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Mossberg: I just deleted half my iPhone apps
- dingo_bat 10y agoI don't see the need to delete an app. Just the quicker access using the icon is reason enough for me to keep an app. Memory is the cheapest thing nowadays. I'm carrying around 64GB memory in my phone. Why limit myself, worrying about space? Even older phones don't have this problem, you can put in an SD card for plentiful storage.
- elsurudo 10y ago> Even older phones don't have this problem, you can put in an SD card for plentiful storage. Unfortunately, not a solution for iPhones. I have an old but trusty iPhone 4S with 16gb, so I certainly have memory problems. however, I've found that programs usually aren't that big – it's usually the data. Photos, podcasts, caches... those are the things that really add up without you noticing.
- coldtea 10y ago>I'm carrying around 64GB memory in my phone. Why limit myself, worrying about space? A lot of apps can be several GB by themselves alone, e.g. some 4-6 GB game titles, etc. Music apps with sample content tend to be on the multi-GB camp too. And of course the user might also have most of those 64GB taken by his music, videos, and photos.
- intoverflow2 10y ago>Memory is the cheapest thing nowadays A bargain at 16 gb upgrade for $100 from Apple /s
- dingo_bat 10y agoBuy it from someone else then ;)
- bdcravens 10y agoProblem is that new apps are often put near the end, and you're swiping a bunch of screens to get to what ostensibly are more frequently used at that time. Personally, I prefer keeping it clean, and often when I upgrade, I'll just start fresh without restoring. It's amazing what I really don't miss.
- wccrawford 10y agoIt's actually worse when they're alphabetized, and a lot of apps end up with short names that don't match the name you saw in Google Play. Facebook Messenger, for instance, is just "Messenger", removing the company name. There's a built-in app named that as well, and I always forget which is which.
- dingo_bat 10y agoOne of the worst offenders is Zomato food order app. Its icon just shows up with "Order". It took me five minutes to find it.
- ac29 10y agoA lot of stuff can end up running in the background, though. Its less an issue of storage space, and more an issue of battery life. Performance and data consumption may also be issues for some people.
- NietTim 10y agoMan...every single time I see a title like this all I can think is "Oh what a special little snowflake you are"
- zzalpha 10y agoRead a bit further. It's not really about him deleting apps (his case is an absurd outlier...). It's really more about the fact that, when it comes to apps, Apple and Google are the new Atari: mountains and mountains of shovelware.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago>Apple and Google are the new Atari: mountains and mountains of shovelware. Apple and Google are just HUGE marketplaces where you can find anything, shoveware included. We don't call Amazon the "new Atari" because you can find tons of crap books, and not just Shakespeare and awarded novelists. It's absurd to expect not to find tons of shovelware in a app stores with 1 million titles. Plus, one man's shovelware is another man's "gem of an app I use everyday". The question is whether there are a few thousands of great apps (and the answer is definitely yes) -- not whether all 1.5 million apps in there are great.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoFor me, the problem is having to sort thru all the shovelware to find one or two useful apps. It would be nice if: 1) there were multiple app stores 2) Apple would curate their own app store I think that approach would solve so many problems. The first would see app stores that were limited in scope (not all, but some). Some would curate, some would not. The non-curated ones would be easily avoidable. The second option needs to happen. The shovelware on the Apple app store makes me want to avoid it as much as possible. If Apple would hyper-aggressively curate their own app store, I think the overall quality would rise. Of course, I realize this probably won't happen. Lockdown of the app store is directly tied to their bottom line.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chickenfries 10y agoI feel like these purges are a relatively common practice? I've heard people say things to the effect of "Oh, I had that app but I deleted it because I never used it and I needed more space." That's usually what prompts me to delete some unused apps. This blog feels like it's a few several years too late.
- jagger27 10y ago> several years too late That's Mossberg for you. He's a good and thoughtful writer who today only writes about what we already know.
- pavlov 10y agoThere's a place for that, as not everyone is an early adopter. He probably knows his readership pretty well, and introduces concepts to them when he feels they have been sufficiently "baked" in tech blogs and other venues.
