how many apps are too many?

[ZepTepi]

Throughout the time I've been an Android smartphone user a common theme that's come up in conversations whenever I've had any kind of issue with my phone is the number of apps I have at any given time. It's almost always friends or significant others who say this but whenever Ive brought it up to a phone service rep I've never gotten any of them to say definitively if I have too many or not or even what is too many so I thought I'd post it to you all here who I'm sure many are more tech-savvy about this kind of thing than I am.

If just saying yes or no is not easy because there's other criteria to consider then what is that criteria and how would I determine what too many is for my particular smartphone?

I look forward to hearing your feedback on this!

Mark

 

[ocnbrze]

I don't think there is a definite amount. It really depends on the phone and how much memory and ram your phone has. If you have 50 gigs of storage for instance you will not be able to have many apps on your phone. But if you have 256gigs, then you really do not have to worry about how many you have on the phone..... really. There more apps you have the more they have potential to run in the background and if your ram is small then or will start to run slow.

 

[MoodyBlues]

If just saying yes or no is not easy because there's other criteria to consider then what is that criteria and how would I determine what too many is for my particular smartphone?

There's really no 'yes or no' answer. That's because there are *so many* variables. What's too many for one person may be fine for another.

One factor is how much storage space you have, and how it's being used. Part of it has to be used by the operating system itself--not just its core files, but temporary files it creates as it's working.

The other part of storage has to do with your use of the device--how many apps you've installed, how many photos and videos you're storing, how many apps you're using concurrently, etc.

As long as you have room to install and run them, I don't think there is such a thing as too many.

 

[Hadron]

There is no such thing as "too many apps" in the sense that I think you are asking, i.e. where the number of apps installed itself causes some problem. A misbehaving app can cause problems, but that's independent of how many others you have installed.

Of course if you are running out of storage that will cause problems, and those can be alleviated by removing unused apps. If you cannot find the app you want you may have too many installed (or just need to organise them better), but that's a problem for you rather than for the phone. And specific types of apps might cause problems: "performance tuning" apps of almost any sort are things you are better off without, but again that's nothing to do with the number of apps installed. And an unused app just occupies some space in storage. Some apps need to listen in the background for events (such as SMS arriving), but a properly-written one will use very little resource doing that, often just subcribing to a system service (a badly-written one might cause problems, but as we've said before that's no a matter of the number of apps). So overall I'd say no, that's not the right question to ask.

To put this in perspective, I've 247 user-installed apps, in addition to 217 system apps (many of which are behind the scenes components that you'd not know where there unless you went looking for them). But I've also got over 50 GB of storage free, so this is not a problem at all.

 

[Dannydet]

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