Mobile apps have skyrocketed in popularity and utility since Apple introduced the iPhone App Store in the summer of 2008. Apps now represent 52% of time spent with digital media in the US, according to comScore, up from 40% in early 2013. Apple boasted 75 billion all-time App Store downloads at its developers conference in June, and followed up by declaring July the best month ever for App Store revenue, with a record number of people downloading apps.
Yet most US smartphone owners download zero apps in a typical month, according to comScore’s new mobile app report.
Companies like Apple like to boast about the ‘app economy’, but in reality, the situation is a whole lot less rosy and idealistic than they make it out to be. I think most smartphone buyers download the bare essentials like Facebook, Twitter, Candy Crush, and their local banking application, and call it quits.
Together with the problematic state of application stores, the ‘app economy’ isn’t as sustainable as once thought.
..for being one of these people?
EDIT:
I only have the banking application of those, I guess I’m not one of these people then after all :/
Edited 2014-08-22 16:47 UTC
If you’re still on your Note 2, you’ve got a lot of features built into TouchWiz that obviate downloading standalone apps. I liked a lot of the Samsung features on the Note 2 I had, and I really only gave that phone up to go to a CDMA carrier and Windows Phone.
I never had Note 2, I had the original Note 1. And no, I’m not on it anymore, I’m using LG G2 these days. I don’t use any of LG’s stuff on it aside from the default caller, SMS- and launcher-apps. I have downloaded a small selection of apps from Play Market, like e.g. AquaMail, Firefox, KeepassDroid and such, but those are all the kinds of apps that, once installed, stay there on the phone indefinitely. I don’t play games on my phone, I don’t see the point in constantly running after the “next cool app” on Play Market or stuff like that, so once I’ve gotten my most-used apps set up the way I like them I touch Play Market only to update them.
Looking at this news article I suppose there are plenty of others like me out there.
I don’t know why I thought you had the Note 2. Anyway, yeah I’m pretty much the same way. The few apps that didn’t come with my phone serve a specific need that isn’t met by the phone’s OS, and beyond that I try to keep it clear of fluff. That’s what my Kindle is for: Time wasting games, social apps, reading, and so on. If my Kindle’s battery dies, it won’t impact my day-to-day routine.
My phone gets me through a full work day and that evening at home or out on the town, and is usually around 40% when I put it on the charger before bed.
Do you realize that
are the kind of apps that heavy-weight desktop environments develop for their users?
[q]apps that, once installed, stay there on the phone indefinitely.
And your point is?
I’ve had a smartphone for over a year and still haven’t downloaded a single app. The most I’ve done with it besides calls is using the browser to access google a few times. It’s primary usage is a replacement for my landline, with the secondary usage of being able to look up something online while out of town.
If I want to run an app, I have a computer that’s 100X more powerful and easy to use than a handheld phone. The reason behind the fact that many people don’t download apps is that phones can’t do anything useful that can’t be done better using your PC. Most people use the phone for calls, texts, playing music, taking photos, checking the time, checking social media, and maybe some light browsing. All of that is built into a modern phone, so no apps are needed. Throw in one or two one-time downloads of a game like Angry Birds and you can clearly see why the average is zero.
Indeed, but what about the times when you are not near your computer or you’re to lazy to start it or go to it?
On the last two points – it’s no secret we in this line of work need to get up and go to things.
That’s where laptops come in – they are for those people who need to compute on the go, or too lazy to get off the couch.
It’s not a coincidence that many new pad-type devices have a keyboard and can be used like a laptop. They’re trying to bridge the laptop-pad divide by being both. In any case, a phone is still not sufficient for real work.
+1
There’s a bonus point for you for not being one of those people.
I actually have a few apps (102, including my local banking app, 4.25 GB) but of the top 25 I have:
YouTube. Never updated from stock.
Google Play, but it is disabled, both Games and News Stand.
Google Search, updated but not to the latest ver.
Google Maps, updated.
G Mail, updated.
G+, not updated.
Garshk! Am I saying that mine is shorter?
I have a 105 iPad apps and 67 iPhone apps. Most of those apps I either don’t load on the device (because I found something better doing the same sort of thing) or I only load episodically (such as for holidays).
