How it started
The other day I was talking to a small business owner and a couple of the small business’s employees. We were discussing local business, small business, and business in general.
I said that when it comes to technology and people with technological skills, I think there’s a question which is impolite but still important.
How many apps do we actually need?
Not as individuals, but rather as users existing within a technological system. Specifically smartphone apps, which seems to be most of what programming and company announcements and startups are focused on currently, “and we created a new app for that,” how many apps do we actually need?
The small business owner replied that he has about fifteen apps to run his business and it seems like each one has its own associated fee.
How it’s going, now that I’ve thought more about this
Fifteen apps, which I’ll use as a starting point. Fifteen user IDs, fifteen passwords, fifteen apps to keep updated, fifteen apps which can break if an update goes wrong, and so on.
No, I’m not advocating for one-stop-shopping all-in-one apps that contain everything and do everything. Those work wonderfully until that one things breaks and then everything breaks. That’s why I stopped using PDAs back in the Palm Pilot days.
What I am advocating is for all of us, myself included, to stop and look at the technology we use from time to time. How much of what I use or have downloaded or installed is to monitor or fix a potential problem created by something else? Or if the potential problem isn’t directly created by something else, how much of it is created by my bad habits using something I already have?