The App Store is one of the key strengths of the iPhone. You can easily find, purchase and install applications that increase the utility of the iPhone. Steve Jobs claims that more than 100 million downloads have occurred in the short time that the App Store has been around. I’d bet that if you were to take all of the other smartphones and add up every download, you still wouldn’t hit 100 million.
My nit with the design is that when you update applications, the app icon on the phone doesn’t stay put. In fact, the iPhone 2.1 update scrambled the order of all my applications. That’s the kind of detail I’d expect Apple to get right.
See more iPhone design pet peeves.
I’ve had the 3G iPhone for a couple of months now. During that time I’ve had the same complaints that most others have had: virtually nonexistent 3G coverage, anemic battery life and frequent crashes.
But there are also details of the UI that have bothered me; some big, some small. This is the first in a series of posts about iPhone pet peeves.
Pet peeve #1: Apple allows developers to access the address book without asking the user’s permission. Apps can copy your entire contact list to their servers and you wouldn’t necessarily know. Early versions of the Loopt application abused this to send spam text messages to your contacts. Apple knows better: applications have to ask for permission when accessing location.
