App hoarders, it’s time to Marie Kondo your phone

If Marie Kondo were to appear before you right now, grab your smartphone out of your hand and thumb through your pages of apps, what do you think she’d say?

The Japanese guru of clean is all the rage in 2019, ever since Netflix debuted her TV show, with perfect resolution-related timing, on January 1. Her “spark joy” meme — toss anything that doesn’t — is the Spanish Flu of our century: It has gone viral while we were paying attention to other crises, and its cleansing progress around the planet shows no signs of slowing. The tech world is only the latest vector of infection.

Kondo’s big-time fame has happened to the chagrin of both hoarders and hipsters who’d long since digested the lessons in her book. I am somewhat sympathetic to the former camp, while my wife is firmly in the latter. She caught the KonMari virus in 2015, beginning the now-familiar rituals of emptying closets and saying goodbye to clothes that no longer served us. Friends began to come down with the bug, smiling serenely at the simplicity of their once-cluttered credenzas. 

Instead of focusing on 30 books, Kondo should suggest we pare our phones down to 30 apps

I held the virus at bay for a long time, thanks to the book thing. Kondo herself owns just 30 books, and her suggestion that we reduce our reading stockpiles to a similar number sparked much fury. But even a book-pile lover like me had to admit she had a point. Every time I steeled myself and put another dozen or so tomes in the Little Free Library my wife had constructed for the purpose, a weight lifted. The books that really begged to be read, or read again, stood out a little more on the shelf.

And I am loath to admit it, but the same principle holds true for my smartphone. Perhaps instead of focusing on 30 books, Kondo should suggest we pare our phones down to our 30 most-used apps.

Does this app spark joy?

Books, at least, can just sit happily on or around a shelf, never requiring an update. Updating apps is one of the banes of my digital existence. I’m resistant to automating the process because a) I’ve been burned too many times by apps that suddenly drop or alter a beloved feature, and b) sudden and rapid depletion of the battery seems to occur if all my apps try to update at once.

I have added a lot of apps in the decade since I bought my first iPhone: definitely more than a thousand, mostly for testing purposes. Through attrition (Apple now auto-removes a lot of apps that don’t conform to the latest iOS, marking each removal with a cloud icon) and a little whittling, over the years, the number fell below 500.

This felt less like a Marie Kondo process, however, than a drawn-out Thanos snap. Apps were dying off haphazardly, and there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to the ones I was removing. 

Far better, I reasoned, to take some time, go through each app and consider it methodically, Kondo-style. Does this app spark joy in my digital life? If not, thank it for its service and delete it. 

The folder fraud

Like many a smartphone hoarder, I’d buried a lot of apps in folders. Using folders — which you create by dragging one app atop another — allowed me to fool myself into thinking I had a mere four pages’ worth of apps on my phone. 

But managing folders had become a time-consuming occupation in itself. The folder-naming scheme has changed a lot over the years as I attempted to combine as many of them as possible. I have often caught myself being stupidly proud of hybrid folders like “File & Do,” “Mind & Body”, “World & Space,” and a games folder focused on “Words & Numbers.” 

Despite such librarian-like cleverness, however, I much preferred the simplicity of the app arrangement on my iPad. Whereas I’d always made each new iPhone a carbon copy of the previous one, with each new tablet I had started afresh. On the iPad, apps were uploaded as and when I needed them — and it turned out I really didn’t need too many.

App collecting or doomsday prepping? 

Admittedly, Apple does make it a little easier to pare down the number of apps on your iPad. On the tablet, go to Settings -> General -> iPad storage, and you’ll see a full list of your apps and when you last opened them. See all the ones that say “Never Used?” That might as well read “Doesn’t Spark Joy.” 

The same cleaning-friendly feature, sadly, is not available on iPhones. Still, on both iOS devices, Apple makes it supremely easy to re-download anything you’re missing: go to the App Store, hit your photo in the top right corner to go to your account, click on “My purchases,” then click on “Not on this iPhone.”

See all the ones that say “Never Used?” That might as well read “Doesn’t Spark Joy.” 

So if our app ownership details are all safely stored on Apple’s servers, why was I so resistant to blitzing those 500 remaining apps on my smartphone down to the bare minimum? Partly it was inertia: I’d got those pages and folders arranged to the point where app locations were embedded in my muscle memory. 

But the deeper I dug into my psyche on this question, the more I realized there’s a part of my brain that just doesn’t trust the internet to stick around. App hoarding, it turns out, may be a hedge against various nightmare scenarios.

If the apocalypse came — some even more horrific Spanish Flu-style epidemic, say — and society’s infrastructure crumbled, I could see myself still making use of the phone by plugging it into my solar-powered charger. Surely then, while eating tinned food around a campfire, I’d feel pretty dumb for not maxing out my phone’s storage with multiple forms of offline entertainment!

Like many weird and fearful thoughts that lurk in our brains, this one just had to be brought to the surface and spoken out loud to make it clear how dumb it was. In the unlikely event of catastrophe, we are all going to have bigger things to worry about than the number of Candy Crush clones on our digital devices.

The minimalist smartphone challenge

So the Kondo-ization of my phone proceeded in earnest, if slowly and painfully. At time of writing, I’m down to 325 apps, and I’m most proud of the fact that Facebook is not among them. Only allowing myself access to the social network on other devices, where I can use it more mindfully, is a small step towards sparking more joy. 

My wife, of course, has gone one better: her phone has a mere 180 apps, and all of them spark joy. How do I know? Because she’s laid them all out by color, completely folder-free, as shown in the screenshots at the top of this story. 

Even if they’re not all actually on the phone — note the little cloud icons — these apps are still meaningful as part of an artistic mosaic. Some maintenance is required, since companies change the color of their app logos more frequently than you’d think. Still, the end result is worth it for the smiles it produces. 

As with books, the minimum number of apps we can sustain is different for everyone. Personally, I do not believe I can ever get as close to the bone as 30 apps. But if you can, congratulations: You are living your most KonMari, joy-sparking digital life.