The App Cleanse
A few weeks ago, Rob Coneybeer noted his declaration of “app bankruptcy.” That is, upon seeing 250 mobile application updates waiting for him upon returning from vacation, he decided to wipe the slate clean and start over, installing only the apps he absolutely needed on his phone.
It reminded me of my process for doing this, which seems to surprise people when I tell them about it. Every year when I get a new iPhone (which I fully recognize is ridiculous and not what a normal person does — but the same principle works whenever you get a new phone), I opt not to restore from a backup. I start using the thing as if it were the brand new device that it is.
In the age of everything living in the cloud, including, most importantly, your photos via iCloud or Google Photos or whatnot, this is actually pretty easy to do. And I highly recommend it.
I’ve done this for many years now with no regrets. You may think you’ll miss that random app you downloaded seven months ago and have only used once, but you won’t. If you did, you could just download it again.
But, again, you won’t.
The reality is that most people probably have a handful of apps they use on a regular basis. Even power users, like myself, probably have only a couple dozen apps that are used regularly. The slightly tricky ones are the ones you don’t technically open all that often but want to have when you absolutely do need them — like bank/credit card apps.
But again, this is still very easy to do. And I’m surprised that people are surprised that I do this each year. It’s quite liberating. Every year I gather a ton of app cruft, and every year I purge it and start anew with a new phone.
The only real pain is in the organization of the apps you do want to keep. Muscle memory dictates where these apps should be, so I tend to put them in the same place that they were on my old phone simply by looking at that phone and manually moving them there. It’s a mild pain for a nice pay-off.
To me, the iOS restore functionality exists solely for if I were to lose my phone (or if it were to break). But even then, I still think I would follow my purging protocol.
