There's an App for that!

This often quoted line could not be more relevant than it it today. Or will be tomorrow. Or the day after that. Everyday over 1000 applications are developed across all smartphone platforms and are tantalizingly displayed to us so that we can click that download button. When the app is free then we show no hesitation in getting it beamed down to our device. But, the horror of having to pay for something! How could we even begin to deal with that, to swallow our pride and hit that pay button?

The problem with today's electronically glued, highly creative society is that we are willing to find alternative, usually illegal ways to save our money down to the last paisa. We justify ourselves by saying that we don't want to throw away our hard earned money and then will go out for a lavish dinner that will end up costing thousands of Rupees. I know I am exaggerating here but the number of illegal channels we have to download pirated content, and the lengths we are willing to go through to save the cost of a packet of chips astounds me.

Think about this, for many people developing apps is how they support themselves. They count on us to hit that  pay button to put dinner on their table. They need that money to continue to develop more apps
and to improve upon their current ones. To give US a better experience.

We are spinning in a vicious cycle. If I spend Rs. 50 on an app and I see that my friend got it for free, and he is getting all the same features as me, why would I want to continue to support that, and further apps? So I'll stop paying for further apps and when I download an app that doesn't function as well I blame the developer. I would rather that a hundred people, myself included, paid Rs. 50 and got a beautiful piece of coding.

Most of us will recognize the name Cydia, the jailbreak app-store which gives iDevice owners access to content that Apple will not. It behaves like a second app-store for your phone with some of the better apps being paid applications. Withing Cydia there is another app-store (starting to sound like Inception here) which allows users to pirate Cydia's apps. There is an extension which allows users to get all the applications they could want for free with an interface which allows for instant upgrading as well!

Don't even get me started on Android. You can just search for certain extensions online and install it on your device. No hacking required. We need to break out of this circle and start paying for the content. I know some of the applications are expensive but they pale in comparison to the cost of buying games for video game consoles and sometimes offer a greater experience. Apps are what make our devices worth it. Without apps our "smartphones" aren't really all that smart.

There have been time that I haven't been able to justify the price of an application. I know that many of us find ourselves in a similar situation. Rather than downloading it illegally and robbing the developer of their hard earned money I have two suggestions. First wait for the app to go on sale. Almost 90% of popular apps will go on sale at some point, maybe around the holidays (American holidays) or just to help boost sales. When that happens you can often get apps for half the price and quite often free. The second option is to test drive it on a friends device and then decide whether you really need it right away or you can wait until it's on sale or an alternative comes out. So the next time someone tells you "There's an app for that," don' ask "How much?"






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