The Application Complication

I purchased an iPhone in September (on a side note my bill has been reduced by 60% over my previous phone which means it has been the best investment I have ever made) and have been downloading applications, or apps as the kids say, ever since. I now have around 60 apps on my phone. As the number of apps I possess increases I am starting to find classification more and more difficult.

When you have 24 or less apps arrangement is simple and folders are unnecessary. Keeping the top 12 apps, by usage, on the front page and the remainder on the last page you have a relatively simple sort. Within the front page you could arrange the apps any number of ways, by colour of symbol, alphabetically, usage, order of download, the default, etc. but all amount to the same basic thing since you can see all the apps simultaneously when you open the screen.

As I continued to download more applications and finding that three screens worth of apps would not be practical I decided to start sorting my apps into folders. When considering how to group apps the iPhone is quite intelligent in guessing names for folders - not only predicting generic titles like games or education but also more specific groups like card games or board games - but the fact is a lot of applications serve more than one purpose.

Do I put bodybuilding.com's app in with the health section along with my weight tracker and exercise video library apps, my social section because I use the bodybuilding forums or with other apps that connect to online shopping websites?

Does Google's application go with social apps because it connects me to my Gmail, reference section with Wikipedia or in utilities because it is a search engine and train map?

Once you have decided to go with folders, is it worth keeping the four or five most used items on the dashboard for easy access or will that upset your sense of order? Another issue I have found with using folders is that I am less likely to cull my apps and delete the ones that I find useless if they are hidden in a seldom used folder.

In deciding how to separate my apps that appear to fit into more than one category I have managed to avoid the pit that is to add more and more folders to the point that their function has been lost. I chose to place the apps together based on the function that I associate with the app the most. For both the examples above it has placed them along with Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter in the social folder. Finally new downloads remain on the second page, not in a folder, for a short period of time until I deem them useful and place them in a folder or summarily delete them.