It's time to rant about something that annoys me.  Sorry to those of you that have already heard me talk about this ad nauseam.

With the advances in smart phone technology and adoptio, one of the hot areas in software development is iphone (and other smartphone) apps.  Apple boasts 50,000 applications in their store.  When people hear I have a Pre, they ask if it's ok not having very many apps.  I constantly read blog posts and hear want-to-be entrepreneurs talking about making a new iphone app.

Some mobile apps are awesome.  95% of them are stupid (fart, flashlight, and beer apps).  95% of them don't really need to be applications at all (I'll get to this later).  Those 95% don't perfectly overlap which makes me want to put the number of useful iphone apps that should actually exist somewhere around one or two percent.

So why shouldn't these apps exist?  Because all they do is display data from a website.  People are missing the fundamental purpose for installed applications.  That purpose is generally to make use of the hardware of the device or to add functionality that a web browser can't support.  Having a facebook app doesn't make much sense to me.  What can the app do that facebook's mobile website can't?

Granted, a lot of companies have pretty bad mobile sites (facebook included, although Frodo might beg to differ), but maybe they would be better if they didn't spend time making applications for every different phone platform out there.

So once again I wonder, what can the mobile app do that the mobile website can't?  Offline mode isn't important for most things.  Facebook certainly isn't useful if you don't have an active data connection.  So why do you need a Facebook, Fandango, or weather app?  They're only useful if you have a data signal and if you do, why not just go online?

The great thing about websites is that they use a universal platform.  Making an iphone website is the same as making a blackberry, palm OS, and windows mobile website.  Most people don't install a facebook or fandago app on their computer, and the same fundamental principles apply with phones.

So what should be applications?  Pandora is a great example.  For that matter, anything where the normal website relies on flash needs to be an app since mobile browsers don't support flash yet.  So Youtube, Hulu, and online game sites make perfect sense.  GPS applications seem to integrate with the phone's hardware more than a browser would support so those apps are legit. Playing music, or anything else that needs to access files stored on the device should be applications.

From what I understand, Google recently came to this realization.  For most of their programs, they're just making really killer mobile sites rather than putting more work into downloadable applications.  The results are amazing.  There aren't many apps for the Pre yet, but I don't really care because Google Reader, Gmail, and Google Tasks all have perfect mobile sites.  And even if the Pre did have applications for those tools, why would I use them instead of the mobile sites?

As my brother pointed out, my argument is sound in theory, but sometimes not in practice.  He said that his facebook app is much faster than the website.  Mobile sites on my phone load in a matter of seconds, so I don't really see this as an issue, but I do realize that an argument could be made that phone hardware and data connections just can't handle life in the cloud.  

I realize the argument could be made, but I still disagree with it.