This doesn't surprise me at all. For most people (myself included) an iPhone or Android is not a general purpose computer, but a communicator. The vast majority of my communicating happens in email, with the web browser a distant second. Apple's email program in iOS accounts for 70% of my usage, web browser 20% and everything else falls in that last 10%. Other people I know have very different breakdowns, but wether it is Messages or Facebook, or something else, that is their primary communication tool. I've got hundreds of other apps that I use occasionally, but so many phone apps for me are simple single purpose apps, that makes them of limited narrow use.
Interesting. My phone is email, browser, phone, music, with very rare branches to other apps. My desktop is email, browser, iTunes, terminal/vim, bbedit, eclipse (yuk), Final Cut, Logic X, Final Draft, office, a bunch of other smaller music specific apps (NMEdit, sysex librarian, etc.) omnigraffle, omnioutliner, and a bunch of others. I know I'm an outlier because of a bunch of uses that web apps will likely never supplant, I'm just always surprised.
The article does surprise me. I assumed people were regularly (at least one a month) downloading new apps and trying them out... I guess I'm definitely in the minority. I like to explore the app store and see what's new. In any given day, I'll be using apps for facebook, instagram, twitter, snapchat, product hunt, mail, safari, nest, hangouts, alien blue, and soundcloud. And when I find a new website that interests me, I usually check if there is a corresponding app.
for me, my smartphone is a general purpose device :
-Access to Pocket articles while commuting
-Music, Podcast
-Social networks
-a little bit of instant messaging / voice
-mails
-maps
It is also a communicator device, but only in the sense that for some silly reason I can't place calls with the 2000$ box on my desk, but only with the 800$ one in my pocket.
None of the apps I have are perfect, especially now that we are in an awkward phase where we have an excellent Material spec and are very far from it in practice. However, they all do their job well enough. So well that I don't remember the last time I added an app to my routines.
I'm sure that there are example of either side, but my anecdotal comment was to correlate the general finding of the article, though my reasoning may not be why others are finding themselves in a single app most of the time.
Not to derail too much, 80-90% of my computer usage isn't even really possible with an iPhone or android, at least not productively. Small devices make it very hard for me to do anything other than small bite-sized interactions. When I'm writing music, prose, editing video, writing code, all of these things are borderline impossible on a phone, and barely possible on a tablet, and those things are the bulk of my computer usage.
> It is also a communicator device, but only in the sense that for some silly reason I can't place calls with the 2000$ box on my desk, but only with the 800$ one in my pocket.
The percentage of users buying apps in a given month does relate to the overall number of app purchases. Also, we're only born once, but we can buy apps any time we want.
I don't download apps, and I make a point of never entering google account credentials into an Android phone. I don't trust Google, and I don't trust app developers; the whole ecosystem seems designed more to exploit than to serve the end-user. So I just use my phone for SMS, and for killing time browsing the web while I wait for a bus or whatever.
I used to do the same until I broke my smartphone and found that I wasn't missing it at all. Now I use a clamshell phone someone gave me. It's very lightweight, compact, robust and it can last about ten days without being recharged. Sometimes, having an internet-connected device with me would be nice, but I don't find this occasional need worth the hassle of maintaining a smartphone.
I still have fond feelings for my Motorola V195, which I accidentally left plugged in to charge at the San Francisco airport a decade or so back.
I'm occasionally tempted to try building my own device, with a QWERTY keyboard, 320x240 monochrome LCD, and hardcoded apps for SMS and email. It would be big and clunky but it would be kind of nice to have a gadget that did exactly what I wanted.
I'm not sure I follow. What specifically about apps would make you think it's designed to exploit the user? I know Android apps are more likely to be ad-supported (hence YOU are the product) but looking at my iPhone, I have Instagram for taking photos and sharing it with my family/friends, Lyft to get rides around the city when I don't want to drive, Dropbox for automatically backing up my photos, Google Maps for Navigation and OpenTable for booking restaurant reservations so I don't have to call them and ask for times they are available and wait on hold forever.
Seems to me that in all of these cases, there is clear benefit to me and serves my needs as the end-user.
