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Comment by smegel | Hacker News Reader

Why would you once have all the apps you need?

Also, my idiotic 16gb Android phone is almost always full (thanks to the OS keeping loads of garbage and leftovers from previous versions, according to google searches). On top of that, every time I plug in the phone on WiFi, all these apps start their regular updates (how often do they need to be updated??).

Thus, I need to be very careful with what apps I have, and constantly trim them. I guess that with a new phone this wouldn't be the case, but heck mine is less than 2yrs old and runs fine.

I am also stuck on a 16GB phone (an iPhone in this case) and thus I also simply don't have the space for new apps.

try removing big storage hogs. it's also liberating to have less apps on phone :)

Let's not forget the apps that store locally hundreds of megabytes of cached data (one of the reasons I removed the Facebook app) and those that refuse to store images and videos on an external SD card (WhatsApp)

SDCard has security implications (you cannot currently protect them with permissions, for example), which means that any other app could read it.

But then there's encryption... so not sure why they wouldn't do it

I have a 4GB Android phone, an original Moto E. Simply updating the phone left it full without anything adding any applications to it. It left it unable to be updated without clearing the cache of everything on the phone every time.

Luckily Motorola supported rooting the phone, which made CyanogenMod easily installable at the time. That fixed the update problems and even allowed me to transfer applications to an external SD Card if I wanted (I do not recommend this for any SD Card slower than a UHS SD Card). It now has LineageOS on it, as that is what replaced CyanogenMod when it ceased to be supported. Works great, although the phone itself may be a bit slow.

This is essentially it. Once you've been there, done that, you're just left with reinventions of the wheel and rubbish "App of the Month" clones.

(I'm generalizing of course)

That was my first thought as well. I use a phone a lot, but only for a finite number of things, and I have pretty good apps for all of those things. Therefore, I download an average of less than one new app a month.

If I download a new app it is either a) a client for a SaaS thing that I already use at home or work, or b) an app that enables me to do something new with my phone (e.g. Sleep as Android for sleep monitoring).

If I played games on my phone, then I might want to download new games semi-regularly, I guess.

The issue here is that the "99 cents from the App Store" model was always a broken way to fund software development.

"The issue here is that the "99 cents from the App Store" model was always a broken way to fund software development."

This is one of the things that bothers me. It doesn't work for you and i, but must be working for some other people. Might be a generational thing. Might be more tech-focused people need less of that, or something.

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