The Next Web reports for Instagram that times are a-changing. There are essentially two kinds of app in Instagram’s ‘add a pretty filter’ space:

• Highly entertaining apps that evoke old-school instant camera charm by live-applying a filter, so you can see what you’re going to get. This is Instagram today.
• Hum-drum apps where you take a photo in a normal, boring way and then spend several days arsing about with countless filters, before more or less choosing one at random, because the alternative is starving to death with a smartphone in your hand, which would be really dumb. This is Instagram tomorrow.

The m0st astonishing aspect of this story comes from Instagram itself, via the known issues site.

As of the current release (v3.1), Instagram does not support live filters on the iPhone 5. Going forward, live filters will be phased out as we work to improve the Instagram experience for all users.

That last sentence is very important and warrants breaking up into chunks:

as we work to improve the Instagram experience

What? How are you improving the Instagram experience by removing something that is core to the Instagram experience?

for all users.

Oh. So Instagram’s boarded the lowest-common denominator train. Next stop: Shitappsville.

UPDATE: Ha! So, on Twitter the response has been split between “Instagram are idiots” and “I never even knew live filters existed”, so perhaps this is also a case of Instagram stamping on a tricky engineering problem related to a feature not used by enough people for them to think it matters. (That said, Android users have responded, grumbling that they’d really like live filters.) Regardless, it’s still a pity to see an app that’s like a ton of point-and-clicks in your pocket get downgraded to one of a billion apply-a-filter-later apps welded to a social network.

Sometimes, there are cringeworthy adverts and video spots, but then there’s something that doesn’t so much make your toes curl up as flee for another country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlsahuZ_4oM&feature=youtu.be

So there we have it. RIM’s band plays on as the ship goes down (baby). Still, I’m sure this will convince developers that everything’s OK. And even if it doesn’t, there’s the rousing speech from CEO Thorsten Heins that RIM has a real honest-to-goodness shot at being number three. However, at the time of writing, I could not confirm whether he meant number three in the mobile computing space or in the soft-rock charts.

1. Half the time when you ask for directions to a town or city, it’ll direct you to something else entirely. Comically, when I earlier tried getting directions to Truro, Maps assumed that I wanted to visit Richmond-based Truro Productions Ltd rather than a nice town in Cornwall. Doing that very American thing of stating a country after a town or city (e.g. ‘London, England’) always seems to work. However, if British people dare utter place names in that way, we’re legally obliged to punch ourselves repeatedly in the face until unconscious. (Excitingly, it also appears Maps’s idiocy is entirely random. Sometimes, it ‘just works’. Sometimes, it’s clearly had an appointment with a lobotomist.)
2. Type in a post code to find out where a building lives and Maps helpfully prunes this part of the address to five characters. So, instead of, say, GU16 7UJ, Maps will amend the address to cut off the last two digits. Occasionally, it’ll also helpfully round up or down the fifth digit, just to further confuse matters. Any guesses which country that rhymes with Invited Plates of Numerica uses post codes that have five digits?
3. Satellite photos of huge swathes of not-USA are akin to you being an idiot and walking right up to a wall in a mid-1990s PC FPS. It’s not so much “I can see my house from here” as “Why the hell has my town turned into a blurry mess of pixels?”

I don’t doubt mapping is hard, but Apple’s previous solution (i.e. using Google data) provided a robust and feature-rich experience for users. At best, Maps for iOS 6 is spotty and, apparently, just a tad US-focussed. For movie sales, that’s fair enough, but for maps it’s simply not good enough. Maps aren’t nice-to-have, but a crucial component of a modern mobile OS. This is worse than a MobileMe moment, and Cook needs to usher his team into a room, ask them what Maps was supposed to do, and then yell something along the lines of: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

I just installed iOS 6 and made a beeline for the Maps app. Um. That was pretty much my first thought: um. The reason being, I went for my house and found a pixelated mess in place of what was once a slightly dated satellite map of my garden. Naturally, this is presumably because the UK is in fact ‘London’, but I don’t live in that bit. (Comically, photos of where I live are so bad in the new Maps that you can’t even make out major roads when you zoom out quite a lot.) Of course, on visiting a few random US postcodes, overhead shots at the same zoom level were spiffy. In the UK, things went from OK to London to black and white to London. In addition, the lack of Street View renders Maps less useful for working at countering my astonishing ability to get lost absolutely anywhere by checking out what a street or building looks like before I set off.

I don’t doubt Maps will improve, but it’ll be interesting to see what comes next. Has Google got its own app in the works, ready for release at a time when lots of iOS users are grumbling? I suspect Google Maps for iOS would go down brilliantly right about now, in part because most people think CHANGE IS BAD, but also because quite a few of the changes in Maps actually are bad. (Depending on your location, the app is either a minor feature downgrade or a massive shift to a relatively tiny amount of information.) Another option would be to leave Apple users in the lurch, not bother with Maps for iOS for months, and point to Android as being the best for that kind of thing.

A sensible Google would take the first option, given that Apple’s app will improve, and also that few people will ditch a platform just because Maps became a bit crap. But whether Google’s got its sensible hat on today is something only Google itself knows.

Marco Arment responds to an article on TUAW by Richard Gaywood. Gaywood asks:

How many of you cruise AppShopper’s price drops page for bargains when looking for a new game to while away a boring commute? Or how many of you, when someone recommends an iOS app to you, find the first thing you do is load the AppShopper app to check the “price history” section… and if the app routinely goes on sale for less than it costs now, add it to your wishlist to buy the next time it’s cheap?

And Arment wonders whether:

a nontrivial number of people really go through all of this trouble to save an occasional dollar on apps for their hundreds-of-dollars iOS devices?

I’d assume that most people who are that price-sensitive wouldn’t be in the market for paid apps at all. But I think the numbers prove that theory wrong.

Part of the problem with the race to the bottom in apps isn’t that people won’t buy them, but that they have an odd idea about value for money. I’ve lost count of the number of game devs who say people have a go at them when they’ve the audacity to price their apps above tier-one. After all, games should cost 69p/$0.99, for some reason. And often I’ll be rummaging around the App Store and see some dolt slam a fantastic game because it costs £1.49. Don’t get them wrong—they enjoyed the game. But it should have been 69p, just because.

That said, I’ll admit now to doing one of the things Gaywood mentioned. I have an AppShopper wish-list, which is full of apps that I’d be keen on buying if they were cheaper, even if they’re already cheap. For me, though, this isn’t so much about being a skinflint, more about creating a storage repository for games and apps I’m mildly sort-of interested in. Apps I care about or that look really interesting are ones I buy immediately, regardless of price. After all, with a few exceptions, iOS apps still usually cost a fraction of the price I was paying for games in 1986, or shareware apps I was buying in the late 1990s.