App-ocalypse

There are over 500,000 applications for the iPhone and iPad, 300,000+ on Android and thousands more on other platforms. The average user has 65 apps installed on their phone (source: Flurry). Many of us have more.
Entire businesses have been built to solve the problem of ?app discovery? ? that is, a way to supplement the limited app search mechanisms built into the vendors? own application stores. This is primarily to benefit mobile app developers, who can?t get their apps found. The end results of these products are pitched to consumers as tools to ?find new, cool apps,? ?find apps your friends like,? or ?find the best apps that do X.?
While these efforts are appreciated by app developers and end users alike, they don?t solve what is increasingly becoming a real problem: finding the apps you already have installed on your phone.

Before sourcing factual data from mobile analytics firm Flurry as to the average number of apps users have installed on their devices, I did some informal polling on Facebook and Twitter. I asked my friends and followers how many apps they currently have on their phones. The answers were surprising. Although there were a few outliers ? the person who only had 10, for example, and a couple of others who have upwards of 300, most people fell within the 40-100 app range. More often than not, they had closer to 50 or 60. Again, this is anecdotal data, but speaks to trends within the tech community. It?s interesting that this non-scientific polling shows that early adopters have roughly the same number of apps, on average, as all smartphone users worldwide ? around 65.
But how many apps do people actually use? According to Flurry, the average consumer uses only 15 apps per week. That means that the majority of the apps installed on the phone are for occasional use. The games you play while killing time, the tip calculator or bill splitter you only pull out when dining with friends, the calorie counter for that diet you began in January (and again June), th