When iPhone apps annoy

Toby Boudreaux calls it cooperative single-tasking. It's one of those weird things that Apple's iPhone does extremely well but it also keeps the phone from becoming less useful, less appealing and less snappy as developers craft ever more applications for the gizmo.

"Switching between applications on the iPhone should feel like tabbing [between applications] on the desktop," Boudreaux, chief technology officer at digital consulting firm Barbarian Group, told an audience at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Thursday. The ability to move seamlessly from one application to another is why the iPhone often feels like it is running multiple applications at the same time, even though it doesn't do that.

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In short, as Apple has built the App Store for its iPhone, unleashing more than 25,000 applications that have been downloaded more than 800 million times, Apple has also trained developers and users to follow a complex set of rules. By saturating the media with commercials showing users swiping, pinching and tilting their way through applications, they've trained the public so well that an average person can just grab an iPhone and go. "The gist is those gestures were learned, not intuited," Boudreaux said.

And last year Apple put that whole language at the disposal of independent developers by releasing a software kit allowing them to build applications that work much like those created for the phone by Apple itself. And when it works, it works beautifully, with one application handing off a chore to another or quietly working within Apple's interface guidelines.

But when developers step outside of those guidelines, the result can be a mess. "It's tempting to create a very sticky application and play around with functional imperialism, rather than letting the applications work together the way God, and Steve Jobs, intended," Boudreaux said.

The developer, like some mad scientist, tampers with nature, inadvertently unleashing a monster, or, in this case, a minor hassle for a user. For example, many applications include their own browsers, rather than handing off that function to the iPhone's built-in browser.

"What really happens is you give them a crappy browser," Boudreaux said. And even if, somehow, a software developer were to build a browser that was easier to use than one built by Apple, it would still be unfamiliar. "They're used to mobile Safari."

The lesson for developers? Let go, relax, don't fight for every moment of screen time. "By the time someone has launched your app, they're already sold, they've paid you, they're synched, they've launched it, you've got them hook, line and sinker," Boudreaux said. "It's totally yours to screw up." So don't.