The Staying Power of iPhone Apps

Wired’s Dylan Tweney, on why he’s not switching to the Droid quite yet:

The second big reason is that I’ve grown dependent on two iPhone apps: Instapaper Pro and Tweetie. I also occasionally use RunKeeper, Stanza, Pandora and a handful of games, but Instapaper and Tweetie are the killer apps. They’re the things that, together with e-mail capability, make the iPhone useful to me.

Tweetie I could probably learn to live without: There are plenty of Twitter apps for Android, and the most popular one, Twidroid, seems to work fine, even if it lacks Tweetie’s elegance and speed. But Instapaper’s ability to collect, reformat and display news articles and blog posts I want to read — even if I’m offline — has made it an indispensable commuter and downtime companion. I would sorely miss it.

So while I’m no fan of AT&T or Apple, I’ll be sticking with the iPhone now. It’s one of the two best smartphones on the market, and it’s the only one that has the apps I depend on.

The Droid, Palm Pre and others now match the iPhone feature-for-feature. In fact, in some ways the iPhone is behind these other devices when it comes to things like multi-tasking, battery life and carrier coverage.

However, switching from one of these devices to another is a complicated thing, as Tweney points out. He — like most power-users — has a system in place that system relies heavily on third-party apps. And with 100,000 apps, no other device — no matter how great — can match the iPhone platform’s power and flexibility.

This again raises the question of “quality vs. quantity.” Just because a platform has more apps than any other platform doesn’t mean it’s better,* but it sure gives people something to think about before buying a new phone.

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*Case in point: Windows.