So many dusty old “apps for that”!

My relationship with tech is like Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football. I never stop trying to charge into the future, and tech never stops disappointing me.

In a fit of pique about this, I just deleted about half the apps on my phone: about three dozen that I’ve supposedly been meaning to use more for ages (actually years in many cases 🙄), but never did, mostly because they were too limited and/or glitchy. So many dusty old “apps for that”!

In my mind, the iPhone is somehow still a shiny new platform full of promise. I was a dork for 36 years before it arrived, so even now it’s only been around for about 20% of my lifespan, and only about a third of the Internet’s. So, “new”! But deleting so many of these shabby old apps really drove it home that it really is not new anymore, and about 80% of the apps I ever thought seemed like a cool or useful idea turned out to be rather lame

There are definitely still valuable apps on my phone. But not many, and I have love/hate relationships with several, most notably car2Go, Photos, YouTube, Maps, Evernote. Here are the ones I do mostly like, and use heavily: Safari, Things, Reeder (RSS), Overcast (podcasts), Camera (so basic and valuable that I kind of forget it’s even an app), Kindle and Books, Radar (public bus tracker), Tile, Checklist, Activity, Dictionary (Oxford), IMDb, Notes, Deliveries (package tracker).

So “there’s an app for that” isn’t an entirely empty promise, but it definitely isn’t a reliable one. I will be trying new apps quite a bit more cautiously from now on.