- davidiach 10y agoI use a 16GB iPhone and I delete apps all the time because of lack of space. In a sense I see this as a strategic mistake by Apple, you can't have people downloading and using lots of app and also sell most iPhone with only 16GB space.
- coldtea 10y agoMaybe Apple doesn't care about "people downloading and using lots of app" beyond a certain point? The App Store has never been a cash cow for them. Hardware has always bin.
- shoover 10y agoAnd then carriers will sell Android phones with 8GB in which the OS takes 5GB and undeletable apps use 2+GB. But it runs quickly enough in a demo and once you buy it you're stuck.
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- Yhippa 10y agoI recently wiped my Nexus 6 because the battery was draining (would die at 2 PM) faster than normal and I had some pretty bad issues with the camera. When I reloaded it I resolved to use the website version of apps as much as possible and not to download native apps. My battery life now is superior to before. I suspect that a lot of the apps I had were phoning home or disrupting WakeLocks like Facebook does. I am officially appskeptic. A lot of the old apps I used to use I can do most things through their mobile sites. For the ones I can't that I have to use I go through the website. I remember the days of the first iPod touch and early iPhone where Apple championed web apps vs dedicated. I wish the trend would have continued that way (even Windows Phone would be viable if so).
- vanadium 10y agoReplacing the Facebook app on Android with Metal (or any one of numerous mobile web wrappers as apps) alone resolved most of the problems I was having with battery life. The argument for apps over mobile web only works when the app respects _both_ the user experience and resources of the device as well as the mobile experience does.
- aroch 10y agoGoogle Fit and Now (and everyone's friend, nlpwakelock) are also frequent culprits
- coldtea 10y ago>Pokémon Go may be a sensation, but the novelty of the App Store is over It's been almost a decade since the App Store was introduced. In what way would it still be a "novelty"? It's now a tens of billions annual app marketplace.
- mark_l_watson 10y agoI have just gone, slightly, in the opposite direction. I used to install almost no apps on my android phone. Now with Android 6 fine grain permissions I have started installing a few useful apps.
- catpolice 10y agoI've read a few articles like this that start with the assumption that storage space obviously needs to be conserved. I always wonder what these people are keeping on their phones. I always buy the version of the phone with the least storage, and I do zero things to manage how much space I'm using and I've never run out. Is it like large offline media libraries? I don't spend a huge amount of time outside of wifi range and don't really have a problem just streaming everything.
- mbrock 10y agoPodcast apps tend to save everything for some stupid reason. My iPhone was full and I noticed Overcast had saved like 3 GB of old episodes. Pretty terrible UX.
- jasonpbecker 10y agoThe default in Overcast is to delete after listening and to save only 3 episodes from each subscription, which is quite sensible IMO.
- joe5150 10y agoit still seems to...not do this correctly? I have it configured thus but still have to delete 1GB+ of old episodes manually on a regular basis.
- massysett 10y agoI guess for him the apps had a novelty they never had for me. I use a few apps and the browser. I'm very happy with my iPhone. Overall this reads like "my refrigerator keeps food cold, it is reliable for years, the novelty has worn off" or "I went to the grocery store and bought every cereal in the cereal aisle, there are too many, it's hard to find good ones, the novelty of having all this cereal has worn off, let's go back to when oatmeal was the only choice." I guess this sort of thinking is inevitable when you hunt around for apps. Most people don't hunt around for apps. They have a need, then they get an app. They're happy.
- xlayn 10y agoI agree. I consider it a part of a more generic problem. The problem of "The next best thing", to search for novelty; I would say the last NBT was maybe Siri and I just use it to set lazy alarms...
