The Lumia 900 is indeed my next, but here's the problem

Posted by Chris Ziegler on April 9, 2012 12:11 am 438

As some of you know, I said in my This is my next feature a month ago that I was looking forward to putting the Lumia 900 in my pocket as my personal phone. I started doing that this weekend and have steered clear of my old standby, the venerable Galaxy Nexus, as much as possible.

As you can probably imagine, there are some growing pains that I'm trying to work through. It's one thing to review a smartphone and keep it around as a secondary device, but making it your primary (and often only) handset is another matter altogether.

Windows Phone continues to have an app gap that it needs to close. Microsoft knows, and it seems to be working a few angles (up to and including throwing large sums of cash in the right direction) to try to fix that — but in the meantime, it hurts. What I've done is compile a list of Android apps that I use frequently and I've mapped it to Windows Phone, recording whether there's an official Windows Phone equivalent available, and if not, whether there's a decent third-party substitute. Emphasis on "decent" here — the app had to have a good review in the Marketplace, and it had to have roughly equivalent (or better) functionality.

Also note that this doesn't pay any attention to relative app quality if official apps are available on both platforms (Twitter for Windows Phone, for example, is terrible compared to Twitter for Android). That may be another post for another time.

Anyway, please don't judge me on my choice of apps here, that's really not the point. These are my apps. I know Words with Friends sucks, I play it because I have a million friends who also play it. I'm just trying to get the lay of the land, see what I'm really missing compared to what I'm accustomed to using on my Galaxy Nexus.

App Available on WP? 3rd-party substitute?
1Password Yes N/A
Adobe Reader Yes N/A
Amazon Yes N/A
Amazon Kindle Yes N/A
Amex No No
Andchat No Yes
Astro No Yes
Google Authenticator No Yes
Barcode Scanner Yes N/A
Best Buy Reward Zone No No
Chicago Tribune No No
Citibank No No
Digitally Imported No No
Google Docs No No(1)
Draw Something No No
Dropbox No Yes
eBay Yes N/A
Expensify Yes N/A
Facebook Yes N/A
FlightTrack Yes N/A
Foursquare Yes N/A
Gmail No No
Grocery iQ No Yes
Hanging with Friends No No
Minecraft PE No No
My-Cast Yes N/A
myAT&T Yes N/A
Nest No No
OpenTable Yes N/A
Pandora No Yes
PayPal No No
Rdio Yes N/A
Scramble with Friends No No
Skype Yes N/A
SoundHound Yes N/A
Ookla Speed Test No Yes
Starbucks No Yes
Google Talk No Yes
TiVo No Yes
Tumblr No No
Twitter Yes N/A
Uber No No
United No No
Google Voice No Yes
WIMM Companion No No
MetaWatch No No
SoundCloud No Yes
Words with Friends No No
Yelp Yes N/A
YouTube No(2) Yes
ZipCar No No
SwiftKey No No

1 - GDocs by tasbir inc. supports viewing, but not editing or collaboration.
2 - There's an "official" YouTube app published by Microsoft, but it's awful — it's little more than a link to YouTube's mobile site.

Important apps of mine with official Windows Phone equivalents: 18/51 (35.3%)
Of those that don't have official Windows Phone versions, a decent third-party equivalent is available: 13/33 (39.4%)
Total coverage between official and third-party apps: 31/51 (60.8%)

What does this mean? I don't really know yet — it's going to take some time for me to figure out how much I miss these apps.

For other Android or iOS switchers, I've got a bit of homework for you: do this same math, report your numbers below. I'm curious how close your percentages are to mine. Is it a big problem for you, or are you adjusting okay?