There are 225,000 applications in the iPhone store and 60,000 in Google's Android store. But those statistics will be out of date by the end of this week, or even the end of this sentence.
You may find it hard to comprehend a selection that vast, let alone navigate it in search of the good stuff. But it could be worse: You could be the aspiring application programmer who has to come up with a fresh idea. (Google has the idea that anyone can be an application developer with its new Google App Inventor software.)
There is an application that reproduces mooing sounds (Hello Cow), one that dials someone from your address book at random (iDrunkTxt), a game in which you score points by licking the screen (iLickiet). What could possibly be left?
In the past, I challenged my Twitter followers (I'm @pogue) to invent iPhone or Android applications that do not exist but should.
I will spare you the wishful-thinking responses: "an app that puts my kids to bed at night," "an app that gives my wife the 'right answer."'
In general, I will also omit the great ideas that do, in fact, have existing applications. (One popular idea: a To Do-list program that, thanks to the phone's GPS, would remind you of things to do when you are in the right place to do them -- to "pick up a saw when you are near the hardware store," as @Truman206 put it. But the Twitterites were quick to identify programs that already do that: Reqall, Omnifocus, Remember the Milk, Geostrings, Pocket Informant, Astrid, Task Aware and so on.)
One hugely popular category was "Shazam for other things." Shazam, of course, is the amazing application that identifies a pop song on the radio just by listening to it. No wonder, then, that people loved @ale_guzman1's concept of "Shazam for movies or TV." How great would it be to let the phone's camera identify whatever you are watching?
Overcoming the iPhone's problems was another hotbed of dreams. For example, @invisible_daddy wishes for "an app that converts a Web site containing Flash video and converts it on the fly to HTML5, or whatever format Apple will allow."
Apple recently acknowledged that the iPhone's signal-strength indicator has been misleading for years. So @PoorDadTech described "An app that tells you that you have 4 bars. But only when you have 4 bars."
Social applications were popular, like the "reverse Foursquare" suggested by @churlala: "Register all your exes, so no awkward run- ins around town." Or @sppatel's "Six Degrees of Separation," which would use "public friends lists across multiple social sites to determine how you may be tied to someone you just met."
Phone calls were on people's minds, too. @jeffroix wants "automatic voicemail forwarding when my calendar reflects a meeting in progress." (There are such applications, in fact -- just not for the iPhone. There is an Android application, for example, called Vibrate During Meetings.)
@SEOtrafficSite, meanwhile, suggested an application that "adds background noise (airport, party ...) during my calls, so people don't think I'm a nerd sitting at my computer all day."
What is especially exciting about these ideas is that almost all of them are technologically feasible.
The hard part, in other words, is not writing applications; it is coming up with the ideas in the first place. Maybe what the world really needs, as @evoulie, notes, is "an app that tells you what there isn't an app for."
