
Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All - pmelendez
http://time.com/3158893/smartphone-apps-apple/
======
abruzzi
This doesn't surprise me at all. For most people (myself included) an iPhone
or Android is not a general purpose computer, but a communicator. The vast
majority of my communicating happens in email, with the web browser a distant
second. Apple's email program in iOS accounts for 70% of my usage, web browser
20% and everything else falls in that last 10%. Other people I know have very
different breakdowns, but wether it is Messages or Facebook, or something
else, that is their primary communication tool. I've got hundreds of other
apps that I use occasionally, but so many phone apps for me are simple single
purpose apps, that makes them of limited narrow use.

~~~
on_and_off
for me, my smartphone is a general purpose device : -Access to Pocket articles
while commuting -Music, Podcast -Social networks -a little bit of instant
messaging / voice -mails -maps

It is also a communicator device, but only in the sense that for some silly
reason I can't place calls with the 2000$ box on my desk, but only with the
800$ one in my pocket.

None of the apps I have are perfect, especially now that we are in an awkward
phase where we have an excellent Material spec and are very far from it in
practice. However, they all do their job well enough. So well that I don't
remember the last time I added an app to my routines.

~~~
moe
_I can 't place calls with the 2000$ box on my desk_

Of course you can. Get a Softphone[1], a SIP account[2], and you're good to
go.

[1] e.g.
[https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/telephone/id406825478?mt=12](https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/telephone/id406825478?mt=12)

[2] Here's a good list (calls to USA landline & mobile are free on most of
them):
[http://www.mobilevoip.com/supported_brands](http://www.mobilevoip.com/supported_brands)

~~~
soperj
Or just use the google talk feature that's part of gmail, and phone out to
anywhere in the US and Canada for free.

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jkot
> _Only about 35% of smartphone users download any apps at all in an average
> month_

Misleading title.

~~~
TheBiv
65% is 'most' of us

~~~
rpenm
'Most' of us were not born 'in any given month'. That doesn't mean we weren't
born 'at all'. Inaccurate headline.

~~~
nitrogen
The percentage of users buying apps in a given month does relate to the
overall number of app purchases. Also, we're only born once, but we can buy
apps any time we want.

------
marssaxman
I don't download apps, and I make a point of never entering google account
credentials into an Android phone. I don't trust Google, and I don't trust app
developers; the whole ecosystem seems designed more to exploit than to serve
the end-user. So I just use my phone for SMS, and for killing time browsing
the web while I wait for a bus or whatever.

~~~
calbear81
I'm not sure I follow. What specifically about apps would make you think it's
designed to exploit the user? I know Android apps are more likely to be ad-
supported (hence YOU are the product) but looking at my iPhone, I have
Instagram for taking photos and sharing it with my family/friends, Lyft to get
rides around the city when I don't want to drive, Dropbox for automatically
backing up my photos, Google Maps for Navigation and OpenTable for booking
restaurant reservations so I don't have to call them and ask for times they
are available and wait on hold forever.

Seems to me that in all of these cases, there is clear benefit to me and
serves my needs as the end-user.

~~~
marssaxman
I can't see or control what information gets sent where. I don't know what
gets logged and sent to Google. I refrain from using Google credentials on the
phone in case that makes it harder for Google to correlate what happens on my
phone with my activity on the web in general. I disable the location services
in case that makes it more difficult for someone to watch my location and
movements. I don't know if it helps because there is no way I know about to
find out what is being logged or where it is being sent.

App permissions seem to be completely coarse-grained, and they all seem to
need access to potentially huge amounts of personal data. I can't, so far as I
know, disable their access to specific bits of data I don't want them to have;
nor do I know of any mechanism for blacklisting or whitelisting access to
specific internet hosts.

My Moto X decided a while back that it wanted to upgrade itself and started
bringing up a nag screen at frequent intervals, interrupting whatever I was
doing. There is no way I can discover to turn this off, and there is no way to
decline the upgrade. It just kept nagging me, many times a day, for months. I
can't disable this behavior; I can only choose between reduced functionality
(getting interrupted mid-sentence and having to dismiss a dialog many times a
day) or letting this remote server take over and install its software on my
hardware.

