Square pegs in round holes

How I’ve dealt with my over-app-populated iPhone

I’ve recently went beyond realising how much time spend on my iPhone, I’ve actually measured it — 4h a day, with about 50 pickups, measured using Moment, a free app I’ve mentioned in a previous post too. So I thought, what the heck, let’s think it through and let’s improve my experience. After all the company I work for, pays me to optimise processes (among the other things). Three weeks of holidays & lots of commuting, gave me abundance of time.

Let’s start from the beginning. I have a problem with apps.

There is a jaw-dropping total of 212 apps installed on my iPhone, which is the result of A) preloaded and unremovable Apple apps + B) being 6 years an iPhone user + C) I’m also very curious and generally an early adopter, trying to keep up with the latest apps.

Diffusion of innovations theory by Everett Rogers

I am also a bit of the Mr. Play-it-safe, hoping for the best and planning for the worst, which means I keep some apps just in case, because you never know.

This being said, I’ve asked myself two questions:

1. If you are still reading, you might have thought what I did too, which is why the hell do I have so many apps? (By the way, do you know how many apps are on your’s?)
2. How do I create relevance in this jungle and how do I simplify access to/interaction with most relevant apps?

1. Why the hell do I have so many apps?

I will spare you the extensive list of 212 apps I have on my iPhone. After giving it a bit of thought, I realised something pretty obvious, apps are no different than your toolkit, your desk, your car, your home and your life. There is usually a lot of unnecessary things. Some things we keep for later or occasional use, some we forget we have (which is why I keep 103 apps I don’t enjoy or barely use). Apps are no different. We are no different. I guess some of us are at ease with messy contexts, some less. In any event, it is safe to claim the key is being able to summon the right app at the right time to solve a specific need.

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign? — Albert Einstein

2. How do I create relevance in this jungle and how do I simplify access to/interaction with most relevant apps?

This is where is gets even more nerdy. First of all, I’ve listed all my apps and voted them (on a scale 1 to 3) according to three attributes: frequency of use, importance & quality of the app.

Frequency of use x Importance x Quality = Score

Then I’ve sorted them by score, which is the product of the vote I gave to each attribute. This gave me a very clear ranking of apps, that I’ve grouped in high, medium & low relevance apps. Breaking down the numbers, within the 212 apps on my iPhone: 103 I consider mediocre or never use (NOTE: among these 15 are Apple apps I could & couldn’t remove), 60 I regard somehow meaningful and 49 rule my world — unfortunately my home screen has room for only 28 of them.

That’s why the second part was thinking about how I interact with these apps. Some time ago I’ve decided I would limit myself to two screens, i.e. the home screen and the “back yard” screen (a mix of apps and folders).

• Low — All of the 103 low relevance apps I’ve buried in folders in the second screen. There are 13 folders, each representing a category. Someday I will actively think about deleting a couple of these #newyearsresolutionfor2017
• Medium — Except for 3 that are in the second screen, the remaining 57 medium relevant apps are also located in folders, but mostly within the the first page of the folder
• High — All the 49 most relevant apps could not fit the home screen, so that’s why I started looking at how I could summon them without actually needing to tap on the app icon. 28 apps found their place in the home screen, another 8 seat in the second screen. Among the remaining 13, only 2 I have to go find in folders, as for the last 11 I leverage some shortcuts, all made possible by Apple’s latest versions of iOS.

Here’s some great iOS system shortcuts:

• Notifications — you just worry about the app only when a notification triggers it. The best example of it to is boarding passes via Apple Wallet.

Apple Wallet ensures the easiest access to my electronic boarding pass. No matter what I do, just by sliding on the notification, I’ll jump from lock screen to boarding card (without even the need to unlock the device).

• Control Center — there’s no need to have the Camera app on my home screen as, regardless of where I am, I can just swipe up and access it from the Control Center. Same applies for the Clock app to set the alarm.

Control Center is great, a side from managing flight mode, wifi, brightness etc, I use it for it shortcuts. I’ve never used AirDrop, so I believe having 2 rows of customizable shortcuts at the bottom would be even better.

• Widgets — once again, there’s no need to go look for the Weather or Stocks apps, as I can get a preview and a shortcut to these apps simply by swiping down and accessing the widgets.

With Widgets I mostly look up stock prices or weather forecast and tapping on the different widgets gets me straight to the desired apps, which I don’t necessarily have on my home screen.

• Spotlight search — sounds old school, but some times it’s simpler to just type the first letters of an app in the search bar, especially when you deal with 103 apps you rarely use #nonsense

Spotlight is way more powerful then a simple app searching tool, even though that’s what I mostly use it for (and no, I actually never search for Apple’s Music app, as I firmly believe Spotify is superior).

• Siri — I mostly use Siri to call someone, to activate battery saving mode, to remind me to do something or whatever I can’t do when my hands or my eyes are busy. My favorite one is actually using Siri as a timer for pasta perfectly “al dente”.

Low Power Mode is great for people on the move like me, but activating it via Siri is way simpler than digging into the Settings app. I would expect this to fit the Control Center.

• iOS app suggestions—this feature is particularly useful when you travel or on the move. An app icon in the lower left corner of your lock screen will appear and that app is supposed to be relevant in regards with your location and activity.

My favorite use of suggestions come with music: when I plug the earphones jack, Spotify’s icon appear, so I can launch Spotify by simply swiping up from the the lower left corner.

• Deep links — are becoming more and more present, making our lives simpler, especially in mobile contexts. Citymapper is so useful its Uber-related alternatives will provide me with waiting time and price option and open the Uber app for me. Once in the Uber app, the pickup address and the destination would be pre-filled and ready for request (see screenshots below). While Citymapper is on my home screen, Uber is not, but doesn’t force me to find Uber’s app in the Travel folder of by second screen.

In the context of mobile apps, deep linking consists of using a uniform resource identifier (URI) that links to a specific location within a mobile app rather than simply launching the app.

- Wikipedia

The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying.

- Paul Adams

While in Safari, clicking on a Youtube URL will prompt me if I want to open the video with Youtube app or while on Amazon’s website I will be asked offered to open its app (which makes the purchase experience way better, especially with Touch ID).

• 3D Touch —unfortunately, my iPhone 6 doesn’t support 3D Touch (iPhone 6S is required), so I haven’t fully experienced the benefits of it, but I can surely foresee them. 3D touch is actually more about getting where you are going, faster. Here are some 25 time-saving home screen shortcuts. The best part? It has just started.

From left to right: Mail — 3D touch gets you straight to a new message, skipping a few steps; Maps — it’s incredibly easy to get home, share your location or remembering where you’ve parked you car, by marking your location; Camera — no need to explain why this is great; Clock — even a system feature gets a significant improvement with 3D touch.

One more thing

Thumb Zone heat map found in this post

Instead of using a logical & ergonomic approach based on frequency of use and thumb reach, I opted for one based on color-based columns, which is a totally pointless thing as it is just pleasing my taste for aesthetics.

My home screen, February 2016

As of February 2016, this is the list of 28 of my favorite or most frequently used apps and how to get them all on my home screen. Let’s see in 12 months what will stick and how will I interact with these apps.

How do you deal with your apps?

Perhaps AI & virtual assistant will frog-leap this issue, until then is there anyone willing to build an app for this? I would be happy to hear you opinions.