I have been recently been at a loss as to what to write about. I submitted JumpShot 2 to the App Store but I had already written about it. Then I went right from finishing that app to working on another. I have been making good progress on it. Hopefully I will be finished with it soon so that I can write about it here (ha!).

In the meanwhile, I read an interesting article where the writer shared the apps that he had on his iPhone screen. I liked this conceit and have decided to steal it for this blog post. They say that you look at your phone 150 times a day - and that many people would not want to share their phone even with their significant others.

What people tend to be more careful about is the data within the apps. Seems alright to share you the apps themselves right?

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Some people have remarked that I keep the front home screen rather light on apps. This is because I swipe between screens a lot and there have been a few times when I put my thumb down to swipe and in doing so accidentally activate an app on the lower rows. So it is more than just a neat freak OCD thing but also a semi-practical one.

Starting from the top left to bottom right …

• Phone: I am a millennial so that means I do not make a lot of phone calls. Pretty much the only people I call on a day to day basis are my parents and my roommate Adam (who remains in the 1990s). I have thought about swapping this one with FaceTime but so far I haven’t. Probably should sometime soon.

• Wikipanion: When I run out of things to read, I like to pull up Wikipedia and get lost in knowledge. Sometimes I like to read about WWII events. Other times I read about the companies on the S&P 500. Yet other times I read about the political structure of Communist China or North Korea. I have looked at a lot of Wikipedia app clients and I think though Articles has a nice skin, this one does the best job of simply presenting text/images at a decent pace.

• Instapaper: This is the first app that I ever bought on my first iPhone. I have a big habit of sending articles longer than 3,000 words to my Instapaper for future consumption. In general I read this only when I am in a tunnel or on the plane. There is one article on here that maybe I should share later that makes me cry every time I read it.

• YouTube: The apps on my screens are organized for best reach distance when held in the left hand. The most important apps are in the middle two rows on the left side because that is the side easiest to reach with my left hand. YouTube is on the top right because it’s not the best app to use with a cellular connection.

• AMRC: I read a lot of Reddit because I like to see pictures of aquariums and their iOSProgramming thread is great for hints and code snippets that I might need for future use. For a while I used Alien Blue, which is the official Reddit client, but eventually I found that particular program slow. It would crash on large threads and take forever to load. I downloaded a bunch of other clients and found this one to work the best. It has a nice swipe interface, loads ultra fast, and is tiny (like 5 MB).

• Minihack: This one (like the one above) costs money but c’mon, seriously? Just pay the $1.99. I read a lot of HackerNews and I find that this app does the best job of refreshing and pulling data from the website. HackerNews has its ups and downs, but it is still full of smart people submitting smart things. I enjoy reading it.

• Reeder: I promoted this app - a standard Feedly client - up to the front page because it became the best way to read content away from Twitter. Twitter is too fast. Too much stuff that I end up missing. I enjoy the perspectives that I read from the various RSS feeds, including the Brooklyn Investor, the smartest investor I read on a regular basis (read his blog, dude).

• Hangouts: I really hate this app and all the Google apps. I read somewhere that they use some sort of cross-platform framework that shares 85% of the code on the back end. Maybe it is why their views take forever to load. I like their animations though and I stole the concept of the floating round button for JumpShot 2. All of the messenger apps that you will see installed on my phone are a result of the splintered messaging ecosystem of my social network. In this case, Hangouts is on the front screen because the biggest number of friends use it to communicate with me - 5 of them, including 2 coworkers.

• Spotify and Apple Music: I am trying out both music systems right now. I have been using iTunes since 2010, and it holds all the weird classical, film themes, and anime music that I have been listening since then. Spotify has been real nice because the music data that I download while listening to it does not count against my T-Mobile data cap. That and the nice playlists (New Music Friday is my favorite) are the reasons why I use Spotify more than Apple Music. I really can afford to have both (since the trial is 3 months long) so I will keep trying it for a bit longer.

• Facebook: Yeah I use Facebook too.

• Camera/Photos: I don’t use a photo management app, though I should. I have like 5 GB of pictures to manage. Note that Camera is on the left center of the screen, where I can reach the app as soon as possible with just one hand.

• Chrome: Technically all the browsers on the iOS store perform about the same because they all share the same web rendering engine underneath. This is mandated by the App Store. The main benefit of having Google Chrome is that it is synced with your Google account. I don’t sync mine, because I would rather Google not know everything about me, but also because I am lazy. I use this in lieu of the Google Search App, which I find slow and plodding and prone to crashes.

• iCatcher!: Stupid name, but great podcasting app. There are a lot of choices for podcast managing. I tried Overcast app but I preferred an app that did everything on board the phone itself. This was the first one that popped up on the screen and I have not found something better since.

Lower Bar

• Outlook: It is a bit buggy on iOS9, which I am running. However it is the best and fastest email client period. It also manages your calendar events too, which is super cool. I could not believe that there is an app out there works better than the official Gmail app, but this one is it.

• Messages: This is the app that I use the most. It has the most friends connected to it, including a few I would not be able to reach otherwise and a number of family. Messages is also synced to my desktop Messages client, so that I can chat while I am at work. This is super helpful for procrastination. I always have wondered how big iMessage is as a service. Apple does not break out numbers and it is definitely not as big as Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger, but it is probably huge.

