Streamline Your iPhone: Declutter Apps and Boost Productivity

Have you ever paused to consider how many apps are installed on your iPhone and how many you actually use regularly? The issue of app overload is real. Thanks to affordable app prices on the App Store and frequent sales and discounts, it’s easy to accumulate a clutter of apps. Your iPhone can quickly become a digital hoarder’s paradise, but the good news is, you can easily part ways with those unnecessary apps. Easier said than done? Actually, it’s more manageable than you might think.

In preparation for a social media detox experiment, I decided not only to delete all social networking apps from my iPhone but also to review and remove apps I rarely or never used. After deactivating my Facebook account, I found that Facebook Messenger no longer worked, and even TimeHop, which compiles social media memories into a diary format, stopped functioning. While TimeHop is a great way to reminisce, I realized that maintaining a personal journal, both digital and paper, offers more meaningful reflection than scrolling through tweets and Facebook statuses. So, I deleted it.

I also noticed an abundance of fitness apps on my device: FitBit, myFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Couch-to-5K, and Fitocracy. The first to go was FitBit. After losing two FitBit trackers in six months, I opted to use MobileTrack to stay within the Fitbit ecosystem virtually. Step tracking has become a popular feature across many apps, and since myFitnessPal introduced this capability, keeping both was redundant and drained my battery unnecessarily. So, I deleted FitBit.

Tracking exercise stats not only helps me monitor progress but also serves as motivation. Many fitness apps sync with each other, so my runs recorded in RunKeeper also appear in myFitnessPal and Fitocracy. But why should all these apps have the same data? Possibly to share my journey with others? That might make sense if I knew people actively using these apps. On myFitnessPal, the only social fitness app I keep, I have four friends, but only one has logged in during the past two weeks. I keep myFitnessPal because it’s an excellent nutrition tracker, and Couch-to-5K remains until I complete the program. The rest? Deleted.

Next on the list were various utility apps I installed “just in case.” Apps like PDFPen Scan+, DeGeo (to remove geotags from photos), several photo apps like Hueless (for black-and-white photography), Google Voice, and multiple scanners were used maybe once a year or less. Keeping them on my iPhone made little sense since I rarely needed them. If the need arises, I can always re-download them quickly. So, they were deleted.

Enough is enough. Inspired by Patrick Rhone’s podcast segment “How Bare is Your Air?” where listeners try to live within the constraints of a 64GB MacBook Air by minimizing apps to essentials, I applied the same concept to my iPhone. What is the minimal set of apps I truly need to get my work done? I even considered deleting alternative apps I use instead of default iOS ones—Mailbox, Fantastical, Dark Sky, SmartPlayer, Overcast. None are absolutely critical, but I prefer them over the standard apps.

Removing unused and duplicate apps frees up device storage and brings order not only to my iPhone’s home screen but also to my mind. It also benefits battery life, extending usage between charges. I plan to conduct similar reviews on my iPad and Mac. While the impact might be less dramatic, it’s still better to rely only on apps I genuinely need rather than getting lost in a sea of utilities saved “just in case.” Such digital decluttering is beneficial for both our devices and ourselves.

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