All Articles Tagged om malik

Confession 1: Soon as the App Store opened, I started downloading. Free apps mainly, but I bought more than I thought I would as well.

Confession 2: I don’t use most of them regularly. I mean, I use the built-in apps all the time, daily if not near-constantly in the case of Phone, Mail, and Safari. But the App Store stuff? Eh…. A couple have become regulars but most are occasional at best and some I no longer even bother to store on the iPhone (i.e. they’ve been relegated to iTunes purgatory.)

60 million downloads, 30 million in sales, and Steve Jobs thinks it could be a billion dollar business. So somebody must be using them, right?

Om Malik consulted Greg Yardley of Pinch Media (which tracks user behavior and provides statics based on that behavior for iPhone Apps) who says that, based on their sampling (which they themselves say currently consists of only a few developers), less than 20% of users return to an App at least once a day, and of them, the average time spent on an App is 5 minutes.

By way of contrast, however, Casey already posted some pretty staggering numbers from the big players like Facebook and Loopt who are seeing tons of usage.

UPDATE: Greg Yardley, in the comments below, points out that Facebook numbers are not necessarily inconsistent with Pinch Media’s.

Hmmm… Could it be that the App Store is still in its honeymoon, right smack in the middle of a little developer gold rush, where for every Apple Remote there’s a dozen (okay, 3 dozen) “I am Rich” / Flashlight applications? Since there’s no demo or beta, its easy to download free apps and moderately easy to take risks on under $10 apps, and come up less than thrilled.

All usage numbers tell us for now is that there aren’t — yet — enough really killer apps, but at the same time so many developers and companies are becoming involved, the odds of another — and another — killer app coming are getting better and better.

So, no I’m not using my iPhone Apps a lot, but I expect better apps to come along that demand I use them a lot more.

C’mon. A day without a MobileMe post is like a day without rain. Or something. So after yesterday’s John Gruber vs. Om Malik showdown, former Apple insider Chuq Von Rospach has strapped on the gloves and joined the fray — in impressive fashion.

Says Chuq, after joking that Jobs is likely walking the MobileMe halls with a flame thrower round about now:

Gruber nails this (see below). MobileMe is a tiny thing compared to iTunes. Apple gets it, and executes it amazingly well. That this release was botched isn’t about Apple not having a clue, but about the MobileMe people either blowing it (I can think of any number of scenarios — scaling it hard). The ultimate failure seemed to be more capacity planning mistakes than anything else, if I’m guessing right. but the ultimate failure was not being willing to tell Steve “we aren’t ready” and taking that heat. They thought they could release and make it work, and guessed very wrong (or thought they were in good shape, which is worse).

The entire post is a fascinating read — chock full of insights, especially about new Apple VP of Internet Services (iTunes + MobileMe + App Store) Eddy Cue, whom comes off looking like a boss just a little to the right of Darkseid…

Om Malik says Apple is clueless about scaling MobileMe:

There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios. Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else. There’s no unified monitoring system. They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover. Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.

John Gruber retorts, with the US’ #1 online music retailer firmly in his corner:

But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has a terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.

The crazy thing is, MobileMe should have been an iTunes-learned breeze for Apple in terms of meeting service levels, given their pedigree. But then iTunes uses WebObjects (which I believe is old school Java-based) and MobileMe uses SproutCore (which is all dressed up in Ajax-y 2.0 objectivity), and the pretty much disastrous July 11th launch, which took down both iTunes iPhone activation, and slammed the MobileMe servers into weeks of problems, show something clearly is different with the new kit on the block.

Hopefully Cue will bring some of the iTunes luster to MobileMe, but only time will tell. What do you think? Which blog wins this round?

Om Malik says GPS on the iPhone is locked and loaded:

[T]here is one thing that’s for sure: The new iPhone has Global Positioning System (GPS) built into it, thanks to legal requirements put in place by the FCC.

The GigaOmster further says that new-to-the-space-space Broadcom has nailed the contract, which is great for them but panic-inducing for the stand-alone GPS market. (We know Google sees positively HUGE maps usage from the GPS-less iPhone already, so that makes the kind of sense that does.)

But Brian Lam of Gizmodo thinks the whole GPS on the iPhone thing is pretty poorly thought out:

No thanks. Don’t need it. I’m fine with the current location technology. It works for walking and that’s all I need it for.

Lam’s reasons? Current cell and WiFi location services are much quicker than GPS, they better suit walking and the iPhone is less useful while driving anyway, GPS kills battery life dead, and GPS chips would significantly fatten up the iPhone.

Personally, both 3G and GPS are still bleeding edge tech when it comes to realistic day-to-day usage in everywhere, USA when not hooked up to a generator, so while nice to have as an option, and fetishized by the tech media and the blogphere commentorati, neither will have the impact on my life that the 2.0 software update likely will. It just ain’t mainstream enough for me to be melodramatic about yet.

What do you think?

[More on the Broadcom GPS story, with thanks to reader southerntraveltourism]