My Mobile App-etite

End of the year means it’s time to do another mobile tech experiment on myself. Instead of going laptop-less/tablet-only as I did a couple of years ago, I’m going to track the number of times a day I open the different apps on my phone. While I expect some obvious patterns will emerge — lots of email via Mailbox for example — I’m going to try and figure out if it’s worth moving to a more clutter free mobile experience.

At this moment I have 127 apps on my phone, including built in and system apps. Too many of those are installed  “just in case” including travel and airline apps, chat/messaging apps, social nets, photo editing, financial, shopping and the list goes on. There’s no performance penalty to having lots and lots of apps on the phone. There is just for me at least a visual and mental clutter that distracts. It’s not like my phone needs to be a Swiss Army knife full of extra blades. I just don’t need six screens of apps to scroll through filled with icons I only push at airports or that I’ll never use in my daily routine.

So through the end of the year I’m going to keep track of the apps I use on my main device, as well as what I use on my phablet. The goal is to see what I open, what I’m looking at and to figure out what can be switched to only install at certain times, or to whether I can get the same feature from the mobile web version of an app.

Results in Q1 2015!