000 apps in the iTunes App Store). This might be true, but I think the argument on which that conclusion is based, that is, their lament about most of the apps being crap, is not so sound.


Yes there are a lot of fart apps. Yes there are other apps that you or I may not find useful.
But lets not forget, what makes eBay auctions tick, what makes the iTunes Music Store tick, what makes (illegally, no doubt) peer-to-peer music downloads tick and what makes the Web in general tick is millions of people adding content that they think will be useful to others in their 'tribe'. 


Given that the content is digital, there is a low barrier to entry and consumers have infinite choice (as per The Long Tail of Marketing, Chris Anderson), so platforms that support this mass of niches are the ones that win.


Do you read all of the several million Google text ads? What makes you think they are all relevant to you? Does that mean, except for the ones that are relevant to you, all the rest are crap? :-) This simple analogy, when applied to Apps will show how the argument, that there's a lot of 'crap' in a marketplace is equal to that marketplace being doomed or useless, is flawed.


That even a control freak company like Apple has realized this in two markets - Music & Smartphone Apps is sure enough pointer that this is a way to keep from being relegated to the museum of technology. After all, Apple could have decreed, like they do in so many other areas that twenty Apps, all written by Apple would suffice for any user. They didn't. 


I don't know if we'll ever see this or not, but a graph of The number of apps sold/downloaded versus their unique rank in the iTunes App Store would make for fascinating analysis. I suspect that graph would look like a ... long tail.