These days it seems everything has or requires an App. The number of Apps you have on your device can spiral out of control if you don’t keep an eye on it. Too many Apps can take up a lot of memory on your device, use up large amounts of your data or deplete battery life. I like to maintain order on my device while making sure there is plenty of space and battery for the Apps that are truly useful to me.
Do You Really Need It?
With so many requests out there to install new Apps, one way to keep control is to ask yourself if you really need it before even loading it onto your device. Will you use it frequently? If not, could you access the same information through a website instead?
Some Monitoring Tools
If you have an i-phone, you can go to your Settings (It’s an App lol) and scroll down to Battery. After that screen opens up you are able to scroll down that page to see a list of Apps and how much battery power they have taken up. There are two options to choose from, the Last 24 Hours or the Last 10 Days.
You can also go to the General Tab in your Settings and look at your i-phone storage for each App. This gives you a pretty good picture of how much memory a specific App is taking up on your phone.
If you prefer the device to handle this for you, you can enable the Offload Unused Apps Feature which is found in this same location on our i-phone.
I personally disabled this feature on my phone though because it kept uninstalling Apps that I still used on occasion. When I would need to use the App, I would find that my device had uninstalled it so I would have to reinstall it before using it. After running into that situation a few times, I decided to shut it down.
Reviewing Your Apps
I think doing a periodic review for most of the things in our lives is important and necessary. It’s always good to take stock of what you have and look at the value to you. This is especially useful for Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, Loyalty Programs, Stuff in Your House and even the Apps on our devices.
I determine how often I conduct a review based on the item in question. I like to review credit cards at the end of the year to see how they performed and if they still have enough value to offset any annual fees in the new year. Clothes in my closet get evaluated at the change of each season. If it doesn’t fit well, the style is no longer relevant or I haven’t worn it in a really long time, it gets thrown out or boxed up for Good Will. You get the picture.
Let’s take a silly App that I have for BuzzTime Trivia. I loaded it onto my device so that my husband and I could use it to play trivia when we visited a specific local restaurant. We didn’t use it that often, but it was fun whenever we did. It uses very little storage space on my i-phone (19.7 MB) and literally no battery except on the rare occasion that we get to play.
I had decided to keep the App because it provided occasional entertainment without overly taxing my device with big storage or battery usage. That is until the day we went to the restaurant and they no longer offered the trivia game that we used it for. I did a bit of research and found that establishment did not renew their license for this game. Since it is the only place we go that required use of this App and we wouldn’t need it there anymore, it was time to part ways. This App has now been voted off the Island!
Another App I have been evaluating this time around is the BestParking App. It takes up 47.2 MB of storage on my device, which isn’t that high in comparison to other Apps that I have. Because I don’t actually use it, it has no Battery Usage to report. I loaded this App onto my phone before we traveled to Portland Oregon last May in hopes that it would help us with the crazy parking there. I tried it out on our trip and didn’t really love the way it worked for me and have not used it since. I am just not finding any personal value in having this App on my phone, so it is another one that I will be getting rid of.
Updating Apps
Software Developers are always providing updates to our Apps. The reasons for this are usually to fix bugs found in the software, security improvements or to upgrade to meet current operating standards. If you don’t update your Apps regularly, you can run into a situation where you try to use it and it requires you to update it first. I like to stay ahead of the game and be as secure as possible, so I run my App updates about once a week.
I recently realized that my husband hardly ever updates his Apps. Now I try to remind him to do his when I am doing mine. It’s not difficult and doesn’t take very long to run. Security patches are important for your online safety and updates fine tune things in order to help keep them running smoothly. It’s really just a small bit of maintenance.
Final Thoughts
During my current Review, I deleted 3 Apps that I didn’t need any more. Maybe managing your Apps isn’t that important to you, and I get that. But in my world where things are already a little crazy, I like to keep order where I can. It doesn’t take a lot of time to do a semi annual review of the Apps on my phone. I feel like keeping them limited to those that I really use and value helps my device perform better and keeps the layout more useful and organized.
The World According to Dev 