> Only about 35% of smartphone users download any apps at all in an average month Misleading title.
65% is 'most' of us
But 'at all' isn't the same as this or that month.
Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#22Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#23I don't download apps, and I make a point of never entering google account credentials into an Android phone. I don't trust Google, and I don't trust app developers; the whole ecosystem seems designed more to exploit than to serve the end-user. So I just use my phone for SMS, and for killing time browsing the web while I wait for a bus or whatever.
I'm not sure I follow. What specifically about apps would make you think it's designed to exploit the user? I know Android apps are more likely to be ad-supported (hence YOU are the product) but looking at my iPhone, I have Instagram for taking photos and sharing it with my family/friends, Lyft to get rides around the city when I don't want to drive, Dropbox for automatically backing up my photos, Google Maps for Nav…
I can't see or control what information gets sent where. I don't know what gets logged and sent to Google. I refrain from using Google credentials on the phone in case that makes it harder for Google to correlate what happens on my phone with my activity on the web in general. I disable the location services in case that makes it more difficult for someone to watch my location and movements. I don't know if it helps because there is no way I know about to find out what is being logged or where it is being sent.
App permissions seem to be completely coarse-grained, and they all seem to need access to potentially huge amounts of personal data. I can't, so far as I know, disable their access to specific bits of data I don't want them to have; nor do I know of any mechanism for blacklisting or whitelisting access to specific internet hosts.
My Moto X decided a while back that it wanted to upgrade itself and started bringing up a nag screen at frequent intervals, interrupting whatever I was doing. There is no way I can discover to turn this off, and there is no way to decline the upgrade. It just kept nagging me, many times a day, for months. I can't disable this behavior; I can only choose between reduced functionality (getting interrupted mid-sentence and having to dismiss a dialog many times a day) or letting this remote server take over and install its software on my hardware.
In the end I feel like this device doesn't actually belong to me at all. It's more like a rental apartment: I can use it, and I can keep my stuff in it if I want to, but ultimately it belongs to the landlord; which in this case is a combination of Google, Motorola, and T-Mobile. The deal seems pretty clear: they get to decide what I am allowed to do with my phone, they get to decide where my information goes and who gets to see it, and I can either accept the deal or not use the phone. For the most part I have chosen the latter.
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#24I don't download apps, and I make a point of never entering google account credentials into an Android phone. I don't trust Google, and I don't trust app developers; the whole ecosystem seems designed more to exploit than to serve the end-user. So I just use my phone for SMS, and for killing time browsing the web while I wait for a bus or whatever.
I'm not sure I follow. What specifically about apps would make you think it's designed to exploit the user? I know Android apps are more likely to be ad-supported (hence YOU are the product) but looking at my iPhone, I have Instagram for taking photos and sharing it with my family/friends, Lyft to get rides around the city when I don't want to drive, Dropbox for automatically backing up my photos, Google Maps for Nav…
Clearly there are benefits to these apps, but the concern was about exploiting the user.
Presumably, the chief concerns are tracking and security. For instance, why does DropBox need to access my entire contact list just to backup my photos? Some people don't even think about it, others don't care but some do.
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#25Misleading headline: most people don't install an app every month, but what about the apps they already have on their phone? Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people never download apps. Just not every month.
It's not particularly misleading, it re-emphasizes a very strong - and well understood - point: the majority of smartphone users do not download very many apps.
The better criticism of this article, is that it's already well known that most smartphone users 1) don't download many apps and 2) don't use very many apps day to day.
Why is that? It's because most apps are not useful or valuable. If they were, people would use them.
The majority of people also do not visit a hundred Web sites each day. Rather, they stick to a very small number of sites, and tend to visit them frequently. No surprise app use is similar.
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#26Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#27> Only about 35% of smartphone users download any apps at all in an average month Misleading title.
Agreed. I might go months without downloading any new apps, then I'll download/buy five or six in a day. That throws off the average.
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#28Four main activities on my Samsung Note3 90% of the time for over 1 year, send/receive text messages, send/receive phone calls, use a messaging app to send/receive text/mms messages, browse websites on Chrome. Rest usage - occasionally checking facebook app and google maps. I delete whatever apps that I do not use at least for two times a week. It annoys me I can't delete bloatwares Samsung installs...
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#29I don't download apps, and I make a point of never entering google account credentials into an Android phone. I don't trust Google, and I don't trust app developers; the whole ecosystem seems designed more to exploit than to serve the end-user. So I just use my phone for SMS, and for killing time browsing the web while I wait for a bus or whatever.
What makes you think this anonymises you? Even if you have turned off everything on the phone (eg location services), the sheer quantity of tracking on web pages will quickly carve you out an identity. (Note that they don't necessarily need to have your name, but you will exist in many databases along with everything you have done.) The same applies if you have installed apps. Doing something like frequent factory resets of the phone would help, but ideally you'd want really deep ones that randomise the various internal ids.
Re: Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All
#30This doesn't surprise me at all. For most people (myself included) an iPhone or Android is not a general purpose computer, but a communicator. The vast majority of my communicating happens in email, with the web browser a distant second. Apple's email program in iOS accounts for 70% of my usage, web browser 20% and everything else falls in that last 10%. Other people I know have very different breakdowns, but wether…
for me, my smartphone is a general purpose device : -Access to Pocket articles while commuting -Music, Podcast -Social networks -a little bit of instant messaging / voice -mails -maps It is also a communicator device, but only in the sense that for some silly reason I can't place calls with the 2000$ box on my desk, but only with the 800$ one in my pocket. None of the apps I have are perfect, especially now that we a…
> It is also a communicator device, but only in the sense that for some silly reason I can't place calls with the 2000$ box on my desk, but only with the 800$ one in my pocket.
FXO card? :/