by Nicolas Magand・About this site・RSS feed・Archive
11 Nov. 2020
Once or twice a year, I get this irresistible urge to uninstall apps from my devices. Apps that I don’t use very often, apps that can be replaced by websites easily, apps that I don’t need all the time, and so on.
Yesterday, I did just that on my iPhone and I now only have four third-party apps installed from the App Store.
On my Mac, the cleanup happened a few weeks ago, and I only have five apps outside of the default Mac apps.1
The result of this minimal approach to using apps is not only a certain peace of mind, but a much more focused use of my devices. Blogging apps? Only on the Mac. Messaging app? Only on the phone. News apps? Websites are good enough. That cool photo editing app that I bought a few months ago but never use? I’ll reinstall it the day I really need it.2
In total, I only use seven different apps across all my devices (I only use the default apps on my Apple Watch):3
Bear in mind that in a few days or weeks from now I may or may not reinstall twenty more apps and make this article completely irrelevant, but this is the beauty of the game.
More recently, I uninstalled the excellent NetNewsWire RSS reader app and use Feeder on the web, which really is enough for my needs.↩︎
By the way, do we know if App Clips are a thing or not yet?↩︎
Not counting my work PC on Windows 10 obviously.↩︎
I also used DuckDuckGo’s great content-blocker on the Mac, but for some reason on the iPhone it becomes a full on browser, not a content-blocker like it is on the Mac. I find this rather unnecessary since you can already have DuckDuckGo as the default search engine on Safari, and the tracker blocking feature could work as just a content-blocker add-on.↩︎
This app is so bad, that I consider getting another bank just for that reason.↩︎