I have a lot of different off-line mapping apps always loaded because I find off-line mapping apps to vary a lot and none do everything perfectly so I keep several in a folder. Ditto several London transport and traffic apps, Ditto several astronomy apps. Then there are a handful of very useful apps I use a lot such as Say It Mail It which I use to send myself an audio notes via email whilst out an about, and various reference apps. I tend to load and unload apps for specific periods or events quite a lot, travel guides, medical guides, photography apps etc.
The single greatest innovation in the app revolution was the very low average price which makes impulse buying so very unproblematic.
Those are the ones loaded ; a much smaller number than the ones I “have”.
Out of those you have how many of them are Top 25?
And which introduced on large scales the “innovations” of alternative payment models, such as ads and microtransactions…
Don’t feel bad, I don’t even having the banking app so I must be an extra bad smartphone user 🙁
But I’m shocked that a callblocker isn’t listed because at least here in the states that is usually one of the first apps added.
Here in Finland it’s not really needed. We have a lot of regulations on all the various kinds of telemarketing systems and the likes, we’re a small nation, almost no one outside Finland even speaks Finnish and so on. I get a telemarketer trying to get me to order this or that magazine once every three months or so, but that’s about it.
Sigh…it must be nice not to live in a capitalist/fascist country. here there are regs but they left loopholes a mile wide so they are toothless so you pretty much have to have a callblocker right off the bat.
Its just a damned shame y’all are so damned cold, sounds like a really nice place. We southerners break out the eskimo gear if it drops below 45f so needless to say I doubt one of us would survive that far north 😉
Finland isn’t a paradise, but I suppose we’re generally better off than most. At least we have good personal security, free healthcare, social security, education and stuff and pretty good privacy laws.
I think as downsides I’d mostly point to Finland being a rather expensive country and that our copyright-laws are outdated.
Oh, once the temperature hits -22F or below you’ll be crying for mommy
-22f? hon if it drops below freezing or we see a drop of snow we are treating it like a natural disaster and shutting everything down, no way in hell we’d survive at PLUS 22f, much less negative! On the plus side one can usually go to the after Xmas sales wearing nothing but a light windbreaker, as we only get below freezing for on average one week a year…the week of my BDay naturally ;-(
But I have a feeling your upsides far outweigh the downsides compared to us, as here healthcare is crazy expensive, we have a huge problem with illegals causing crime to jump through the roof thanks to the rampant soul grinding poverty that comes with them, an administration that is frankly more than a little racist, and newsmedia that is so in the pocket of various corps that their “reporting” is little more than propaganda. Things really aren’t looking so good over here in the states and what is scary is how easily it would be to get the populace into that whole “bread and jobs” mindset that allowed the NSDAP to rise to power in Germany in the 30s. Scary times we are living in, scary times.
I downloaded no more than 10 apps. That was all I needed.
Why would I keep on downloading potentially crap apps and paying good hard earned money when they are not needed.
Ok, I was never into playing games apart from Soduku. No Angry Birds or Farmville for me. Nor am I into Facebook or Twitter so I don’t need them. (Ok the HTC POS I used you couldn’t remove them because they came with the device but they were never used)
The crux of the meatter is that users have widely differing needs from of their device. It seems that many of them are not app junkies whch I personally applaud.
I can’t speak for iOS as I haven’t used it past version 6, but when I use a Windows Phone device, I don’t have to download nearly as many apps as I do on most Android devices, because so much functionality is baked in to the OS.
That said, some Android devices I’ve used have all sorts of functionality in the custom interface they ship with, be it TouchWiz, Sense, or similar. In my collection I have an Evo 4G LTE that I just upgraded to 4.3/Sense 5, and there’s a ton of nice features included. Also as mentioned elsewhere, Facebook, Twitter, and several other services are built in (though I wonder if they are kept up to date like the standalone apps).
I’m the opposite. I use a very stripped-down version of Android, the smallest possible gapps package (basically just all the libs and frameworks without any Google apps beyond Play Store). That gives me a nice, small, clean base OS setup. Takes around 200 MB of disk space for this base OS install.
Then, I install everything I need/want from the Play Store to get all the features I actually want/need. There’s about 90-ish that get installed, although only about 20 are used on a daily basis. The rest are just needed for a few minutes to configure things (DPI changer, or themes, for example), or are used occasionally at work (WiFi Analyser, wireless file transfers, speedtest, etc).
