I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed.

As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are:

A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar)

B) direct and group messaging (e.g. Signal, Element, Telegram, WhatsApp)

C) social media, time wasting, distraction (serves no other real purpose other than to kill time, e.g. Facebook, Instagram)

D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor)

E) always-on utilities (e.g. Venmo, Uber)

When you do this categorization, with a strong will, you can uninstall everything in categories C and D and end up with a much more utilitarian phone, primarily using the stuff in A and B.

I find that when you work on companies or projects, Slack and Discord are the tricky ones, because of how noisy they are but also how much people expect to be able to reach you there, especially via their DMs feature, which many use in lieu of email. I'm experimenting with the Texts.com app to work around this edge case. That is, keep Slack/Discord DMs visible via Texts.com app, but only use full Slack/Discord channels when on desktop when I am in a "channel skimming mood," via the desktop apps only. Haven't tried this fully yet on mobile since their Android app is still under development.

Anyway, I wrote up my personal experience with a smartphone app audit here:

https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit