Unlike being too rich or too thin it appears that you can in fact have too many apps for Apple's iOS 6 to run properly. Agreed, this is something that is only in the beta release and might well not be in the full one but:
The beta versions of Apple's iOS 6 limit the number of apps that you can have installed on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch – a limitation that didn't exist on iOS 4 or iOS 5.
The limit, however, is high enough that only the most app-happy Apple-kit owners would hit the wall, according to a post by "macjeff" on the Mid Atlantic Consulting Blog.
According to macjeff, who says that his discovery was confirmed by Apple, once your iOS 6–equipped iDevice has over 500 apps installed on it, you will begin to experience "slow booting, auto-rebooting, and other issues."
Exceed 1,000 apps and your beloved shiny-shiny won't even boot at all. You'll be forced to restore it to factory settings.
The full macjeff posting can be found here.
Now, yes, this is a fairly trivial limit to how much you can use anything running iOS6. It's exceedingly doubtful that anyone would ever want to have 1,000 apps. But then recall what Bill Gates said about needing more than 640k of RAM.....
The more important thing about this is what it has led people who do have many apps loaded to say. That is, that you're most unlikely to be able to get to 1,000 apps and still have a usable device anyway. As pointed out in the comments section at The Register:
Just having apps installed shouldn't slow it down, and iOS is pretty brutal about shutting them down when they're not in the foreground, this must be down to something essential thats always running and doesnt scale.
My money is on the Springboard, It was only designed for 20 apps, but now you can stuff almost ten times that to each of its ten pages. I suspect it caches all the icons and those 'previously' launch shots into RAM so there is never any lag on the homescreen, but one (hundred) too many apps and the system starts to get light headed from RAM starvation.
Whether or not this is true is one thing. It's certainly a reasonable explanation though. It's something I've noticed over the years (decades perhaps: my first job in computing was producing ports of games for the Commodore 64). Ever increasingly RAM is just not considered a scarce resource. Which is these days of 4 GB RAM chips perhaps it isn't. But that still doesn't mean that there's infinite space for every background or once used app to have a few MB or tens of MB just so that it can be launched immediately. Have enough apps and you will end up using that memory.