Personally, I can’t stand OS installs that have every feature imaginable installed (like LG’s or Samsung’s versions of Android). Give me a clean foundation to build on. It’s much easier to add functionality I’ll actually use than try to hide or work around lame crap tacked on top by the OEM.
It’s also a better upgrade path, as it’s easier to update a small base OS than a giant monolith like TouchWiz (see the recent articles on arstechnica.com about how long it takes OEMs to update Android). And it’s much, much, much easier to update apps that are available in the Play Store than apps that are pre-installed and only upgradable via ROM updates.
Basically it’s a testimony to what’s already coming bundled on the machine, plus the raw capability of the browsers.
I counted, I have 11 apps on my iPhone, including a banking app (that I only used once to deposit a check). I’ve had an iPhone since the 3GS hit. They consist of a few games, Google Authenticator, and one of those star map apps that you can point in the sky.
I am either in the browser, or iBooks (reading free ePubs I find). I am content with the built in apps for Weather, Notes, Contacts, Mail, etc. etc. etc.
It even works pretty good as a phone.
My needs are simple, and my “don’t mess with it” philosophy grounds it. I don’t mess with it, I don’t want to mess with it, I don’t want to fiddle with it, hack it, root it, “manage media” with it, etc. Only time it touches iTunes is if I need a new book, and perhaps the semi-annual music sync with my all told 700 songs.
I have a 4S, I look forward to the iPhone 6.
This is one of the reasons I prefer a Windows Phone device to Android as my primary device. I do have fun fiddling with Android on other phones in my collection, but for daily use I don’t want something hacked together, I want something designed from the ground up to be a phone/communication device first, a toy second. I think that is a real advantage iOS and WP devices have over Android, but obviously I’m in the minority in that opinion.
And that being said, these days if you get a good enough Android phone and don’t tinker with it, you have something reliable and usable as a phone.
So most smartphone users download zero apps. Then you invent a stance that Apple supposedly has about an app economy and extrapolate that to mean that apparently app sales aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Let’s look at the reality instead.
1. The article is about smartphone users, which includes all those phones that would have been feature phones in the past but are now low end android. Despite running Android and being capable of running apps, most of those are only used for feature phone activities like texting, phoning, playing music, email, and browsing.
2. When apple boasts about their app market, they do it using numbers. Like 75 billion downloads, or record monthly revenue. Those are actual facts, not extrapolation based on a survey. So I’ll buy the argument that the “app economy” is in trouble when the actual numbers start going down.
3. Since when is “apps per month” any kind of valid metric of the app economy? Much app revenue is earned in the same apps via in-app purchases and the number of apps downloaded per month is more or less irrelevant.
Edited 2014-08-22 17:49 UTC
Really?
I never thought of his logic as very stellar to begin with.
1) They don’t just use feature phone apps, they use the apps Thom listed.
2) Those are highly biased facts coming from a company that has financial incentive to present them in the best way possible. Always touting total number of app downloads, ever instead of giving a time frame for the downloads or any kind of information that would not present the app store and apple in the best possible light.
3) Apps per month is pretty bad, but not worthless. It shows how un-adventerous most users are. If they have the five apps they really need, they aren’t casually browsing the app store and downloading apps to see if they like them. It means a lot to app developers, that you have little chance of the average joe even trying your app –regardless of how much it costs.
Why? Because Thom said so?
So your argument is that Apple is directly lying about downloads and revenue from their store? Incredibly unlikely given the PR damage and exposure to fraud lawsuits if that was unearthed.
As for focusing on total downloads that’s not even true. They talk about monthly revenue, they talk about total downloads, they talk about number of apps over time, they talk about everything.
You can speculate it means some or all of that, but you have almost no evidence. The evidence that matters to app developers is download counts on their apps, revenue from their apps, and revenue from the app market as a whole, as well as platform usage and market share + demographics. A survey about apps per month matters not all to developers, and says almost nothing about the app economy.
Yeah, I’d guess it’s like PCs… some users download apps, though I imagine most probably don’t. Still, the ones that do… those are probably in the millions.
No, but he’s not wrong. Just because Thom says the earth is round, doesn’t make it false. In my non scientific, but somewhat larger than normal observations of roughly 200 or more teens, college students, young, middle, and older adults. I’d say that’s fairly accurate.
Dang, forgot to address the other points:
The survey seems to confirm this article from last year.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/10/how-much-do-ave…
The long and short of it: most apps don’t make much money.
