Attack of the iPhone app launchers

It’s really amazing how quickly iPhone apps have sprung up. I mean, it’s only been about ten days, yet already more than a hundred apps have been created by developers who get no direct profit from the endeavor. So while these apps are great and all, they are hard to manage. Sure, you could just use the iPhone bookmarks feature, but that can be tedious and difficult if you have a lot of apps. So, to answer this problem, a variety of iPhone launcher apps have been created.

There are three iPhone launcher apps that I know of: AppMarks, Mojit, and MockDock. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, while all being very good apps. Appmarks is a great tool because it allows you to add not just iPhone apps, but any web site to its page, which shows icons and names of your different sites. Unfortunately, very few iPhone apps and websites have AppMarks icons, causing AppMarks to resort to getting icons from a site’s favicon, which some iPhone apps lack. AppMarks does require you to register a free account to save your icons. Overall, AppMarks is a very versatile tool and great iPhone launcher.

The next iPhone launcher is Mojit. Mojit is a service that allows you to, after registering a free account, put apps in Mojit’s now very small library onto your homepage. The service work very well, even though many of the iPhone apps I use are not on it, though Mojit says they will add an automatic app submission form soon. The final launcher, MockDock, is very similar to Mojit, requiring a mere email address to register. It also has a selection of iPhone apps about the size of Mojit’s, though many of them are different.

In the end, figuring out which of these launchers is best for you is a matter of taste and which apps you use. I personally like Mojit and AppMaker, though, because neither has all of my apps and displays them well, I really don’t end up using either that often. But hey, they’ll only get better over time.