There is now an app for just about everything, but how many do we have on our Smart devices, and how many of them do we really use?
Compared to some people, I would consider the 200 or so apps I have on my iPhone fairly modest, but the truth is that I probably don’t use even half of them. I have installed some through recommendations, some to compare with similar apps in the same category on another operating system, or just through curiosity. I have also created folders for my apps which are all self-explanatory:
- Birdsong
- Books
- Communication
- Finance
- Healthcare And Fitness
- Identification
- Microsoft
- Music
- Nature And Relaxation
- Navigation
- News
- Online Shopping
- Photography
- Productivity
- Radio
- Sport
- TV
- Utilities
- Web Browsers
- Weather
- Writing Tools
I could even group these folders into subfolders, but I just haven’t got round to it. So what are the apps I use most?
Apple’s built-in Mail, FaceTime, Phone and Messages apps are probably the ones I use most frequently, and I have put these in the Communication folder for obvious reasons, along with Contacts, WhatsApp, Meta AI, Aira and Zoom.
The Productivity folder has by far the largest number of apps and probably does need sub-categorising a little more. It has apps such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Sonos, Clock, App Store, Google Calendar, and Dropbox among others.
The Identification folder is another busy place where I have grouped all my OCR apps such as Be My Eyes, Seeing AI, Envision AI, Sullivan+, OneStep Reader and VDScan.
Then the Online Shopping contains a plethora of apps such as Amazon, Argos, Asda, EasyJet, John Lewis, QVC, and Savers.
There are what I would describe as occasional apps like those I have in my Birdsong folder, or weather apps that I tend not to use in favour of one of my Smart speakers. Like most people, I could probably uninstall lots of apps that I currently have on my phone that I have possibly only ever used once. Some of these apps are there simply because I have installed them on my Google Pixel phone and wanted to compare their usability with iOS, the Amazon Fire TV app being a case in point. Or I have installed an app just to be able to help someone else with it.
Over the years, I believe one of the most useful group of apps for blind or visually impaired people are the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) ones which are hugely popular and useful for identifying packaging, tins, medication and mail. In the days of Nokia phones running the Talks software, an OCR app would set you back hundreds of pounds whereas many of those we use today are free. Remember the Nokia N82 with K-NFB Reader? But adding AI to the mix today and you very quickly realise what a phenomenon Smart devices have become in our community, particularly over the last decade.
The other category of apps that has proved incredibly popular in recent times is navigation. These include Blind Square, Lazarillo, Voice Vista, Google Maps and various journey planners. While I have several of these on my phone, I rarely use them because I live in a fairly rural location, and the route to a bus-stop or local shops is so straightforward that it doesn’t particularly require an app to navigate there. Yet I keep them because I never know when I might need one. And I guess that this is the reason why we all end up with so many apps on our devices: we never know when we might need them; we never know when we might want to compare them; and we often prefer an app that encompasses something we want to do rather than use a web browser to search through endless links and adverts to find what we want.
So if you are someone who has several hundred apps on your device, perhaps the best suggestion I can make is to create folders so you can categorise your apps and be able to find them. Yes you can ask your voice assistant to open a specific app, but if you have that many and can’t remember their names, then grouping them in folders is often more efficient.
It is very hard to choose a favourite app because there are quite a lot that I do use regularly and find incredibly helpful. At the time of writing, however, I think Gemini is right up there for me. It works better on Android than on iOS because Gemini is now Google’s primary assistant so just pressing your side button for a couple of seconds brings it up on a Pixel device whereas you need to go into the app itself on an iPhone. And where the camera felt kind of obsolete to someone with little or no sight at one time, it now matters just as much as a screen reader with all the apps that use the camera feature for reading text.
So there is a lot to look forward to in 2026, and there is a lot that keeps me ‘appy.’