The short and the short of it: the numbers on App Store revenue are facts, while surveys are notoriously unreliable. As for most apps not making much money, that’s exactly the same as most programs for any platform not making money. Of all the millions of Windows programs, most don’t make much money. Where is the doom and gloom about the software economy being doomed?
Ok, its clear we had different impressions of the app store economy from the hype. I had the impression that it was a great meritocratic gold rush, where anyone who had a great idea and the skills to code it would be able to make a decent living without having to hire a staff or go through the work of getting distribution through the old school distribution network.
You seem to have thought that it was exactly the same as the old school software market. Which, I think is the point of all of these articles. Its not the revolution some people thought it was.
And what’s with the harsh tone? I don’t think at this point we disagree on anything. App store’s economy isn’t that different from the traditional one ( read: Not good).
If you disagree with a survey, that’s fine I guess. It just happens to agree with a lot of other data I’ve seen floating around.
If distribution was the only thing holding you back, or an expensive part of software ( like b2b verticals): The app store is AWESOME for those.
But for strictly consumer focused apps that seek to make money on the price of the app or advertising… Its not so great for making money, for most developers.
Its like the difference between the gold rush of 1849 and gold mining in 1996 ( when gold was at a historic low). Yes there is gold in the hills, but its more difficult to get and requires more capital investment.
Total logic fail. The earth being round is a provable fact not speculation like what and how many apps people use.
And you counted the apps of 200 people? Bullshit. I could come up with an equally useless anecdote. I have about 100 apps installed and use all of them (if I didn’t I would uninstall them) and that’s somewhat on the high end but not atypical amongst my acquaintances.
You’re confusing anecdotes with data. Neither of our anecdotes can be generalized to the larger population
I don’t think you’ve understood anything I’ve said. Furthermore, you’re asking questions setting up answers that you’ve already prepared to dismiss. You’re not serious in having this debate.
The article certainly has some informative statistics, however it ended on a pretty dumb note.
Central software repos have existed for a long time, apple wasn’t the first to do so on a mobile device. This would probably come as a shock to the author, but apple wasn’t even the first to do it on their iphone! Cydia offered that capability before apple did.
Apple originally envisioned and released the iphone as a web2.0 platform. It wasn’t until after cydia that they even announced their own software distribution platform.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-P…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia#History
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/06/live-from-apples-iphone-press-co…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_App_Store#History
The flow of ideas is organic, and when we look closely enough we find that everything has traces to something else. I find it totally naive when some people assume that the flow of ideas is one way with everyone else copying.
Edited 2014-08-22 18:40 UTC
I still download a handful of apps per month on iOS, some free, some paid. Obviously nowhere near the amount I downloaded/bought when I first got into the platform – searching for that perfect email, podcast, notes, etc app. Most of my iTunes gift card credit (because I’m a non-American using the US App Store) goes towards music or magazine subscriptions these days.
On Android (2012 Nexus 7), I think I’ve only downloaded 3 apps this entire year – a currency converter, a file manager and a NASA app. Part of the reason is simply because I use the platform often, but Google’s stock apps being decent enough for daily tasks is probably another factor. The only paid apps I see on my Android apps screen are a RSS reader and a Kairosoft game.
I don’t even use Facebook or Twitter, and don’t know wtf Candycrush is. Banking apps are a necessary evil.
Edited 2014-08-22 19:01 UTC
Sort of like how people use Ninite on windows because they limit apps. Instead of having to use a competing app store what Google, Apple, MS need is for people to go into app store and be able to select filters that limit apps.
This would work the same way you can select which list to use in Adblock Plus. The app store API should let web communities build their own app store filters that approve or even suggest entries from the app store.
Maybe even give people advanced search filters like checkbox for “avoid apps with micropayment” and “limit search results to apps with 4 or more stars”
Maybe I want to set my filter to OSnews and the app store selection would be limited to apps people here thought were worth bothering with, or Android Central, or insert community of choice.
That way Google, Apple, and MS could just approve everything not malicious and let community filters help sort out the junk. I have no idea why they aren’t already doing this.
One of the problems with the app economy is that it’s difficult to find a decent application in the app store. I have an iPhone, iPad and Kindle Fire. Amazon has significantly less applications for their device, and they don’t have a good selection that run on the first gen fire. Apple has a horrible experience to find applications with no sorting or filtering capabilities. I can’t see what my friends buy. I don’t hear word of mouth for most apps from others either.
