What I learned after downloading every iPhone App of the Day for a month

There’s an App for that.” Apple’s slogan, trademarked two years after the App Store was launched in 2008, summed up a period when an unfamiliar icon on a friend’s home screen was a conversation starter, and someone with a good idea working from their bedroom really could do something radically different....

Now Apple wants to bring some of that excitement back to the iPhone of 2017, rebuilding the App Store from the ground up....
Gone is the focus on lists of top sellers, replaced with the new App (and Game) of the Day. The entries are drawn from across the spectrum, from huge developers with large marketing budgets to small utilities made by indie teams. The apps aren’t freebies – Apple expects you to be enthused enough to drop real money on the downloads...

So I did. For a month, I grabbed them all: from those laser targeted at me (productivity app Bear, and password manager 1Password, so good I already own it) to those laser targeted away from me (female fitness app Sweat, pregnancy guide The Wonder Weeks).

I’ve got a fever, and the only cure is more apps
I’ve long pined for the good old days, but at some point along the way, my thirst for novelty died off. I can’t put a precise date on it, but I remember noticing around the end of 2014 that I didn’t regularly use a single app that had been released in the previous two years...

My hope was that living life the Apple way would rekindle some of that excitement. Would I be fitter, happier and more productive? Should I seek professional help about my endless attempts to fix my life with a parade of glowing quadrilaterals?

Maybe. My first surprise was rather more prosaic: it turns out it’s actually really expensive to buy apps every day.

Unlike the free-to-play-dominated mobile games industry, where the many can have a perfectly fun life completely subsidised by the few who will drop £1,000 on power ups and cosmetic items, the app market is more traditional in its attempts to build revenue.

More than a third of the apps promoted in that opening month had a good old-fashioned up-front cost. The days of the 99p app are well and truly numbered, it seems, with prices ranging from £1.99 at the low end to £4.99 at the high. I paid the latter for image editor Pixelmator, which is tremendously good value for what it is, with the app offering many features once exclusive to Adobe’s Photoshop, software that costs almost twice that per month.

Apps of the Day: Pixelmator..
Heck, I’ve considered buying Pixelmator multiple times over the years, but never quite been able to get over the initial hurdle of not having a fiver free for that specific purpose, on that specific day. Of course that’s stupid. I have impulse bought almost every bloody seasonal drink Starbucks has ever created to ruin a perfectly good latte, yet I pause at the idea of dropping one and a half eggnog lattes on an app, which has been hailed best-in-class multiple times and will probably last me a good few years......