It's obvious that the app store has had huge growth over only one year. There are already enough apps to keep one searching through the catalog for an enormous amount of time. What happens in 2 years? 3 years? 8 years? the production of apps is astonishing and its clear that the app store is much more than we all thought it would be. It's already difficult enough to discover new apps that get hidden in the masses (although the new genius feature is helping) how will we keep track of everything when the number of apps is 5X the size? One thing is for sure, it is truly amazing how one tiny icon can hold a whole world of apps. Im excited for the future...
I am excited too. I think that tens of thousands of purpose-built apps, replacing hundreds of highly generalized ones, represents a paradigm shift.
That said, the solution quickly becomes the problem. Finding the "right" purpose built applications among tens of thousands is a chore. For example, there must be close to ten apps for processing payment card transactions. I have two apps for downloading my travel itineraries to my iPhone and two to track flights. We went from having no turn-by-turn navigation programs to needing a program to choose among them.
I had hoped that the forum would help. Remember the top-five apps thread? I read every post and maybe found one app that I wanted.
If this new paradigm is to succeed, it is going to need lots of help. How about a few apps for finding apps?