More Apps Than Sense

It's an app, app, app, app, app, app world. How did we get here and how will devices adapt to cram in even more of the buggers?

With the news that Spotify is launching its own range of apps, we may have reached a sort of tipping point. Now you don't just get in-app purchases, you get in-app apps. What if Rolling Stone magazine, say, were to use its Spotify app as a wrapper for a bit of software of its own? Then you'd have an in-app-app-app - which sounds like a bit of dialogue from The King's Speech.

Ever since Apple launched its smartphone-based Stores, it's not been enough to make software or hardware (or both). You have to be a "platform", which is the new, hip way of saying "shop". That way, not only do you have people buying your stuff, you get to take a cut of stuff made and sold by other people, through the virtual supermarkets you've put in your punters' pockets.

This has two massive benefits if you're the platform owner: it gives your device an ever-expanding host of new USPs, thus keeping it feeling fresh and newsworthy; and it can also be extremely lucrative, as Apple found.

Today, it seems like everything has to have apps. Radios, TVs, desktop computers, and now other apps: they all want a slice of the red-hot platform action. The big stores -Apple, Android and, to an extent, the PSN and Xbox Live portals - have swollen to Tesco proportions. Aisle upon virtual aisle is laden with downloadable tat that people pick up, play with for a day and then discard.

Is this a great business model for Spotify, or for makers of TVs, cars and toasters? Probably not. But I reckon the app explosion is the reason that two particular Apple rumors have proved to have real sticking power: the one about the iPhone 5 having a bigger screen, and the notion that Siri, rather than being an amusing novelty that nobody uses, is actually a central plank of Apple's future success.

For what can you fit on a larger screen? More apps. And what is an easy way to instantly access those apps you can't cram into your massive new home screen? Saying their names. This is even more essential with the cloud, as you're now no longer limited to just those apps you uploaded to your handset this morning; you can chop and change as you see fit, unlimited by device storage.

Many Android devices, of course, already have larger screens and - through other apps - the ability to resize icons in order to cram more apps on to them. And Google started making a big noise about its voice-control features long before Siri pitched up.

Now you might feel like you've reached app overload already. That the need for upwardly spiral-ling quantities of games, time-passers and ever more specific utilities is proof that humans are De-evolving into beings with the attention span of gnats and an inability to locate their own arses without the aid of a GPS chip and augmented reality camera. But that's tough. Apps are just getting started...