In the end I feel like this device doesn't actually belong to me at all. It's
more like a rental apartment: I can use it, and I can keep my stuff in it if I
want to, but ultimately it belongs to the landlord; which in this case is a
combination of Google, Motorola, and T-Mobile. The deal seems pretty clear:
they get to decide what I am allowed to do with my phone, they get to decide
where my information goes and who gets to see it, and I can either accept the
deal or not use the phone. For the most part I have chosen the latter.

~~~
apayan
You might enjoy using CyanogenMod on your phone. No google account required,
and it gives you a lot more control over Android.

------
p1esk
I thought most people download a few of their favorite apps immediately after
they buy a new phone. After that, at least for me, installing new apps is a
very rare event. I installed about 5 apps right away, and a couple more in the
two years since.

------
saboot
I wonder what the demographics on non-app users are. My grandmother had an
iPhone briefly, however the only way she used it was to make calls (she
actually carried the 'old school' phone handheld attachment, and would use
that ..).

The only reason she had one was a best buy employee convincing her as a
replacement for her old but functional cell phone.

------
gruntled
Misleading headline: most people don't install an app every month, but what
about the apps they already have on their phone?

Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone
users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people
never download apps. Just not every month.

~~~
adventured
It's not particularly misleading, it re-emphasizes a very strong - and well
understood - point: the majority of smartphone users do not download very many
apps.

The better criticism of this article, is that it's already well known that
most smartphone users 1) don't download many apps and 2) don't use very many
apps day to day.

Why is that? It's because most apps are not useful or valuable. If they were,
people would use them.

The majority of people also do not visit a hundred Web sites each day. Rather,
they stick to a very small number of sites, and tend to visit them frequently.
No surprise app use is similar.

~~~
Dylan16807
It mislead me greatly. The headline is a very surprising claim that they're
not participating in the app system at all, ignorant of its benefits. But
actually they're already satisfied with the apps they have, and use some of
them a lot.

------
apocolyps6
I personally would say I download a fair number of apps. Maybe less than
average because I don't have many games on my Android, nor do I use
Intagram/Snapchat/etc. ~120 apps, not counting uninstalled ones.

Thing is, the way I download stuff is I enter the play store and browse and
download until I am done. This happens maybe twice a year. Maybe less
frequently. The only other use case is when I feel the need for something
(such as downloading a Flashlight app in the dark) or when I find out about
the existence of a mobile version of something I already use.

If I were to download even 1 app per month, that would mean I'd be interested
in casually browsing the Play store or that I am often trying new software
such that some percent of it becomes important enough to me that I download
the mobile app.

I'm not convinced that even 35% of people exhibit these behaviors.

------
pmelendez
Interesting thing is for most people it seems to be important to have
available a big selection of apps. That has been for years the excuse of why
windows phones are not more popular.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
Most people only use 20 apps, but those 20 apps are different from person to
person.

~~~
beamatronic
Once I get those 20 apps installed, I can go months without installing new
apps.

------
venomsnake
We don't have innovation in apps, so not surprising. I suppose it is a perfect
storm of walled gardens, locked devices, everything social and strange
monetization.

People are not building apps, but social graphs they could sell. Or addictions
that they can milk. If the software happens to do something useful is a nice
side effects.

------
mark_l_watson
I don't install much at all on my devices. On laptops, I install my IDE of
choice, Emacs, Java 8, lein, node, haskell, ruby, and a few tools I use for
writing.

On my android phone, I do install more things: netflix, kindle, audible, music
player, weather app, and that is about it. Email and a web browser do it for
me.

------
donaldr3
Would be interesting to compare that number to the same stat but for
installing programs on your computer. Once I have my set up, I don't really
change it all that frequently, regardless if it is my phone or laptop.

