“Ten Apps Is All I Need” – How Few Can You Live With? [Have Your Say]

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Here’s a great post over at 37 Signals, posing the question: how many of the apps on your iPhone do you actually make frequent use of?

David Heinemeier Hansson says that the only third party apps he actually uses on a regular basis are Echofon and Bloomberg.

He says:

“And yet I use my iPhone all the time. It’s my favorite piece of technology and has been for years. Do you know why? Because Apple nailed the basics. Safari, Camera, iPod, Clock, Weather, Photos, Messages, Mail, and Maps are the apps that I use 95% of the time. Those are the ones that made me buy the phone and stick with it.”

I think he has a good point. If I take a good look at my iPhone, there’s only a tiny handful of apps I use daily. Twitter, Camera+, Simplenote – that’s about it. Everything else gets infrequent use. I could delete the vast majority of apps on there and I wouldn’t miss them.

Where do you stand on this? Should you keep your iPhone free of cruft, with just a dozen or so essentials? Or do you feel that, since you have a portable computer in your pocket all the time anyway, you might as well fill it up with potentially useful stuff? It’s like carrying a pocket knife, right? You never know when a particular blade is going to come in useful.

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