Most of Us Don’t Download Any Smartphone Apps at All

This doesn't surprise me at all. For most people (myself included) an iPhone or Android is not a general purpose computer, but a communicator. The vast majority of my communicating happens in email, with the web browser a distant second. Apple's email program in iOS accounts for 70% of my usage, web browser 20% and everything else falls in that last 10%. Other people I know have very different breakdowns, but wether it is Messages or Facebook, or something else, that is their primary communication tool. I've got hundreds of other apps that I use occasionally, but so many phone apps for me are simple single purpose apps, that makes them of limited narrow use.

> Only about 35% of smartphone users download any apps at all in an average month

Misleading title.

I don't download apps, and I make a point of never entering google account credentials into an Android phone. I don't trust Google, and I don't trust app developers; the whole ecosystem seems designed more to exploit than to serve the end-user. So I just use my phone for SMS, and for killing time browsing the web while I wait for a bus or whatever.

I thought most people download a few of their favorite apps immediately after they buy a new phone. After that, at least for me, installing new apps is a very rare event. I installed about 5 apps right away, and a couple more in the two years since.

I wonder what the demographics on non-app users are. My grandmother had an iPhone briefly, however the only way she used it was to make calls (she actually carried the 'old school' phone handheld attachment, and would use that ..).

The only reason she had one was a best buy employee convincing her as a replacement for her old but functional cell phone.

Misleading headline: most people don't install an app every month, but what about the apps they already have on their phone?

Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people never download apps. Just not every month.

I personally would say I download a fair number of apps. Maybe less than average because I don't have many games on my Android, nor do I use Intagram/Snapchat/etc. ~120 apps, not counting uninstalled ones.

Thing is, the way I download stuff is I enter the play store and browse and download until I am done. This happens maybe twice a year. Maybe less frequently. The only other use case is when I feel the need for something (such as downloading a Flashlight app in the dark) or when I find out about the existence of a mobile version of something I already use.

If I were to download even 1 app per month, that would mean I'd be interested in casually browsing the Play store or that I am often trying new software such that some percent of it becomes important enough to me that I download the mobile app.

I'm not convinced that even 35% of people exhibit these behaviors.

Interesting thing is for most people it seems to be important to have available a big selection of apps. That has been for years the excuse of why windows phones are not more popular.

We don't have innovation in apps, so not surprising. I suppose it is a perfect storm of walled gardens, locked devices, everything social and strange monetization.

People are not building apps, but social graphs they could sell. Or addictions that they can milk. If the software happens to do something useful is a nice side effects.

I don't install much at all on my devices. On laptops, I install my IDE of choice, Emacs, Java 8, lein, node, haskell, ruby, and a few tools I use for writing.

On my android phone, I do install more things: netflix, kindle, audible, music player, weather app, and that is about it. Email and a web browser do it for me.

Would be interesting to compare that number to the same stat but for installing programs on your computer. Once I have my set up, I don't really change it all that frequently, regardless if it is my phone or laptop.

We need a single application that can be used for anything.

This is why it is very important for web developers to make sure their apps give a great mobile experience. Can't just test on your Mac and call it good.

I've got hundreds of apps on my iPhone, and iPads, and I only use a very small set of them. In fact I can honestly say there are hundreds of apps I've never used, even though I've collected them.

One of the principle uses of my i-Devices, it seems, has been the slow and steady accretion of apps from the store, which I end up completely ignoring. The description hooks me, or some friend recommends something they played with for 30 seconds and considered it worth twittering about, but generally .. my iDevices are a memory hole containing things I forget about, pretty much, straight away. This is a real conundrum for me - I hate it that I've gotten so much crud on my phone, and so the more I look at that crud, the more I choose to ignore it.

I blame this on the fact that my iDevices are phones, and I just didn't grow up with the idea of using the phone for anything except calling people, and maybe (barely) receiving messages with it (thats what a pager is for..) .. and also on the fact that the way that these apps is presented to me is just too darned un-organized. Apples' rigorous desire to dumb-the-device-down means I have no way of sorting the list of apps on my phone by "last-used-date", which alone would help me administer the device properly, or at least give me a means by which I could grasp the backlog of "opening a newly installed app for the first time".

The device also doesn't sort things automatically by category - I'm supposed to do this manually. That is such an infuriating conundrum in this, the 21st Century, that I simply refuse to participate in the stupidity. Its akin to the stupidity one finds, even still today, in something as mundane as the Finder of OSX which, for all the godlike computing power in the universe, still can't automatically update itself to fit its content, properly, in a sane and sensible manner. For all the intelligence and wow, Finder is still an utter piece of junk when it comes to sorting a list of files on the screen such that the labels of the columns describing each file auto-size to fit, nicely in a typographically pleasing fashion, the information in the window - Like what happens on Windows, which almost gets there, when you open an Explorer window on a folder and press ctrl-alt-numpad+ .. oh, how I wish this would JUST HAPPEN on any so-called Desktop operating system of the 21st Century, without me - the user - having to think about it..

So with regards to organizing the Apps on the iDevices, and interacting with the horrendously backlogged list of apps I've completely ignored over 8 years of iDevice ownership .. There seems to be some sort of glass ceiling about this, in my personal psychology, about how/what/when/why to use the phone for something. The most I ever dive into the 100's of un-used, generally useless apps I've accrued over time, is when I'm just sitting somewhere with nothing else better to do - and generally, that is a very rare occurrence these days.

There is one exception to this: my music-making iPad. This device gets used a lot for music-making, and there is a set of core apps I have gotten familiar with. But I don't treat that as an iDevice - for me now, its a well-maintained synthesizer device, which supplanted the previous studio-laptop-laden-with-endless-plugin-crud that I used to use. The fact is, I've only ever loaded up music-making apps on that device, when I'm in the mode of studio-usage, and that has been its only saving grace when it comes to App discovery. I wish I could do the same with the iPhone app collections, but there is just too much crud to deal with .. and the thing doesn't want to help me - at all, in the slightest - to deal with it.

Based on a report published on August 21, 2014....