Craig Dalton over at Mplayit had an interesting post on his blog this morning highlighting some data his company just released from an activity survey of 42k visitors to their Facebook mobile discovery apps (e.g. iPhone Arcade) at the end of 2009. The company compiled the favorite apps of users across 3 smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android & BlackBerry) in 6 key content categories (excluding games)... and the results (see above) were remarkably similar. Craig's thesis is that, in terms of utility (in these categories), the platforms are beginning to approach parity for users. I think he might be on to something. Furthermore, reading this raised a question in my mind about a challenge the iPhone ecosystem may be beginning to face: At what point does the shear volume of Apps, many of them free and/or crap, on iTunes begin to make the platform less attractive to time constrained users who want to maximize the utility derived from their device? In other words... at what point is too much selection a bad thing? Let me know what you think.
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