As for hardware, Apple devices do not have enough storage space for all the apps that they want us to buy. I can’t even fit all my music on my iPhone and I use their iTunes match service to get around that problem at the expense of battery life. I also can’t fit all the apps they have. My iPad isn’t much better on storage space to a point I’ve had to pick and choose some apps for my phone and others for my iPad. In general, apple doesn’t seem to want to ship large flash on any of their products. Cloud services aren’t fast enough to pull down everything. I have business cable from comcast at home and I have trouble downloading from ITMS sometimes. The cloud isn’t a replacement for local storage on a iOS device and it certainly isn’t for a Mac.
Apple needs to improve their cloud services, increase the storage for apps on iOS or come up with a “cloud” way to do that too, and realize that being cheap isn’t helping anyway. My first iPhone had 8GB of storage and my latest iPhone is only double that. Lowend should be 32GB now and iPads should have 128GB or more to be competitive with other vendors. If tablets are supposed to replace PCs, they must be able to store apps like PCs.
Carriers love devices with little storage & cloud services…
The more apps, the more chances of an update borking the permissions on some folder, or something killing my battery life. I’d really rather keep it simple.
I download 0 apps most months, and also install 0 applications on my PC most months. I guess, given the low cost of apps, this is bad news if you’re relying on up-front payments given the low cost of apps, but most successful apps are depending on advertising or in-app purchases, which generate continual revenue from the installed base.
I’m aware Thom and many others here (including myself) don’t prefer this model, but not liking it doesn’t means it’s not sustainable.
Of course, there’s also a bit of a gold rush mentality going on, which results in more apps than the market could ever bear, so a lot of those will have to fail before we can settle on a more reasonable number of apps and app developers. It’s rather like the web bubble, but hopefully the bursting will be less severe. Still, that’s not necessarily a problem with the app store model, but rather with the excitement surrounding it and unrealistic expectations of app developers and investors.
I fail to see what Thom’s agenda is here. Does he think app stores are stupid and want them to go away completely in favor of users not being allowed to install anything on their phone other than what the thing came with? Does he want to do away with app stores completely and make direct downloads from developers’ sites the only way to put apps on devices? He says the current system is not “sustainable”, just what does he mean by that? That not enough people are making any money from selling their apps? Should they be guaranteed a certain amount of monty for their efforts, whether or not the apps they came up with aren’t selling? Are there just too many apps? How do you winnow down those numbers of apps? Who decides which apps should and should not be in an app store? I can just imagine what Thom’s reaction would be if Google or Apple came out and said there are too many apps in their stores and they are going to throw out the ones that aren’t selling or don’t have any “utility” value in their opinion. Just imagine the hue & cry!!!
I just don’t get it. Sure, we all know that every app store is filled with crap, malware, apps that have little to no value to anyone or just a very few people, but so be it. It’s a free country/world, those apps are there because developers are free to put them there and people are free to buy them or not buy them in a free marketplace called an app store. What could possibly be wrong with that? If an app isn’t useful to you, don’t buy it or download it! Dont put any apps on your phone if you don’t want to, no one is making you put any apps on your devices other than what the thing came with, and that is a whole other discussion. Just what is the agenda here? This is stupid.
Edited 2014-08-23 08:28 UTC
Is this a first? Someone complaining about a posting that hasn’t got enough agenda/bias?
Most people, when they first get on the internet, do a lot of surfing.
And then after a while, they have their favorites like OSnews.
In fact all the smart ones settle on OSnews, but I digress.
So you visit this very small set of websites in a typical month compared to umpteen million that are available. I go to news.com, OSnews, abcnews, my bank website, and just a few others, don’t go all over the place.
So I’m asking you all reading this, to think of, not how many websites you visit, but how many “new” websites that you add to your small list of regular websites, and then look at that on a monthly basis. It could easily be said that most web users don’t visit new websites each month. You’d be surprised.
The internet is still healthy, and so are apps.
I just don’t agree that in a healthy app economy that means every user installs new apps on a monthly basis. Apple still has 75 billion downloads total, and what it he monthly rate now? I’m not 100% sure, but its probably approaching 2 billion a month.
Edited 2014-08-23 09:34 UTC
Just another invented controversy.