• TweetBot: This one costs $4.99 to download, but I love it. Unlike the standard Twitter client, it has a dark mode and does not feature ads. I use Twitter a lot as a source of information and interesting things to share with friends so it is important that I have a good client too. This one is the best and I have tried a whole lot of them.

• Safari: Standard web browser. Nothing special. I search for stuff on it.

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Page two is where the first folder shows up, and the one thing that about my folders is that they go deep. It is worth bringing up a few notable apps within the folders.

• Money: The app that I use the most within this one is Mint to manage my money and finances. It also holds a bunch of credit card apps for all the credit cards that I am in debt to - AmEx, BoA, Citi, and Chase. Sigh.

• Calendar: I don’t actually use the app. I just look at the day on the icon. I manage my calendar with Outlook (see above), but for the most part, my day does not really have a lot of pre-defined events.

• Check the Weather: Pretty useless in perpetually sunny California. I exclusively use this to determine whether or not I should wear shorts or jeans to work that day.

• Yelp: I don’t really like to use Yelp but my friend Jenny yells at me to do so whenever we decide that we want to go eat dinner but we have no idea where to go. I put it on a front page outside of a folder because I was wasting too much time finding the app so that I can go find someplace to eat.

• Utilities: The notable thing here are the 4 apps that I use to back up photos: Flickr, Amazon Photos, OneDrive, and Google Photos. They all automatically work in the background to upload your photos to the cloud. Amazon Photos is the only one that actually uploads your photos in full resolution, with a Prime subscription. Yeah, I really do open up all four after a long day so that they can get to uploading photos online. Call me OCD.

• Settings: The one thing that I love to do with settings is check my battery life to see how long my phone has been up. Pretty cool to see that it’s gone 14 hours on standby and still got 30% left.

• Twitter: I own Twitter shares so as part of due diligence I figured that it would be worth using the true app rather than the Tweetbot client. I didn’t realize just how many ads that you get on the standard client and just how featureless the iOS client is. It is a pain to share a tweet to your friends too. Can’t email it easily. I still own shares because I believe they are undervalued (hur hur), but I am nervous about it in the long term.

• Caltrain: No clue if this is the most popular app about Caltrain, though I see it on a bunch of commuters’ phones too. I like that it has this double rotary changing method that you can use to match up two end points and find the trains that take you there.

• MESSENGERING ROW (SnapChat, Line, Telegram, and Messenger): Each one of these apps exist here on my row because they are tied to a particular 1-2 friends who use them. I use Line to talk to the friends I made in Taiwan, Telegram to talk to one particular friend in Singapore (no one else I talk to uses this app), and Messenger to talk to rando acquaintances that I need to make plans with. I use SnapChat to send funny pictures to my sister.

• Enlight: This is the most expensive app that I have on my phone. It costs $4.99. I love it, it is the best photo filter and manipulation app that I have ever come across and I come across a whole bunch of them. You can export a pic to Instagram too.

• Apps I am trying out: Whenever the App Store downloads an app, it sticks it here at the end. I leave it there for a bit as I try its functionality and decide then whether I want to keep it (organizing as I wish) or deleting it. Bento is a food delivery app that my coworker Lisa wants me to try. Medium is for reading iOS programming articles that I have come across. That being said, I have no idea how to search for new content within the app. Poor UI.

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Page 3 is where I have the junk stuff. Rando apps that I need to tap on fairly frequently (1-2 times every couple days).

• HeadSpace and Buddhify: My friend Jenny introduced me to HeadSpace as part of our meditation efforts and I came across Buddhify on a BusinessInsider article. I listen to these when my mind feels turbulent and I need to slow things down. Not all the time, but I like having them out here on the front page so that I can look at them and remember the lessons.

• Facebook Ads: This is for work. I manage Facebook ads. I need to do them on my iPhone sometimes. I use this. The other interesting thing about this app is that it is written entirely in React Native. I have been dabbling about with React Native a bit recently - coming across a few bugs here and there - but so far seeing an app like this written completely in the framework is amazing.

• Entertainment (Netflix, HBO Go, CrunchyRoll, MTV, and Amazon Instant Video): I don’t watch TV often on my phone - it is just too cumbersome. This is why these apps are buried all the way in the back.

• Shopping (Amazon, Lyft, Apple Store, AirBnB, Groupon, and AliExpress): I do a lot of shopping but most of it is on Amazon and lately, AliExpress. Aliexpress is the consumer facing side of Alibaba, so you get to buy stuff from Chinese merchants at rock bottom prices. I heard Wish is really good too, but I haven’t tried that in a while. I bought some sunglasses from AliExpress, waited like 3 weeks for them, but paid just $4.62 for some decent glasses. Not bad!!!

• Uber: If only they could securitize the income stream from my Uber rides and sell it to investors …

• Ideas: This app supposedly uses keywords from the App Store to help you figure out a good idea for developing an iOS app but I haven’t had the time to really put it to the test yet. Soon …

Wow this post turned out quite long. I didn’t expect that to be honest but I enjoyed reading through the apps and thinking about how I use them and how much having a phone changes your life. I like to reminisce with my coworkers about life in high school before phones came about and all you did was just play cards on the floor. What days …