Do you suffer from AOD (App Overload Disorder)?
I do, brother. Can I get a witness?
AOD is a horrible, stifling disease characterized by an excessive amount of time spent every day to maintain an apps habit.
The symptoms of AOD include:
- you have more than 50 Chrome tabs open right now
- your phone, tablet and laptop are always running out of memory
- you upgraded to a paid Dropbox/iCloud account – to make room for apps
- it takes you 2 hours to groom your apps in iTunes
- you check IFTTT daily to make sure your recipes are working
- you stay awake at night wondering when if you backed up your keyword passbook
- your hands are permanently disfigured through constant typing of user names and passwords
I love my apps! But they’re killing me.
I use apps pretty much every waking hour of every day.
my first page of iphone apps (jk)
I have apps on my phone, apps on my tablet and apps on my laptop.
My internet TV has its own apps, too. The Roku I attached to my TV has its own downloadable apps, one for each channel I watch.
My new Pebble smart watch uses still more apps.
At work, I use 10 enterprise apps, plus at least 30 programming / project management apps.
When I get home, I waste plenty of time on my social media, news and gaming apps.
Or I use my Airdrone iPhone app to fly my Parrot around – zoom!
When I’m shopping, I check prices on my phone (more apps).
There are even apps that help me keep tabs on my apps.
But the overhead involved with using these is taking over my life. It feels like all I do now is enter my userid and password, over and over again. Or worse, to save time I give my life’s story to every Tom Dick and Harry app provider by clicking on the “Connect Using Facebook” button. Because my carpal tunnel just can’t handle it anymore.
This Can’t End Well
I often wonder where today’s app explosion will end. I mean, there are over a million iOS apps, and almost that many Android ones.
Who has the time to search for what they want from this many choices? How will we navigate this when there are 10 million? 100 million? one for every person on the planet?
It really looks like the number of apps might surpass the number of web pages at some point soon!
Will some mega-VC come in and buy up all the loose apps in the world and create an Oracle of apps?
Or will I (gasp) have to delete a bunch of my beloveds, to return my life to sanity?
I think I need an intervention.