Most people visit the same webpages every month.
Most people don’t install any new windows/Mac/linux software every month
Most people don’t buy different groceries every month
Oh my god the web/software/food industry is dying!
… What the hell has happened to us?
It’s just what happens when things get popular. When computing technology was for the select few, it was about progress and ideas. Now technology is widespread and everyone thinks they’re geeks for using technology rather than understanding technology.
In a way, “us” hasn’t changed. It’s more people claiming to be “us” when they’re still closer to “them”.
Part of the reason that we have so few apps on our smartphones is that we have moved them all over to our tablet. The smartphone gets used for quick banking, making calls, taking pictures, and maps. All extra functionality was moved to a Nexus 7 so that the phone can enjoy longer battery life.
Crap like Facebook app on Android is too heavy for a smartphone. The tablet has also completely replaced our e-Reader, and is used more than the MacBook Air.
The trend is the other way around. From tablets to (big) phones. There are WAY more smartphones than tablets in the market and they are used much more often as well
Maybe. We like to extend the life of the phones as much as possible in case of an emergency situation, which results in a minimum number of apps on the phone and everything else on the tablet. The cost of a very good entry level phone (Moto G) + a great tablet (Nexus 7) is also much more cost efficient than outright purchasing a phablet.
Really?
Moto G: 164 Euro
Nexus 7: 227 Euro
Total: 400 Euro
Nokia Lumia 1320: 224 Euro
That 1320 will give you enough battery life for 1.5 day of heavy use while you only have to carry around one device
That Nokia is very well priced. To be honest, I did not consider Windows Phone at all. We got the 16GB Moto G with discount for $169 USD, and the (first gen) Nexus 7 32GB for $110 around the time the second generation was released.
To each his own, I’m glad you’re happy with your Nokia.
The Nexus 7 is a great buy and you got it for a crazy low price. No wonder you like your 2 devices setup
I decided to go with the higher end Windows Phones (1020 for me, 1520 for my wife) and am indeed loving them. They aren’t perfect, but I have never had any trouble finding apps and every update that I get is greatly improving my enjoyment (although I think that 8.1 was the major one that really put WP on par with Android and IOS. I don’t think there will be another major update like that in the future)
Moto G is now entry-level? :/
Because “apps” are getting annoying? Yesterday I tried playing Asphalt 8 on my smartphone, but it required a mandatory update to run which was 1.36GB in size.
Also, apps are getting increasingly saddled with microtransactions and ads, and most are released with lots of bugs which are fixed by an endless stream of updates.
Some of them even take such liberties as to run a backround service, gumming up your device.
I just have a few trustworthy apps and games and that’s it. “App discovery” is dead.
Edited 2014-08-23 13:23 UTC
Some people actually use their phones as phones, instead of as toys to just dick around with all day.
“Apple boasted 75 billion all-time App Store downloads”
So when you have sold 800 million IOS-devices that becomes about 100 app store downloads per device which seems very reasonable.
My 2 big questions would be:
1) How many of those 75 billion were paid
2) Does updating an app count as an App Store download?
Look at everybody in these comments patting each other on their backs because they have an expensive device they don’t use at its full potential. There is no virtue in not using apps – you don’t need them, I get it, don’t brag about it. Some of us have different needs and if we install some extra apps it doesn’t mean that we’re some superficial idiots who can’t get their nose out of the latest social app or idiotic mobile game.
And if apps were such a non-issue then non mainstream platforms like Windows Phone and Blackberry OS would have no trouble competing since they are pretty well made and have some decent built-in functionality.
We all use apps, but just a few. Just like I only have about 20 programs installed on my Desktop (counting Office as 1) I only have about 20 apps on my phone. I haven’t downloaded a new app this month, but I have used my existing apps a lot.
There are also about 20 websites that I visit daily but it has been a while since I bookmarked a new site
After a while you have mostly found things that fulfill your needs and only when you see something really amazing you will add it to your toolbelt.
I am much more productive with the 20 programs that I have been using for years than with the 100 programs that I used in the past while I was discovering what I could do with my computer
Edited 2014-08-24 20:23 UTC
I haven’t downloaded any new apps for my laptop in months. What does that say about the state of the desktop(laptop) app economy?
Nothing.
People download apps that they need for something. If the apps they have meet the needs they have, then all fine I think.