Thursday was the first day you could get your hands on a myTouch, the new Android phone from T-Mobile.
The most interesting thing isn’t the phone itself. Oh, it’s a nice phone with much better battery life than the first Anroid phone, the G1. But more interesting are two apps that T-Mobile has been promoting heavily alongside the rollout.
What makes those highly touted apps of interest is that one is a smart example of what an app should be and the other is a missed opportunity. And therein may lie a lesson for the industry.
The smart example is Sherpa, an app that learns your likes and dislikes, then makes recommendations of nearby restaurants, shopping and such, wherever you go.
Granted, because Sherpa is a learning app and new, it’s not particularly accurate yet. Presumably, accuracy will improve. That’s not the clever part.
The clever part is that Sherpa is exclusively available on an Android Phone from T-Mobile. It’s not a hand-me-down ported over from Apple. And it has been promoted heavily in advertising and with PR.
The Sherpa deal shows an understanding that people like their phones but love their apps. It’s a large part of the reason why Apple, with the lion’s share of apps, has continued to dominate the smartphone market.
And while law makers are discussing whether carriers should continue to have exclusive deals with phone makers, like the deal between AT&T and Apple, competition in apps is unquestioned and wide open.
It seems to me what T-Mobile has done is publish a map for future competition: offer competitive phones with exclusive apps that are well publicized.
But then there is the missed opportunity. Another app that T-Mobile has hawked relentlessly is called AppPack. It is an app that recommends apps.
Here’s where the opportunity is missed. The app stores – all of them – are a nightmare to shop. There are two ways they could be made usable. One would be to offer sorted searches, so you could go in, put in some parameters, like four-star music apps for less than $1.99, and get back a manageable list.
The other would be to have an app that learns the way Sherpa does. It could check the apps you have, perhaps observe your common searches, then make customized recommendations of apps you might like.
That is not what AppPack does. AppPack shows everyone the same nine apps. T-mobile won’t say how they are chosen, or how often they will be refreshed (they did say developers don’t pay for the placement).
It’s a missed opportunity because it’s not just a hardware competition anymore. Where Apple and Blackberry are vulnerable is their app stores.
I asked Rahul Sonnad, founder of Geodelic, which makes Sherpa, if he might apply his firm’s learning algorithms to an app that recommends apps. No, he said, his company would stick to location-based services (with some interesting updates promised in the next six weeks).
The field is open. Anyone care to build a better app store? Anyone?Source
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