We ranted recently about the ridiculous ‘Call One Name’ set of 26 apps that all do the same thing (speed dial icon on home screen), but are all sold individually at $0.99 for each person’s name that you might want to call. There are a number of these quantity over quality sort of apps hitting the App Store now. Latest I’ve spotted is the iFlag series – here’s a small part of their App Store description on the Turkish flag version of the app:
This is a cool application with an interactive 3D flag of Turkey. It is a live interactive simulation of a 3D Turkish flag modeled and simulated like cloth using laws of physics, so it moves and feels similar to an actual flag.
Honestly, I’m already not feeling I need this app. Respecting your nation’s flag, hanging one outside your home – seem well and good to me – but I just can’t imagine feeling a need to have a ‘virtual’ flag to touch and mess around with on the iPhone. That’s just me though. These apps do offer to play each nation’s national anthem on a double-tap, and let you interact with the flags which are meant to move and feel like a real flag – so for entertainment, hey if it floats your boat …
The scarier line in the app’s description is this:
We are currently adding flags for most of the countries.
How many countries are there in the world? 190 odd? So we’re eventually going to end up with how many of the iFlag series littering the App Store aisles???
The set already has 10 apps – at $0.99 each. Apple really needs to figure out a better stance on this subject soon – or we really are going to get to where it is a huge struggle to find anything useful.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
You have a great point, I didn’t plan well what I wrote in the description and it is a bit misleading. I will keep the number of iFlag versions to a minimum number of countries and will mostly make iFlag for countries that I receive requests for. I’ll change that line that says “most countries” to reflect this.
There were a number of reasons for making them as separate apps, all of which probably could be overcome by spending enough time and trusting the internet connectivity of users. But as this was my first app on iTunes, I’ll blame it on my inexperience. Up to this point I only got positive feedback, but if it becomes such an annoyance I can spend some time to put it all in a single app.
Sorry for the inconvenience and kudos for the nice blog.
itoys – Firstly, thanks for the comment. Glad you’re going to change that description line – it was pretty scary
I hope at some point maybe consolidating down to one app may be possible for you. Even if you’re getting good feedback, I wonder how much better it would be if just one app offered that much more. Just my .02 …
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