blog364

I love Apple products. I love how they look, I love how they function and I love how they make me feel when I use them (Seth Godin was right in All Marketer are Liars when he said that we don’t buy products, we buy the stories that we tell ourselves about the products we buy!), but please don’t call me a “fanboy”. A “fanboy” has nothing but great things to say for the brands/products he/she loves. As much as I can see and appreciate the greatness in Apple (whether you like it or not they’ve come back from an ‘almost’ assure extinction), I can also see its shortcoming, mistakes and fumbles. From the app store approval process to the recent “antennagate“, Apple has had and will continue to have its share of issues. But one issue that no one seems to have brought up or made much fuss about is the current inability to delete any one of the pre-installed Apple apps on any of the iPhones.

My iPhone 3G came with 20 pre-installed apps. Of all these, there’s only one that I can think of that shouldn’t be deleted: Settings. This would be the same as deleting the Control Panel on a PC or System Preferences on a Mac. Clearly there’s a need for it. But why can’t I delete any of the other applications, such as: Weather, Stocks, Clock, Photos, et’al? Certainly, there are thousands of other applications in the App Store that can do the same things that these pre-installed apps can do and better. Why is it that Apple will let me uninstall pretty much any application that came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro but won’t let me do so from my phone?

So I decided to call Apple Care (I paid a pretty penny for it, so I figure I’d put it to some good use). After a little bit or “routing me around” I finally heard what I was expecting: “We don’t support that functionality. If you don’t want to see the pre-installed apps, just move them to the last ‘page’ on the phone.” Again…. F#$*ING LUDICROUS!!! Move them? Shove them under the proverbial “carpet”? OMG – LOL! This to me sounded much like the, now infamous, email from Steve Jobs to the user complaining about the iPhone 4 reception issues where he tells him to “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

I’m not saying: “don’t give me any pre-installed apps with my new phone”. All I’m asking is to have the choice to remove them if I want to. It’s my phone, I should be able to have a saying in what I put in it and what I remove. Can you imagine Ford telling you that you cannot change the tires on your new car or the stereo? Ludicrous!!!

Not too long ago Microsoft was made to capitulate about including Internet Explorer with Windows OS. Microsoft argued that it needed to include IE with Windows for the OS to work. The courts didn’t buy the argument and Microsoft had to provide a way to remove the intruding program (albeit in a way that made you feel that you were better off WITH the program rather than trying to go through the week long process to remove it!). That was ONE program. My iPhone has over 10.

To: Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Apple designers, et’al: your customers are smarter and more capable to make choices on their own, even if you don’t agree with them, than you give them credit for. Exercising such a tight control over your products long AFTER they have left the factory and been paid for will only help, in the not so-long term, to alienate your core supporters and only leave the “fanboys” behind. Of which, I’m sure aren’t enough to sustain your delusions of grandeur. You created the BEST MP3 player in the world but you didn’t tell us how to fill it up. You gave us great laptops but trusted us to fill them with useful applications…. please trust us that we are equally capable with your….err…. OUR phones!

Sincerely,

A loyal Apple user, but NOT a “fanboy”

(Note: this post was originally posted last year. Due to the hacker incident it’s being reposted again!)

Today I downloaded my 100th iPhone application (Flight Control - careful, it’s HIGHLY addictive!). Of those, I usually keep 64 on the phone at any given time. At 4×4 apps per page that’s 4 pages to re-organize every time I add/remove an app, ONE app move at a time – this only gets worst if you add more apps to the phone (I know what you are thinking: “you don’t need that many apps on the phone.” And you are probably right, BUT… this is not what this posting is about. So lets move on) . So here’s a “recurring” problem that shows up again and again every time we add/remove apps to our beloved iPhones (and I know I am not the only one having to deal with this pain): how to organize all our apps on the iPhone without having to play a game of “Finger Twister”. I find this problem quite puzzling. Not because it’s technically challenging to move apps around on the iPhone – just time consuming (and YES, I did time myself once: 4:17 seconds to move those 64 apps around), but because I always thought of Apple as a company who very much cares about its user’s experience. We all have heard one or two stories about how “obsessive” Steve Jobs is when it comes to product and experience design. It’s said that he puts as much effort in the design of the hardware as he does on the packaging for it. Yes, they think and re-think even the smallest details…. So, how is it possible that a company that cares so much about details and user experience doesn’t provide us with a better way of organizing the apps on the iPhone? May Apple finds the problem of organizing apps on the iPhone to be similar to the problem of how to implement “copy & paste” on the iPhone OS. Where the problem wasn’t so much technical (read: coding) as to how to get the functionality working but more about how to do it in an elegant and integrated manner. So, maybe, they can’t think of a simple, elegand and well implemented solution for apps organization on the iPhone either. So I figure I’d give the guys down in Cupertino a look to one way of resolving the problem. Take a look:

Organizing apps on the iPhone via iTunes

How’s that for simple? You can use the arrows to add/remove apps (or just drag & drop) and the bottom arrows to scroll through the pages. I know this is not the most sophisticated implementation/solution but it’s one that shouldn’t be to hard for Apple to design and implement and it would make the life of its customers so much more blissful!