“There is an app for that” is a phrase that 2016 saw and heard in abundance. Almost every facet of our lives has been permeated by a plethora of apps. Most notably mobile applications, spurred on by the constant growth of the smartphone market and the need for connected devices.
This is so true, from apps that whiten your teeth
to apps that teach you botany and zoology.
However, the abundance of apps do not necessarily mean things are all rosy. Well in some cases they are. We invite these apps into our lives, on the premise that they would make our lives simpler, promising to deliver smooth performance, timely updates, improved service, breaking news, file management etc etc.
And they do…
Till they begin to suck the life of our data plans, our storage capacity, and most painfully start adding functionalities that we did not need in the first place.
This week I had to do some spring cleaning, on my smartphone.
First to go was TrueCaller.
Started out as a neat application , promising to let you know who is calling before you pick up a call. I dare say that was a functionality that we wish we had since antiquity, and it was brilliant, until the creators begun adding variations and options, bells and whistles that begun getting in the way, notifications you could not turn off unless you enabled them, which was the same as turning on the notification.
Now I am not saying these additions are not improvements; which in turn are good, but they are not always what your client wants, even if majority cry out for that particular functionality. Thus it will always be a good design principle to leave an opt-out option for your client to enable/disable a particular option.
Next was ES Explorer.
This app is no doubt the best in file managers, and that was what it was before it became a media player, a notification master, a file-change-noise-making-pop-up notifier, space-clearing, phone-system-tuning-app. I was told the paid version was way better, offering you more ways to customize it.
Even so, the free version though free was very annoying. It had to go.
Now I am two apps light and the world has not come to a screeching halt.
Tell me what apps you can and should do away with before we start the new year.!
Cheers,