- flyinghamster 10y agoAs I see it, the big problem is separating the worthwhile apps from the useless (and sometimes semi- or fully malicious) ones. User reviews aren't necessarily trustworthy, and unscrupulous publishers often game the system. Then there is (at least on typical Android handsets) the undeletable bloatware. It doesn't seem to be quite the problem that it used to be, but it's still annoying. Though I have root, I'm wary of just deleting things. I have about 85 MB of disabled apps on my current phone, and about 6 GB free out of 16 GB main storage. A 64 GB MicroSD stores my media, so 16 GB is less of a problem here than it is on a Nexus or an iPhone. It's too bad there's such a ridiculous markup on built-in storage, SD slot or no. I already occasionally purge apps that I don't use, though - and when I install something new, I watch battery life like a hawk. If it shows any sign of misbehaving, away it goes. If it needs ridiculous permissions (like location information for a flashlight or a metronome) it doesn't get installed in the first place. In-app ads aren't a huge problem to me, but they annoy me anyway just because of so many deceptive "Clean your phone of viruses!" ads (often with fake "close" buttons) that bamboozle less-savvy users. I'd like to see the FTC give the deceivers a good stomping, but in today's political environment that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
- joe5150 10y agoMaybe unrelated but I think that the Music app used with Apple Music uses up a lot of storage with caching that isn't surfaced in the app-by-app storage usage. I have a 16GB iPhone (mistake) that I'm constantly deleting photos from, deleting and reinstalling apps to bust caches, etc., just to find the space I free evaporate when I listen to music.
- ringwalt 10y agoGoogle Play Music is the same, at least on iOS (well, the storage usage is accurate). It caches any song you listen to once or twice, until it eats up all free space. Then your only choice is to purge the entire cache, except for albums you've manually downloaded (which can only be set at an album granularity).
- joe5150 10y agoWell with Apple Music you can't manually trigger a cache purge (to my knowledge) and of course you can't delete the Music app and reinstall it. Maybe toggling Apple Music or iCloud Music Library off/on would do it? But I tend to want to avoid ever changing iCloud-related settings on my phone once they appear to be working correctly, due to my experience of them just falling apart in the past.
- mcculley 10y agoThe iOS SpringBoard needs a way to view apps by how often they are used (among other views). That would make it easier to clean up the apps I've downloaded and used only once.
- Jtsummers 10y agoThat would be nice. I've developed a system of (periodically) separating out apps I know I use from ones I'm less certain about. So if I have a folder like "productivity" and it has 10 apps, I'll pull out the 2 or 3 I know I used in the past week and put them in a new Productivity folder. If the other apps don't get used after a month or so, and have no good reason to stick around despite their rare use, I'll delete them. I have a handful of apps I use 2-3 times a year (like Eventbrite or Delta or Airbnb), but I keep them because it's easier than redownloading when an event comes up that does ticketing through them. Those go on the last of my homescreens so they're out of the way until I need them.
- jmstickney 10y agoThis comment/quote seemed interesting to me: "A WELL-DESIGNED APP IS MUCH BETTER TO USE THAN A MOBILE WEB BROWSER, EVEN ON A LARGE PHONE" as The Verge did away with their native app a long time ago. I wonder how he feels about The Verge not having a native app.
- cuddlybacon 10y ago> Over the past few days, I’ve methodically deleted 165 apps from my iPhone, about 54 percent of the 305 apps I had on the phone when I started culling the herd I don't think I've had more than 50 installed at once. Having 305 installed seems like the app version of being on Horders.
- mcphage 10y agoWell, he points out that it's because he's a tech reviewer and trying out lots of apps is part of his job.
- apatters 10y ago> For instance, I’d use Facebook and Twitter much less on my phone if I had to use them through the browser This was the most interesting line in the article for me because I recently had the same thought. But my reaction was to uninstall Facebook because I wanted to use it less! It's one of the best computing decisions I've made in years. I still have Messenger so I don't miss anything truly important. The FB web app is perfectly serviceable for the rare occasion when I need to use it. My battery life has improved. The rest of my Facebooking now happens solely on my PC and all I really miss out on is scrolling through the same items in my feed 6 times a day. The two simple acts of uninstalling Facebook and turning off push notifications for email have given me back those periods of the day where I'm alone with my thoughts. You know, those moments that people are always lamenting have been destroyed by the smartphone.