Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All

Interesting thing is for most people it seems to be important to have available a big selection of apps. That has been for years the excuse of why windows phones are not more popular.

I've got hundreds of apps on my iPhone, and iPads, and I only use a very small set of them. In fact I can honestly say there are hundreds of apps I've never used, even though I've collected them.

One of the principle uses of my i-Devices, it seems, has been the slow and steady accretion of apps from the store, which I end up completely ignoring. The description hooks me, or some friend recommends something they played with for 30 seconds and considered it worth twittering about, but generally .. my iDevices are a memory hole containing things I forget about, pretty much, straight away. This is a real conundrum for me - I hate it that I've gotten so much crud on my phone, and so the more I look at that crud, the more I choose to ignore it.

I blame this on the fact that my iDevices are phones, and I just didn't grow up with the idea of using the phone for anything except calling people, and maybe (barely) receiving messages with it (thats what a pager is for..) .. and also on the fact that the way that these apps is presented to me is just too darned un-organized. Apples' rigorous desire to dumb-the-device-down means I have no way of sorting the list of apps on my phone by "last-used-date", which alone would help me administer the device properly, or at least give me a means by which I could grasp the backlog of "opening a newly installed app for the first time".

The device also doesn't sort things automatically by category - I'm supposed to do this manually. That is such an infuriating conundrum in this, the 21st Century, that I simply refuse to participate in the stupidity. Its akin to the stupidity one finds, even still today, in something as mundane as the Finder of OSX which, for all the godlike computing power in the universe, still can't automatically update itself to fit its content, properly, in a sane and sensible manner. For all the intelligence and wow, Finder is still an utter piece of junk when it comes to sorting a list of files on the screen such that the labels of the columns describing each file auto-size to fit, nicely in a typographically pleasing fashion, the information in the window - Like what happens on Windows, which almost gets there, when you open an Explorer window on a folder and press ctrl-alt-numpad+ .. oh, how I wish this would JUST HAPPEN on any so-called Desktop operating system of the 21st Century, without me - the user - having to think about it..

So with regards to organizing the Apps on the iDevices, and interacting with the horrendously backlogged list of apps I've completely ignored over 8 years of iDevice ownership .. There seems to be some sort of glass ceiling about this, in my personal psychology, about how/what/when/why to use the phone for something. The most I ever dive into the 100's of un-used, generally useless apps I've accrued over time, is when I'm just sitting somewhere with nothing else better to do - and generally, that is a very rare occurrence these days.

There is one exception to this: my music-making iPad. This device gets used a lot for music-making, and there is a set of core apps I have gotten familiar with. But I don't treat that as an iDevice - for me now, its a well-maintained synthesizer device, which supplanted the previous studio-laptop-laden-with-endless-plugin-crud that I used to use. The fact is, I've only ever loaded up music-making apps on that device, when I'm in the mode of studio-usage, and that has been its only saving grace when it comes to App discovery. I wish I could do the same with the iPhone app collections, but there is just too much crud to deal with .. and the thing doesn't want to help me - at all, in the slightest - to deal with it.

Most people only use 20 apps, but those 20 apps are different from person to person.

65% is 'most' of us

Once I get those 20 apps installed, I can go months without installing new apps.