App Store Madness

There is some­thing about cus­tomiz­ing our envi­ron­ment with add ons and apps. Some­thing about peo­ple, and me espe­cially. It seems that I’ve been installing apps for at least twenty five years.

Way, way back in the day I used to buy apps for my games. They were some­times called expan­sions. My friends and I would spend hours brows­ing the shelves at the hobby stores buy­ing apps (expan­sions, dice sets, fig­urines, dun­geons, new rule books, etc.).

We would spend our money buy­ing all this stuff to try it out and see how it worked. Some­times we would even write our own apps (expansions).

Later when we had PC’s we would spend hours together trad­ing disks full of apps to try. We would down­load and install hun­dreds and hun­dreds of apps just to see how they worked. It was app mad­ness really. Some­times it bogged down our com­put­ers but we couldn’t help our­selves. Some­times we would even write our own apps.

More recently we moved our app-mania to browser add ons. My browser would have a list of add ons that would cir­cle the globe if printed. My friends and I would dis­cuss which apps (add ons) we installed and why. The num­ber and qual­ity of apps only increased as Chrome and Safari started allow­ing apps. We would install them all just to try them out and see how they work. Some­times we would even write our own apps (add ons, extensions).

Now we have smart phones. At first they just had a browser. Now, my friends and I (and prob­a­bly you too) spend hours brows­ing app stores and app web­sites think­ing about which apps are best for this or that. We spend a lot of time and money expand­ing the capa­bil­ity (the rules?) of our phones and extend­ing the lim­its of there func­tion­al­ity — and bat­tery. We install apps just to try them out and see how they work. Some­times we even write our own apps.

What apps are you installing these days?

P.S. At least my com­puter is bogged down as much these days.

Note: To keep this brief I didn’t even want to get into a few other areas like gui­tar ped­als, word­press add-ons, iPod acces­sories, car stereos, and dozens of other places that we have been app-fying our lives.