------
miguelrochefort
We need a single application that can be used for anything.

~~~
gmays
How long will it be until most app functions can just run in the browser or
something like it (i.e. HTML 7).

------
JustSomeNobody
This is why it is very important for web developers to make sure their apps
give a great mobile experience. Can't just test on your Mac and call it good.

------
fit2rule
I've got hundreds of apps on my iPhone, and iPads, and I only use a very small
set of them. In fact I can honestly say there are hundreds of apps I've
_never_ used, even though I've collected them.

One of the principle uses of my i-Devices, it seems, has been the slow and
steady accretion of apps from the store, which I end up completely ignoring.
The description hooks me, or some friend recommends something they played with
for 30 seconds and considered it worth twittering about, but generally .. my
iDevices are a memory hole containing things I forget about, pretty much,
straight away. This is a real conundrum for me - I hate it that I've gotten so
much crud on my phone, and so the more I look at that crud, the more I choose
to ignore it.

I blame this on the fact that my iDevices are phones, and I just didn't grow
up with the idea of using the phone for anything except calling people, and
maybe (barely) receiving messages with it (thats what a pager is for..) .. and
also on the fact that the way that these apps is presented to me is just too
darned un-organized. Apples' rigorous desire to dumb-the-device-down means I
have no way of sorting the list of apps on my phone by "last-used-date", which
alone would help me administer the device properly, or at least give me a
means by which I could grasp the backlog of "opening a newly installed app for
the first time".

The device also doesn't sort things automatically by category - I'm supposed
to do this manually. That is such an infuriating conundrum in this, the 21st
Century, that I simply refuse to participate in the stupidity. Its akin to the
stupidity one finds, even still today, in something as mundane as the Finder
of OSX which, for all the godlike computing power in the universe, _still_
can't automatically update itself to fit its content, properly, in a sane and
sensible manner. For all the intelligence and wow, Finder is still an utter
piece of junk when it comes to sorting a list of files on the screen such that
the labels of the columns describing each file auto-size to fit, nicely in a
typographically pleasing fashion, the information in the window - Like what
happens on Windows, which almost gets there, when you open an Explorer window
on a folder and press ctrl-alt-numpad+ .. oh, how I wish this would JUST
HAPPEN on any so-called Desktop operating system of the 21st Century, without
me - the user - having to think about it..

So with regards to organizing the Apps on the iDevices, and interacting with
the horrendously backlogged list of apps I've completely ignored over 8 years
of iDevice ownership .. There seems to be some sort of glass ceiling about
this, in my personal psychology, about how/what/when/why to use the phone for
something. The most I ever dive into the 100's of un-used, generally _useless_
apps I've accrued over time, is when I'm just sitting somewhere with nothing
else better to do - and generally, that is a very rare occurrence these days.

There is one exception to this: my music-making iPad. This device gets used a
lot for music-making, and there is a set of core apps I have gotten familiar
with. But I don't treat that as an iDevice - for me now, its a well-maintained
synthesizer device, which supplanted the previous studio-laptop-laden-with-
endless-plugin-crud that I used to use. The fact is, I've only ever loaded up
music-making apps on that device, when I'm in the mode of studio-usage, and
that has been its _only_ saving grace when it comes to App discovery. I wish I
could do the same with the iPhone app collections, but there is just too much
crud to deal with .. and the thing doesn't want to help me - at all, in the
slightest - to deal with it.

~~~
kaolinite
With regards to your Finder issue, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're
after, you can click on the green maximise button (or, on OS X Yosemite, hold
alt and click it) and the window will resize to fit the contents. Same goes
for most apps (at least those designed properly for Mac), e.g. Safari, where
it will resize to fit the website content.

There is likely a keyboard shortcut for it as well but I'm not sure of it.

~~~
fit2rule
Thats not what I mean - I mean the column content itself should resize, and
then the window to fit. Auto-fitting seems obvious, but its not happening
anywhere in OSX.

------
scholia
Based on a report published on August 21, 2014....

