Probably, in your iPhone you have more than 50 apps installed. Some of you maybe more than 100. And there’s a good probability that you never use most of them. That sounds crazy to me, I have only four home screens and don’t have panic attacks on a daily basis. How is this possible?
Many users I have come across have tons of apps installed and not sorted. They do not care about minimalism, efficiency and productivity, or just keeping the iPhone clean and nice. They only want to have as many apps as possible. This could be right if the iPhone was perfect, but we have a limit on the total home screens that can be seen, and the more apps you download the less the iPhone is responsive.
Speaking of myself, my iPhone actually has only 4 home screens, not even fully filled with apps. Yes, as I pointed out I use stacks, but there are no more than 3-4 apps per stack, for a total of 2 stacks. I used to have only three pages, but I’m liking photography so much that I chose to dedicate to it a specific home screen, right before the games one.
You could say I am mad because my 3G can be filled with tons of apps without losing much responsiveness and speed, but i don’t care. Why? Because I thought about this for an entire day. (I feel geeky when this happens, but I don’t really care) Analyze every app you own, starting from the second home screen, the first after the “most used apps” one. Have you ever used those apps? Probably not.
So, why don’t you delete them? I know you’re going to say that they could be useful in the future. Just in case. And this is exactly your (and mine before thinking about it) mistake. I live in Italy, in a semi-rural village – yeah we DO use cars to move and not horses 
– and I have a 2Gb per month internet plan. Why I’m boring you with this detail? Because almost everywhere I have access to the internet. Are you starting to get the point? What I’m trying to say is that most “just in case” apps weigh in at less than 1MB, so you can download them everywhere, anytime. And if you can do that and you’re still keeping them in your iPhone, your are wasting memory and free space.
To recognize the apps I had to delete, I created an empty note on the iphone and when I used a non “must have” app I wrote its name in the note. After a month, there were only eleven apps in the list. So I deleted every app not listed. It’s been a while from that experiment (about three months) and I NEVER used one of the deleted apps. That surprised me a lot.
Of course, you can dislike my thoughts, but you should give them a try. It’s a personal technique I developed for myself and it works perfectly for me, but I’m not so arrogant to think it can be applied to everyone. But I’m reasonably convinced that the general idea behind it is right. Again, just give it a try and if it doesn’t work, get back to your previous method.
You don’t have to pay to try it, so why not?
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What an absolutely ridiculous article.
You should delete unused apps just because….you should do it? The title of the article is why you should do it, but you didn't actually give any reasons to support it. Apps take up free space AND memory, huh? No, they take up space on the device, but since they aren't allowed to run in the background, they wouldn't take up any RAM. And since you say that most apps weigh in at under 1MB (a stat you pulled out of your ass, no?) it's not like you'd be gaining all that much free space by deleting a dozen or more apps.
If there's a chance you might need to use something in the future, why wouldn't you leave it? It's not hurting anything, and you can always delete it in the future if you need the space.
Nevermind the fact that the idea of anyone with a jailbroken iPhone that has multiple home screens just boggles my mind. With Stacks, CategoriesSB and PogoPlank available, the only reason to have multiple home screens is because you enjoy clutter.
Are you sure of what you are saying? Try this: delete all apps and look at the speed of the iphone. Then, install 100+ apps and measure again the speed. It slows down. Why? Because every app icon takes up free memory and the iphone has to load every single time all the homescreens. Obviously i'm talking about a 3G. But this could be applied even to the 3GS, why should you lower your free ram if you can encrease it?
About the weight of the apps, well, yes if you analyze each app separately they are light, but if you consider them as a group they can take much free space. 100 1MB apps will "steal" you 100MB, and this is bad. If you download them when you need them instead, they can be ready to use in a few seconds and then diseappear again.
I think this can help you understand what I am trying to saying: http://www.marco.org/71448261
Last but not least, you say they are not hurting anyone? Thery do hurt. They make your iphone cluttered and this is always not good.
I hope you get what i mean, and thanks for the comment, it made me think.
I use a 3GS and I continually run with well over 100 apps and have done for months. I have not experienced any noticeable slowdown because of this. I find no incremental loss of responsiveness if I move from 130 apps to 150 or 160 apps etc.
I also have to disagree with the whole bit about 'clutter is always bad'. Why? Because you and Marco think it is? Fair enough then, it is bad for you guys. That does not make it 'bad' for everyone.
I don't own a 3GS, so i can't talk of its performances, I just assumed that.
And the clutter thing, i can understan you saying "i don't want to declutter because i feel fine" but i think a cluttered X (where X is anything that can be cluttered, an iphone, a house, etc) is always worse than an uncluttered X. I can't imagine a world where the opposite it's true.
You can’t imagine it. I guess that was the point of patrickj. It is a subjective question. What is clutter and what is not, and when and how it is bad. And speaking of imagining worlds where clutter is bad, just think that in a perfect uncluttered universe, there is no chance for life.
I have dozens of apps, but my iphone screens are neat, organized and uncluttered because I keep all of my "don't-use-but-might-someday" apps nicely disabled in iTunes. Deleting them seems a waste of time. Why bother searching for an app in the future when it can just stay nicely inactive until I just click the box during a sync?
That's exactly what i was saying. When i say delete an app i mean delete it from the iphone, or uncheck it from the apps tab in itunes.
Whlie I can not speak to the technical aspects of having 100+ apps on the device, I would assume having more would impact performance. There are some apps that can not be downloaded anywhere (e.g. Pizza Hut) but I see the point of the article. Why keep apps if you hardly ever use them. I delete them frequently myself because I get tired of flipping through several pages. I have my screens organized by frequency of use (home) and then type (games, business, misc). Last night I went from 9 screens to 6 and even though I like to download and try apps all the time, I find that I only use a fraction of them on a regular basis.
You are from a rural area …… You are not like us …..
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