By: Charles Stack
I had the great pleasure of spending last weekend in New York City. My wife and I try to go every few months to shop , eat, and take in a Broadway show. Sometimes we actually go. With kids at camp or work this past weekend we managed to pull it off.
Much to my wife’s chagrin I downloaded about 40 NYC iPhone apps so I could test and experiment with them while there. I’ve never done a deep dive into an app category before and it was an eye-opener. The vast majority of the apps really sucked and were totally useless. So, Apple, enough of the Big Brother Prude role, let’s exercise some actual quality control or the app store will devolve into a pile of steaming excrement. I am not suggesting that you censor apps, because that is clearly a slippery slope that you are singularly unable to navigate. But please give consumers a better way to discern quality from crap. Some suggestions. Provide filters so I can remove from view apps below a certain number of stars. Or ‘retire’ apps that haven not been updated in 6 months or more. Or borrow the Netflix rising/falling popularity meters. Or implement the standard ‘people who liked also liked’ approach. Almost anything will help.
With that rant out of the way what apps did I find useful in the Big Apple? What apps are still on my phone?
1. UpNext – This map app shows your location on a refreshingly non-google map that is perfectly suited for NYC. The focus is on neighborhoods, buildings, and commercial tenants. It has the standard ‘locate me’ function and a 3D representation of actual buildings with lists of the commercial tenants in each. Hugely useful when you are in standard tourist ‘wander mode’. You can also select categories and the app will highlight buildings that contain those businesses. Tapping the building will then get you the business and usually a complete description. A keeper.
2. Zagat - Although it could be much better we used Zagat 2-3 times a day to locate restaurants. And gained 2-3 pounds. The ‘where am I and what good restaurants are nearby’ is the key to a great vacation, at least for my family. Zagat delivers.
3. NYC Transit – Buy a subway pass and this $0.99 app and travel NY like a native. Included are a zoomable subway map, line/stop maps, station detail, GPS, and routing. No one will know it’s your first time while you discreetly count off stops on your iPhone.
4. asap - New York City – This is a very simple RSS aggregator for all things NYC. We used it more frequently than dedicated solutions like the NY Times app. Feeds from The NYT, NY1, NY News, New Yorker, Gothamist, and others are quickly accessed and scanned. One glance and you are fully qualified to engage in a conversation or argument with anyone in the city.
5. Tripit – Although not a NYC specific app we used Tripit for plane, hotel, and show scheduling. If you haven’t used Tripit before it is very useful on the desktop and invaluable on an iPhone.
That’s it, three NYC apps and two general apps that we found helpful. Out of forty. The good news is that the five apps we used made our trip more relaxing, more fun, and more successful. Just like the iPhone itself I now can’t imagine travelling without these apps. They are indispensible.
You may have noticed that Google wasn’t listed. While I use Google Maps all the time I found that it wasn’t particularly well suited to the type of travel we enjoy in urban areas. Google is ideal for the ‘I want to get from point A to Point B’. But that is not how my family travels in cities on vacation. We plop done somewhere interesting and then wander from shiny object to shiny object. Until we get hungry. Then we eat.
The useless apps fall into several categories. There were a dozen or more that consisted of nothing but maps: pretty maps, ugly maps, cached maps, downloadable maps, old maps, subway maps, and special interest maps. Other than one subway map (NYC Transit listed above) they were largely worthless either because they failed to utilize the GPS or were lacking useful content. There were a variety of other apps that offered NYC webcams, Wikipedia reprints, and pretty pictures. These were quickly deleted.
The other large category of failed apps consists of big-name (and some small) travel publishers who tried to repurpose their content for mobile. I don’t need other peoples’ pretty photos of NY on my phone. I don’t need information about planning a trip or how to get to NYC. I don’t need to know when to go. And I probably don’t need hotel information if I am already there. And publishers that expect me to read long text passages or to read a list of names of the book’s authors have not really thought through the use cases. As with all attempts to repurpose content from another medium there was minimal value delivered in the new format. There is a big market opportunity for someone to deliver travel guides that are designed from scratch for the new mobile medium. Hmmm?
Apple needs provide a better method of separating the indispensible from the incompetent. Users should not need to wade knee deep through 30 or more apps to find the 3-5 gems. So Little Apple here is my prescription: Move some resources from saving our morals to saving our time.
