Managing My Million Apps

I remember when I had less than thirty apps on my iPhone and tended to use each of them for substantial amounts of time. Now I have more than one hundred apps on my iPhone.

While there are many of those that I only ever use rarely, the core set that I use the most has increased in proportion with the total. As a result, each app is now used for smaller amounts of time on average. I now find that I can productively segue between quite a lot of apps when I have only a five-minute dash to gang together a block of tasks. This is a very different use-case to what I adopted when first using this iPhone. On one hand this is a way of working that I have developed that best suits my needs. On the other hand this behaviour must reflect the affordances of the available software, where the vector is now clearly moving towards single-use apps that do one thing really well.

Extrapolating forward from this current use-case and the macro-trends of the software infrastructure, could we be looking at a future where we will have many thousands of apps on our phones and use most of those for little more than a few minutes each week? (1) That is an interesting line of inquiry that leads me to think about the overall way that the OS serves the user and how it could be optimised for such a use-case.

App Idea: Usage Monitor

It would be useful to have a easily accessible overview of how much time is spent using certain iPhone apps. In the spirit of the ‘Quantified Self’ and general self-awareness it would be helpful to have this sort of oversight:

• How many hours of podcasts am I actually listening to each week? 
• Am I spending more time than I realise tending to social media?
• Am I really writing for half an hour each day?  

At present, there is no built-in mechanism that will allow me to discover the information to answer those kinds of queries. The fundamental data must be available within the iPhone system. There really should be an app for that.

My Most Useful Apps 2012 – Part Two

These are the next four apps in my ongoing overview of the iPhone apps that I currently find most useful. This time it is my to-do task manager, my weather app and my two primary content consumption apps.

My Most Useful Apps – Updated for 2012 (Part 1)

My 2010 article analysing the twenty most useful apps on my iPod Touch was one of the best-received posts since I started this blog. I have now started to prepare a revised and upgraded apps overview from an iPhone-based perspective. I think that the amount of change in my list reflects the pace of innovation and disruption in the app space.

My original post was based on the twenty apps that had earned a place on my iPod’s home screen. Apple has since introduced folders for apps in iOS, so my home screen now contains far more than twenty apps. To retain the focus which that number enforces, I limit myself to looking at twenty apps again this year.

I am keeping these summaries concise, with just some top-level thoughts about each app. If I do decide to write any in-depth comprehensive reviews they will get their own full-length posts. That said, I have used each of these apps extensively and am happy to recommend each of them. I am planning to part-publish the twenty apps in separate blog posts. These first four are the apps that have earned the four premium places in my iPhone’s dock.

ToothFairy.app 2.0

My six year-old lost his first tooth this week. While putting it under his pillow we had a conversation about “how does the Tooth Fairy actually find all of the children who have lost a tooth every night?” 

As usual, he was more than happy to answer his own question for me. While he didn’t use the exact phrase “there’s an app for that”, he did describe a pretty elaborate worldwide technological infrastructure: with red lights blinking on a huge world map at Tooth Fairy Global HQ, and individual Tooth Fairies getting fine-grained, street-level directions from some kind of ‘ToothFindr’ app on their iPhones. I am always impressed with the creativity of the six year-old mind, (and also his innate millennial’s understanding of the iPhone app ecosystem).

One broad theme that our conversation revealed was a whole under-exploited vertical of useful software products aimed at addressing the un-met needs of mythical characters and helping them to become more efficient in the 21st century. Perhaps the two of us could get VC funding this suite of app products that we came up with?



• Naughty Or Nice? — Easily classify, manage and edit huge lists of billions of people. All of your data is securely encrypted and backed up into the SantaCloudTM. Launching in December.

• StarCrossed — Move beyond clumsy physical Cupid’s arrows, and avoid potential liability from accidents and misfires. Now, using your iPhone’s camera and recognition software, you can virtually tag lonely singletons to introduce romance into their lives. Launching in February.

• Rainbow’s End — Maximise your ability to locate pots of gold efficiently and effectively using a combination of GPS, weather information, and crowd-sourced data. Launching on 17 March.

• Bunny-Plus — Quickly generate multiple, alternative, randomised schematic plans for Easter Egg placement in gardens of any size. Select your preferred amount of eggs and the simply shake your iPhone to generate new sets of egg coordinates.

What other mythical/festive characters do you think could benefit from having their own app?

An Apple iOS Idea: Proximity Links Between Devices

Establish a spatial link between iPads and iPhones.

Just this week I heard of two more people forgetting their iPads. One was left on a plane; gone forever, and the second was left in a hotel room, but luckily was recovered after a breathless drive back across the city. What about adding a feature allowing people to establish a temporary spatial link between their iPad and their iPhone? That could reduce in the number of iPads left in hotel rooms, conference rooms, planes and taxis in the first place.

This would work by allowing you to define a minimum separation distance between their two devices. Then place a notification alert on top of that. For example:
Warn me if <"iPad Name"> is more than <"10 metres"> away from this iPhone in the next <"6 hours">.
Ideally, both the class of notification and its intensity would escalate as you moved further away from the forgotten device in question.

This could serve as an early warning system, preventing many lost iPads. It would compliment the Find My iPhone/iPad feature which is used *after* any loss. My assumptions here are that a significant number of iPad owners also carry iPhones and that such people are most likely to still possess their iPhone in scenarios where they have left their iPad behind.

An additional feature would be the option to dismiss the notification alert for a set amount of time:
Activate again in <"12 hours">.
This would address scenarios such as leaving the house without your iPad on a day when you are intentionally leaving it behind.

UPDATE
Two weeks later, I have come across the Zomm Wireless Leash. A hardware solution to aspects of this problem, but one requiring you to carry an additional accessory. (Sourced via the Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

A Novel Feature Idea for iOS

iOS should present a default device owner’s avatar image to any apps that request one.

Getting started on any new social media platform – or on one of the majority of apps which increasingly require an initial login to create a presence within the app’s community – is now a pretty efficient and streamlined process. If you do not want to login with your Facebook or Twitter identity credentials [1] then you just need to provide a user name and a password (sometimes an email address is not even needed any more) and you are good to go. You get a generic avatar icon to speed your way directly into the service: completing your user profile by adding a photo and any other information can always happen at any time later on. Because including your avatar photo is not a step within that initial on-ramping workflow one can see a lot of default avatars being used in the early stages of community building.