I Moved All My Apps Besides 3 to a Single Folder
And turned off badge app icons…
…And, it’s quite awesome.
I really don’t recall what triggered me to do this. It was a few weeks ago, before vacation, and I just decided to try it out. I was already fairly meticulous with my app arrangement and organization with only 2 home screens. The main was for my most frequently used, daily go to apps, and the second was everything else organized into multiple folders. The problem I had was that I didn’t really have enough apps that I truly considered essential and worthy to put on that first screen. And, it isn’t as if I don’t seek out and download apps…I do. The reality I find is that although there are 2 million apps in the Apple App Store, I need much fewer than that to get by on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Right now, I have 101 apps installed on my iPhone.
That is after the cleansing process that I went through that entailed moving each and every app on my phone into a single folder. Most of the apps that were moved were moved from a folder into this new omni-folder. I deleted probably 30–40 apps in that process because I just so rarely used them.
Putting most of my apps into a single folder means that I use a combination of text search and Siri to open apps. I actually prefer text search over Siri most of the time because I don’t typically have to type the full app name in before the correct suggestion pops up while with Siri I may have to say the app name 2–3 times to get it to open. Siri isn’t the service that it needs to be yet. However, a lot of the time I interact with apps as they interact with me: I receive a notification, I click, the app opens.
The 3 apps I left out of the omni-folder are an email client (I use Spark and you should too), Messages, and Safari (because I love the integration and easy synchronization across my other Apple devices). I put those 3 and the omni-folder in the app tray. I change my home screen wallpaper fairly frequently now as it suits my mood. I no longer care if it clashes with my app icons.
Parting thoughts:
Badge icons are a waste of time unless you just want to obsess over numbers. I try to use them scarcely and only for apps that I truly need to know if I am missing something.
I don’t get the difference between swiping down and getting the search box and four suggested apps and swiping right and getting the same search box and suggested apps with suggested contacts, nearby searches, and news. This is dumb.
Siri really does need to improve and mature into a reliable service. Then, and only then, maybe I won’t feel so awkward when I am talking to my phone when other people can see or hear me.