I can't see or control what information gets sent where. I don't know what gets logged and sent to Google. I refrain from using Google credentials on the phone in case that makes it harder for Google to correlate what happens on my phone with my activity on the web in general. I disable the location services in case that makes it more difficult for someone to watch my location and movements. I don't know if it helps because there is no way I know about to find out what is being logged or where it is being sent.
App permissions seem to be completely coarse-grained, and they all seem to need access to potentially huge amounts of personal data. I can't, so far as I know, disable their access to specific bits of data I don't want them to have; nor do I know of any mechanism for blacklisting or whitelisting access to specific internet hosts.
My Moto X decided a while back that it wanted to upgrade itself and started bringing up a nag screen at frequent intervals, interrupting whatever I was doing. There is no way I can discover to turn this off, and there is no way to decline the upgrade. It just kept nagging me, many times a day, for months. I can't disable this behavior; I can only choose between reduced functionality (getting interrupted mid-sentence and having to dismiss a dialog many times a day) or letting this remote server take over and install its software on my hardware.
In the end I feel like this device doesn't actually belong to me at all. It's more like a rental apartment: I can use it, and I can keep my stuff in it if I want to, but ultimately it belongs to the landlord; which in this case is a combination of Google, Motorola, and T-Mobile. The deal seems pretty clear: they get to decide what I am allowed to do with my phone, they get to decide where my information goes and who gets to see it, and I can either accept the deal or not use the phone. For the most part I have chosen the latter.
Thanks for providing more context and I can understand your perspective as a privacy-minded individual.
I think for most people, privacy is secondary to convenience and we basically sell data about ourselves in exchange for free use of these services that have become an essential part of our life.
I also think it's extremely hard to piece-meal control what permissions are allowed and requires substantially more work from app developers to consider all the possible conditional cases and have well thought out experiences when some/all pieces of data are missing. In many cases, it's just a matter of what is practical and doable in light of constrained resources. Not giving them a pass, but offering a possible reason instead of assuming malicious intent.
Clearly there are benefits to these apps, but the concern was about exploiting the user.
Presumably, the chief concerns are tracking and security. For instance, why does DropBox need to access my entire contact list just to backup my photos? Some people don't even think about it, others don't care but some do.
Does Dropbox ask for that? On my phone, I don't have to give DropBox access to my contact list to use it.
I think one of the challenges is that a lot of what an app maker wants to do is not known yet but they want to mine the user data to identify patterns that might help them decide on what features to build next or provide insight on how they should improve their app. Given this, they err on the side of asking for more data vs. less. On a mobile device, this definitely feels much more invasive given that our phones are basically "tied at the hip" when compared to classic web tracking techniques.
What makes you think this anonymises you? Even if you have turned off everything on the phone (eg location services), the sheer quantity of tracking on web pages will quickly carve you out an identity. (Note that they don't necessarily need to have your name, but you will exist in many databases along with everything you have done.) The same applies if you have installed apps. Doing something like frequent factory resets of the phone would help, but ideally you'd want really deep ones that randomise the various internal ids.
To clarify "they" don't actually care who your identity is. While it is really important to you, knowing that you are John Smith of 123 Main Street isn't that useful to them.
Knowing that "you" (your browser) looked at buying a car last week is far more valuable, especially when combined with other activity and demographic guesses. ie rather than a solid individual, your database records are a set of probabilities. Looked at diapers - probably have a kid. Looked at concert tickets for One Direction - you are likely young and very unlikely old. Combine all these anonymous snippets and probabilities and the database representation of you is then "exploited".
The goal is relevancy. Advertising pays on results, which means the advertisers don't want to pay for things going to people that aren't the targets. eg if they have a campaign aimed at females 20-30 years old that have children in North Texas, then they aren't going to pay for ads going to 60 year old men in Seattle. And if it is a car company, then ads going to people who are likely to buy a car in the near future is far more valuable than a kid playing Angry Birds. (There is also brand advertising where the idea is to keep a brand in your head and good feelings about it, but no immediate action expected of you. They find out if this works by doing it in some areas and not others, and then tracking sales etc over the longer term.)
