What makes me love an app? Let me count the ways.

What’s in a App?

Dogs, it’s been said, look like their owners. If you ask me, people’s smartPhones look like reflections of how their owners live life. In the course of a day it’s likely that I’ll reach for 6 or 7 apps, each satisfying a special need. My most treasured apps fall into a number of categories.

The Utilitarian: These are the apps I can’t live without (or at least I don’t remember how I lived without them). The ones that let me use my voice to find the nearest pizza place, or the next bathroom stop. The ones that let me make my grocery list based on recipes. The ones that navigate me through the labyrinth of the NYC subways. The ones that bring me my news when I need a headline fix.

Best of Breed: The wisdom of the crowds really does seem to matter when choosing the best apps. There may be fifty crossword puzzle apps available at the various app sites, but the crowd usually gravitates towards the one that’s best. I look to the top sellers in a category and weigh that into my final decision.

Sheer Whimsy: It’s certainly not essential for my iPod Touch to glow like a glow stick or my phone to hit me with the FunFact of the day, but there’s an amorphous quality to certain apps that’s hard to quantify. The best I can say is that they move me and engage me for reasons unknown.

Augmented Reality: My favorite tech obsession these days is augmented reality. Augemented reality basically means that your device is adding more information than the physical world around you offers. Point your Android at the stars and it’ll tell you which constellation you’re looking at because it knows about your geographical coordinates. Or point your iPhone at a castle on the Rhine to have your phone provide a description of what you’re looking at. These apps are jaw-droppingly amazing.

Tell it to me quick and go easy on the pocketbook: Life is short and there’s only so much time that I can devote to my search for the perfect app. If I don’t get the point of the app in a quick read, and if the price too steep for something that I haven’t been able to demo sufficiently I balk.

What about you? What does your phone’s apps say about what’s important to you?