Legal Research

Software Apps Crash Too

By Steven Matthews

I had an interesting App experience this morning. While using The Weather Network’s iPad Application, my device crashed. Hard. It locked up so completely that my attempts to hard boot the device with a forced power-cycle didn’t work. Ten minutes later, the OS did finally auto-reboot on its own; but during that time, I seriously considered that my battery was going to have to run out before I would be able to regain access.

The experience was a gentle reminder to a long standing issue for me. That the web, as a working environment, is so incredibly rock solid; and that application software — even Apps — are not. I may still be in the minority on this, but if I counted the number of machine stoppages I’ve had over the years, the vast majority (more than 95%) have been caused by application software errors. And now, even the most light-weight of environments — our mobile Apps — are causing similar problems.

In light of Ben Schorr’s column on Google Apps, and in light of Simon’s Apple Apps Store post, I am considering this disadvantage once again. Even small software applications are software nonetheless; and admittedly, it’s a comfort issue for me (I’m a ‘web guy’), but I have little faith in business services that are not delivered predominantly on web architecture. As anti-cloud as some opinions are in the technology community, I find myself pulled further and further in the opposite direction.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 06, 2011 (boomark / email).