In theory this should lead to you get good relevant to your interests advertising. In practise it is annoying drivel to many because the companies advertising (ie the ones paying) aren't relevant to you. They are trying to get your attention.
While I only mention advertising, the other pieces especially tracking are pretty much in support of the advertising. It allows the probabilistic deductions about you.
To avoid this you would need to eliminate Internet activity, or go completely anonymous (eg only using Tor, incognito browser sessions, and have components on your system constantly make up data like user agents and locations).
Baseband aside (a big "aside"), isn't the mobile permissions system much more satisfactory than the desktop? unprivileged user-per-app vs everything-as-one-user-and-sometimes-we-ask-for-root
It's a step in the right direction; it just isn't much of a step. Ultimately I think we need a fine-grained capability system, where every process runs in a sandbox which can only see the resources I choose to grant it. Access to the specific hosts ought to be resources... and I should be able to provide dummy resources so that recalcitrant apps which refuse to run without the ability to call home can be run in an environment equivalent to a "hellban".
I thought most people download a few of their favorite apps immediately after they buy a new phone.
After that, at least for me, installing new apps is a very rare event. I installed about 5 apps right away, and a couple more in the two years since.
I wonder what the demographics on non-app users are. My grandmother had an iPhone briefly, however the only way she used it was to make calls (she actually carried the 'old school' phone handheld attachment, and would use that ..).
The only reason she had one was a best buy employee convincing her as a replacement for her old but functional cell phone.
Misleading headline: most people don't install an app every month, but what about the apps they already have on their phone?
Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people never download apps. Just not every month.
It's not particularly misleading, it re-emphasizes a very strong - and well understood - point: the majority of smartphone users do not download very many apps.
The better criticism of this article, is that it's already well known that most smartphone users 1) don't download many apps and 2) don't use very many apps day to day.
Why is that? It's because most apps are not useful or valuable. If they were, people would use them.
The majority of people also do not visit a hundred Web sites each day. Rather, they stick to a very small number of sites, and tend to visit them frequently. No surprise app use is similar.
It mislead me greatly. The headline is a very surprising claim that they're not participating in the app system at all, ignorant of its benefits. But actually they're already satisfied with the apps they have, and use some of them a lot.
How is that misleading? I think that's the point of the entire article. People aren't downloading new apps which means they're likely not plugged in to the app discovery scene. There's a much smaller surface area for developers targeting new customers than the number of smartphone owners.
> which means they're likely not plugged in to the app discovery scene.
That is a very significant point.
I bought my wife a Google Play voucher at Christmas, and she was so overwhelmed by the mess that is the Play Store that it took her three months to find a decent solitaire app.
Everytime she would go looking for one she had to wade through pages of junk and just gave up.
Eventually I found one recommended on a forum and even then when we searched for the exact name in the Play Store it was only in the second row of results.
App discovery is HARD, particularly for people unfamiliar with app stores. I am not surprised that they just don't bother.
I personally would say I download a fair number of apps. Maybe less than average because I don't have many games on my Android, nor do I use Intagram/Snapchat/etc. ~120 apps, not counting uninstalled ones.
Thing is, the way I download stuff is I enter the play store and browse and download until I am done. This happens maybe twice a year. Maybe less frequently. The only other use case is when I feel the need for something (such as downloading a Flashlight app in the dark) or when I find out about the existence of a mobile version of something I already use.
If I were to download even 1 app per month, that would mean I'd be interested in casually browsing the Play store or that I am often trying new software such that some percent of it becomes important enough to me that I download the mobile app.
I'm not convinced that even 35% of people exhibit these behaviors.
Interesting thing is for most people it seems to be important to have available a big selection of apps. That has been for years the excuse of why windows phones are not more popular.
I think it has less to do with having a large selection and more to do with having the apps you want. I dont care if the app store has 1 trillion apps; I do care if I can't use Gmail and Google Voice.
Also the internet doesn't seem to like IE as much as the WebKit browsers, or at least that was the case before I gave up on WP8. And then there's the lack of a notification pane..
We don't have innovation in apps, so not surprising. I suppose it is a perfect storm of walled gardens, locked devices, everything social and strange monetization.
