Forget Paid Applications: Free Apps Review

Free iPhone applications and games are the cornerstone of the iPhone.  The majority of applications that people will put on their iPhone are not ones they will pay for, which is mainly because people cannot afford to pay for everything that they will want on their iPhone.  The iPhone itself uses the framework of the application to establish itself as a superior device.  This means that almost all of the benefits that you get from the iPhone come from the diversity of applications that are available.  If you want to turn your iPhone into a multifaceted device, ranging from a PDA to a hand held videogame console, you will have to get a sizable number of applications onto it.  For this you have to mostly resort to free iPhone applications, but many of these are either missing important components or weighed down by banner advertisements.  Developers usually have to make money from their applications, and if they have a free iPhone application these are often used simply to advertise a full paid version or act as a vessel for ads provided in the website model.  Many developers will actually give away some of their paid iPhone applications as a form of promotion, but it usually requires a kind of extensive research to find the where and when of these apps.  It is in this search that one of the best, and most surprisingly obvious, iPhone applications that you can download.  Free Apps for the iPhone comes with the plainest of tag lines: Finding Paid Apps for Free.

Free Apps has one of the most bare bones designs that you are going to find out of the free iPhone application market.  You will begin with a long list of iPhone application and game genres, ranging from things like trivia and adventure to sports and social networking.  Once you select a genre you will be given a list of of iPhone applications and games by list that fit that generic category.  Along with the name you will get the original cost of that application and where it is ranked at the iTunes' App Store.  After you select the application that you are interested in you will get a profile for that application that is really just a list of information that is already given at the App Store.  This is given against a grey background on which black text is printed, all with the aesthetic consideration of public housing.  In the upper right hand corner will be a "Get It" button that will just take it to the page for that paid iPhone application, which is now free.

The success of Free Apps is based on how many applications are here and how accurate the list is.  Fortunately, Free Apps wins on both accounts.  You can find an almost exhaustive list, though the amount of free iPhone applications that you will get through Free Apps is based on how generous these developers seem to be.    The service itself comes from AppTracker.com, which is a web service that does essentially the same function.  What Free Apps actually brings to the table is giving an easy access set of links directly to the App Store on your iPhone.  This allows you to browse these new free iPhone applications easily, download them immediately, and then try them out at your leisure.  This will not work with all of the applications listed in Free Apps because some of them require a hard connection through a computer, but with access to a Wi-Fi connection you can receive almost anything from the lists.

Free Apps is a simple application in both structure and task, but this may be fine as what it provides is one excellent feature.  Download Free Apps and keep it on your iPhone, especially if you want to breeze through a number of iPhone applications continually. 

Five out of five stars.  itunes