The case for fewer apps
A home screen is a budget. Most of us are spending it badly — and the cost is not storage.
The average phone carries around eighty installed applications. The average person opens nine of them in a given week. The other seventy-one are not free: they hold background permissions, they sync, they notify, and — most expensively — they occupy the fraction of a second you spend scanning for the thing you actually wanted.
Attention is the scarce resource
Storage is cheap and getting cheaper. Attention is fixed. Every icon on a home screen is a small tax on finding the icon next to it.
A simple rule
If you have not deliberately opened an app in thirty days, it is not an app you use — it is an app you installed. Those are different things.
- Sort by last opened.
- Scroll to the thirty-day line.
- Delete everything below it.
You will reinstall two of them. That is the correct number, and reinstalling takes fifteen seconds.
What remains
What survives this is usually a short list: a browser, a messaging app, a camera, a maps app, something for money, something for music. Six to ten tools that each earn their place daily.
The phone does not get faster. It gets quieter. That turns out to be the thing most people were actually asking for.