Crappy Apps In The iPhone App Store? That’s Part Of The Fun

January 22nd, 2009

Very amusing article over at AppleInsider by a developer who wrote what he considers a “crap” iPhone App in an hour just to see how successful it would be. It’s called Sound Grenade and its admitted purpose is to “annoy people.” Much to his surprise, it shot up into the top ten of free iPhone Apps.

“The goal of my app was to create a tool for people to annoy others,” Gloss wrote in a blog entry at his website.  He set a one-hour time limit to write and upload it to Apple.  “The end product was Sound Grenade, which is a really terrible app, one button turns a sound on or off, period.  For 20 minutes’ work, I thought it would be interesting to take the ride.”

The app took off quickly on its first day.

“You can imagine my shock when I checked the App Store page on the first day to see 50 glowing reviews.  Two days later, another 50 reviews.  Five days later, Sound Grenade is in the top ten free apps almost everywhere in the world.”

These crappy iPhone Apps bother some people. I think they have their place.

For starters, there’s something I find highly amusing about turning the expensive, luxury item that is the iPhone into something as base as a virtual whoopee cushion.

I’ve had fun with iFart, the iPhone whoopee cushion. I demoed it at a party and the reactions were quite funny. They were all over the map, from “Don’t you have something better to put on your iPhone?” to “I have to tell “XXX” about this! It’s hilarious!” Just to measure people’s reactions was worth the few bucks I paid for it — it’s not so much the app itself that I find funny.

I recently read about some app called Bikini Blast, which basically puts photos of bikini models on the iPhone. Supposedly this is an existing market for people who like to trade pictures with other cell phone users (?!?!). Complete utter garbage as far as I’m concerned, but who am I to judge other people for strange hobbies.

This crappiness, while annoying to some, is something I find very fun about the iPhone. I liken their existence to many viral memes — LOLcats, hampster dance, All Your Base. The over-arching humor I find in all those memes is how the all-powerful, awesome Internet is being used to spread stupid photographs with terrible grammar, dumb, time-wasting videos, and photographs of scantily-clad women.

I get a kick out of that corny viral stuff on the Internet, and consider the crappy iPhone App much in the same vein.

So I think crappy iPhone Apps have their place. I think I’ll download some more and turn it into a running column of sorts. I’ll start with Sound Grenade.