Nathan Lott

Music teacher studying to be a librarian.

Posts

February 12, 12:02 PM

On the App-A-Day podcast episode number 290, I talked about the conclusion of a month long experiment I did to see what apps I use on a daily basis. The purpose of this experiment was to see which apps get used the most, how many apps I actually use, and which apps I might remove from my iPhone and iPad to save space. This blog post is a written version of what I talked about on the podcast.

Days in the experiment
28
Number of iPhone and Universal apps that I own
703
Number of iPad apps that I own
114
Average number of iPhone apps I use per day
13
Average number of iPad apps I use per day
11
Most number of iPhone apps I used in a day
18
Most number of iPad apps I used in a day
16
Least number of iPhone apps I used in a day
6
Least number of iPad apps I used in a day
6
Number of apps on my phone
217
Number of unique apps that I used in the last month for iPhone
84
Number of apps on my iPad
155
Number of unique apps that I used in the last month for iPad
57
Apps that I used the most on the iPhone
Mail and Downcast tied for everyday.
More than 20 times: App Store (21), Facebook (20)
Between 10 and 20 times: Zite (14), Settings (10), Phone (15), Safari (18), Tweetbot (13)
Between 5 and 10 times: eBay (7), Weather Channel (7), Google (9), QRANK (8), Flipboard (8), Calcbot (5), Foursquare (5), Music (6), Runtastic Pro (8), Groupon (7), CheckPlease (7), Kindle (5)
Apps that I used the most on the iPad
Downcast was used everyday.
More than 20 times: Safari (24), Settings (21), Mail (25), Alien Blue HD (20), Evernote
Between 10 and 20 times: Instacast HD (11), App Store (16), App Shopper (17), Facebook (13), Progressive Alarm Clock (10)
Between 5 and 10 times: eBay (7), Remote (6), GoodReader (5), LastPass (5)
Use of built-in apps vs 3rd party apps
My most used built-in apps on the iPad and iPhone were Mail, Settings, Safari, Phone, and App Store
Conclusion
It was really interesting doing this experiment and seeing just how much I use the apps that I have on my devices. Some things were not a surprise. I listen to podcasts everyday so it was obvious that Downcast was the most used app. However, it was interesting that I check Mail a little more often on the iPhone than I do on the iPad. The reason I used Settings so much on the iPad is I have Bluetooth headphones that I use to watch podcasts and I have to open Settings every time to pair the Bluetooth.

There was one mistake I made throughout the duration of the experiment. I used Evernote a lot on the iPad to write down what apps were used every night. I did not write down Evernote itself, though. Most of the time I used Evernote on the iPad, but a few times I used Evernote on the Mac and I should have kept better tabs. However, it would not have been relevant to average use since Evernote was special to this experiment as it was the app I used to record the data.

The last thing I want to say about this is that these results are a good sample of the apps I use most often. There are a lot of apps I use once or twice that were not mentioned. These might be apps that I’m reviewing for App-A-Day or something I feel like using. There may be times when I feel like using a certain kind of app that were not represented in this list at all such as Music apps or other games.

December 24, 12:54 PM

Checking Kindle Books out of the Library

BorrowingKindleBooks.doc Download this file

Posted via email from nathanl’s posterous

December 19, 11:25 AM

Podsafe Christmas

This is a tribute episode to the Christmas episodes that Jen has done on her Inside My Head podcast for the past 3 years. I chose some of my favorite songs that she has played.
(One correction from the show: I said that Chiron Beta Prime wasn’t played on a Christmas episode of Inside My Head and I was wrong. It was played on Bah Humbug (2009))