[warning the video is a little NSFW… so don’t watch if it wouldn’t be appropriate to hear foul language]
I’m not usually a Jenna Marbles fan, but she points out an issue in all of us. We love our ‘apps’ (even though I hate that term… I don’t call Office an ‘app’ on my PC).
Some of us install tons. Lots.
The other day I did a quick poll with you to see how many apps do you have installed, and how many of them you thought were ‘superfluous’ (just love using that word).
…and I thought I was bad.
Average number of apps installed: 81
Average approximate percentage that are ‘useless’: 42%
That means almost half of our app drawers we don’t need. One fella has 250 apps installed. 250. And claims that 60% of them are non-essential.
I should have asked some follow-up, such as, how many of these ‘extra apps’ did you pay for. We could see how financially impactful this app habit is.
Of the 50+ folk that answered here’s what we got:
Total apps installed: 4668
Estimated useless apps: 2080
2024 extra icons amongst 50+ people. That’s 100 app drawer screens. Yowza.
But, is it really bad? If you’ve got the space, and the apps aren’t running in the background amok, then it isn’t. But how many of these 2024+ apps that people have do they know what they’re doing… that’s what I’m always concerned about.
When I install an app it’s usually after I’ve seen it elsewhere, and I intently watch it when it’s first installed. See what it does, see how it plays with the other apps and resources. If something looks askew, it’s gone.
I wonder how many of the folk that reported over 50% extraneous-ness are that diligent, or do they notice a significantly reduced battery life.
Stuff to think about.
How do you check?
- Check your battery usage (menu/settings/battery). This will help you see what apps are consuming your battery. If you see something in the top 10 and you know it’s something you hardly use… check it out. [except for graphic intense games… those chew up a lot regardless]
- Check your data usage (menu / settings / data usage). Eating my battery is one thing. You start causing me to pay data overages… that’s a call for war. How much data is that one app using. In ICS you can monitor how much is background/foreground, and even limit background. For some reason blogger was using a fair bit of data when I barely ever used the app (like 15MB a month…). That seemed wrong so I cut it out.
- Check running apps (menu / settings / apps / swipe to ‘running’). Now I’m not a computer science tech, so I’m not sure the difference between cached processes or running ones, and you have to tread lightly here too… some things may be running that you don’t know, and they should be. But if you see an app you just downloaded and quit, still running and it’s gobbling some obscene amount of RAM… do a force quit. Wait a while and see if it comes back on its own. It shouldn’t… or should it.
- READ THE PERMISSIONS (when you install from the play store). If it’s a nice Sudoku game, why should it access the internet or your contacts? This also goes without saying that you should read other reviews. Check the rating… how many installs… etc… I may be paranoid, but I like to baby my device.