People are not building apps, but social graphs they could sell. Or addictions that they can milk. If the software happens to do something useful is a nice side effects.
I don't install much at all on my devices. On laptops, I install my IDE of choice, Emacs, Java 8, lein, node, haskell, ruby, and a few tools I use for writing.
On my android phone, I do install more things: netflix, kindle, audible, music player, weather app, and that is about it. Email and a web browser do it for me.
Would be interesting to compare that number to the same stat but for installing programs on your computer. Once I have my set up, I don't really change it all that frequently, regardless if it is my phone or laptop.
This is why it is very important for web developers to make sure their apps give a great mobile experience. Can't just test on your Mac and call it good.
I've got hundreds of apps on my iPhone, and iPads, and I only use a very small set of them. In fact I can honestly say there are hundreds of apps I've never used, even though I've collected them.
One of the principle uses of my i-Devices, it seems, has been the slow and steady accretion of apps from the store, which I end up completely ignoring. The description hooks me, or some friend recommends something they played with for 30 seconds and considered it worth twittering about, but generally .. my iDevices are a memory hole containing things I forget about, pretty much, straight away. This is a real conundrum for me - I hate it that I've gotten so much crud on my phone, and so the more I look at that crud, the more I choose to ignore it.
I blame this on the fact that my iDevices are phones, and I just didn't grow up with the idea of using the phone for anything except calling people, and maybe (barely) receiving messages with it (thats what a pager is for..) .. and also on the fact that the way that these apps is presented to me is just too darned un-organized. Apples' rigorous desire to dumb-the-device-down means I have no way of sorting the list of apps on my phone by "last-used-date", which alone would help me administer the device properly, or at least give me a means by which I could grasp the backlog of "opening a newly installed app for the first time".
The device also doesn't sort things automatically by category - I'm supposed to do this manually. That is such an infuriating conundrum in this, the 21st Century, that I simply refuse to participate in the stupidity. Its akin to the stupidity one finds, even still today, in something as mundane as the Finder of OSX which, for all the godlike computing power in the universe, still can't automatically update itself to fit its content, properly, in a sane and sensible manner. For all the intelligence and wow, Finder is still an utter piece of junk when it comes to sorting a list of files on the screen such that the labels of the columns describing each file auto-size to fit, nicely in a typographically pleasing fashion, the information in the window - Like what happens on Windows, which almost gets there, when you open an Explorer window on a folder and press ctrl-alt-numpad+ .. oh, how I wish this would JUST HAPPEN on any so-called Desktop operating system of the 21st Century, without me - the user - having to think about it..
So with regards to organizing the Apps on the iDevices, and interacting with the horrendously backlogged list of apps I've completely ignored over 8 years of iDevice ownership .. There seems to be some sort of glass ceiling about this, in my personal psychology, about how/what/when/why to use the phone for something. The most I ever dive into the 100's of un-used, generally useless apps I've accrued over time, is when I'm just sitting somewhere with nothing else better to do - and generally, that is a very rare occurrence these days.
There is one exception to this: my music-making iPad. This device gets used a lot for music-making, and there is a set of core apps I have gotten familiar with. But I don't treat that as an iDevice - for me now, its a well-maintained synthesizer device, which supplanted the previous studio-laptop-laden-with-endless-plugin-crud that I used to use. The fact is, I've only ever loaded up music-making apps on that device, when I'm in the mode of studio-usage, and that has been its only saving grace when it comes to App discovery. I wish I could do the same with the iPhone app collections, but there is just too much crud to deal with .. and the thing doesn't want to help me - at all, in the slightest - to deal with it.
With regards to your Finder issue, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're after, you can click on the green maximise button (or, on OS X Yosemite, hold alt and click it) and the window will resize to fit the contents. Same goes for most apps (at least those designed properly for Mac), e.g. Safari, where it will resize to fit the website content.
There is likely a keyboard shortcut for it as well but I'm not sure of it.
Thats not what I mean - I mean the column content itself should resize, and then the window to fit. Auto-fitting seems obvious, but its not happening anywhere in OSX.
