My friend Gretchen has a folder on her iPhone’s home screen called “Crapple.” It’s where she sticks all of the apps that Apple adds to her device that she doesn’t use. As Apple has forced apps for their smart watch, HealthKit, bookstore, a separate podcasts app, their own maps app, and now their streaming music store on users, all of these come with apps that you can’t get rid of.
There’s a problem with pushing too many apps on users: anything that they don’t actually use is just burdensome and takes up hard drive space. For the makers of hardware and software alike, “spotlighting your own apps only works as well as the apps themselves do,” points out Brian Barrett in Wired. Part of the reason why some people switched to the iPhone in the first place was the relative lack of bloatware.
We’ve written before about the challenges that come along with trying to disentangle yourself from Apple services that you do use, like when iPhone users switch to another phone platform and their text messages still get redirected to iMessage.
Here’s the problem, which is specific to the current generation of Apple devices: the apps that you can’t get rid of gobble up 3 GB of space, and they still sell a 16 GB phone. If they want their customers to use these apps, they should create something superior instead of making something that people are stuck with forever and ever.
Apple Music’s Worst Feature? You Can’t Delete It [Wired]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist