Do We Really Need All of These Apps? I’m Drowning in Them!
In some ways, the proliferation of technology has been an amazing thing for society.
Huge medical advancements have been able to take place courtesy of the way in which tech has taken huge leaps year-on-year, whilst the working lives of many people have been improved beyond measure.
Even social lives have seen an improvement for lots of people, with partners having met online who would never have met in real life, for example. The problem is, technology is also something of an excuse for laziness on the part of many.
Try to do virtually anything on the web nowadays and you’ll be asked to download an app to complete your task.
Is that always really necessary?
What Apps Were Designed For
When the iPhone not only hit the market but absolutely took it by storm, one of the chief things that it offered was the ability to have applications on the phone that could help you with numerous different tasks.
Rather than needing to load up your email provider inside Safari, for example, you could use the Mail app instead. It took things that you needed to be able to use, like a calculator, and made it easily accessible. It was such a selling point that by the time the iPhone 3 launched, Apple created an advert for it with the tagline ‘There’s an app for that’.
Whatever you wanted to do, apps made it possible to do it.
That is what the whole point of apps was in the first place. When Androids began to challenge the iPhone in the mobile phone market, they also offered apps for their users to be able to make use of. In fact, Android phones promised the ability to customise how you used your phone in a much more interesting manner, so the number of apps available and the things that you could do with them grew and grew.
Still, though, the point of apps initially was to allow you to do things that you couldn’t do previously online without it being particularly fiddly for you to do so. It wasn’t that they were intended to completely take over our lives.
Apps Have Had Some Mission Creep
In the decade and a half since the iPhone 3 informed us ‘There’s an app for that’, the world of applications has become embroiled in something of a mission creep. Rather than being a thing where you would download an app in order to make your life easier, it now feels as though you have to download an app for even the simplest of things.
If you want to book a table at your local restaurant, for example, then gone are the days of doing it over the phone or heading to their website in order to say how many of you are coming and what time you need the table for. Instead, there’s a dedicated app to download to do your booking.
Got a new (refurbished) phone and redownloaded a bunch of apps and damn did I have so many useless apps just clogging up my old Home Screen
— arden 🍂🎶✨ (@ardenepstein) November 15, 2024
Whatever you try to do on your phone, you’re almost certainly going to be asked to download an app in order to help you do it. When previously you would just jump on your internet application, load up the relevant website and do what you needed to, that is often no longer an option.
Even something like building flat-pack furniture, which was a right of passage for most people and a frustrating time spent on a Sunday afternoon, has been taken over by the ability to download an app that will either help you through the stages or else put you in touch with someone who will come and long and to the building in its entirety.
What’s the Point in Them All?
The original remit of applications was to make life easier. That doesn’t feel like it is the case any more, with so many apps existing that you have to search your phone to find the one that you want.
A banking app? Great, that’s a really helpful thing to have if you’re trying to sort your finances out. Similarly it’s good to be able to load up a podcast as the drop of a hat or find out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow.
Is it necessary to have 15 different apps to control devices in a smart home, though? Do we need to have an application for every different airline that we’ve ever flown with, so we can check-in and pick our seats?
@thedailyshow @Hasan Minhaj asks @Marques Brownlee if we really need 100 apps to communicate with the same eight people #DailyShow #foryoupage #fyp #hasanminhaj #marquesbrownlee #tech #apps ♬ original sound – The Daily Show
All of that is without even mentioning the fact that there are so many different app creators trying to do something as simple as join BlueSky as a replacement for Twitter means that you have to work out which of the apps most suits how you like to use social media.
When WhatsApp became the thing that everyone used to send messages that was great, but soon alternatives began to spring up and in order to keep in touch with different groups you needed to have Signal, Telegram, Discord and more. Simply catching up on your social life can involve loading dozens of apps and at some point the madness just has to be stopped.