the institute of hybernautics

Chorus iPhone app: bloaty, useless, and socially awkward

I gave Chorus a try…so you don’t have to.

Chorus seemed like a good idea when I read about it: iPhone app discovery based on what your friends are using. With 100K apps in the store, it’s tough to sort out the great ones, and I would love to know what my friends are using. But I don’t want to explicitly ask for recommendations, or require anyone to do any extra typing. This information could be passively shared and aggregated in the way Last.fm did for music. Something like I Use This that was wired to my iPhone and my social network.

This is not what Chorus does.

Chorus started out by using my Twitter credentials not to populate my friend list, but to autotweet the following without my explicit confirmation:

And then they filled my empty friends list with so-called Mavens, complete strangers whose opinions are exactly as useful to me as App Store ratings.

Chorus then showed me 3 pages worth of app icons, asking if I liked any of them. I recognized a few, but it was clear that this was not the list of apps on my phone, but some Netflix-like list of known apps. I had only used one out of the complete list, so…pretty useless.

I assume that it’s not physically possible for one app to see the other apps on an iPhone—a pretty serious technical hurdle that Apple threw in Chorus’ path to success. As an alternative, they have something like the Last.fm “scrobbler” program to run on your desktop. Where the Last.fm scrobbler is a tiny daemon that watches your iTunes “now playing” status and posts that info to Last.fm’s web service, the Chorus “Content Gobbler” is a bloated piece of AIR crapware which, after the tedious yak-shaving of a lengthy install process and AIR software update, consumed as much memory and swap space as it possibly could, then crashed.

Giving up on the Memory Gobbler, I went back to the Chorus app itself, looking for the simple way to rate the apps that I use. No such luck. If you happen to come across an app that you want to rate in the “Activity Stream” of the people who only 10 minutes ago were random strangers, you can review it. But it takes 7 actions to reach the same 5-star rating that you know from the App Store interface. Huh? I can only assume that my opinion must not be very useful to Chorus, or they might have made it a bit easier to collect. Oh, and when you rate an app in Chorus, it auto-tweets twice.

And then you disable Twitter in Chorus altogether.

I did buy one app that I stumbled across via Chorus, so they made a few dimes off me. And despite the 5-star rating from a complete stranger, that app kind of sucked, too.

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