How many apps do we actually need?

Every time I try to do something new on my phone, from checking supermarket deals to booking an appointment, the same prompt appears: “Download the app.” Most of the time, I resist, and not out of laziness. I have a rule, but I will get to it. First it is worth looking at the numbers, because they tell a more interesting story than expected.

Eighty installed, thirty used

The average smartphone contains more than 80 installed apps. We actually use around 30 of them over a month, and just 11 in a single day, while 62% of what we download sits there gathering dust without ever being opened. There is more: a quarter of apps get opened once after the download and then forgotten. The picture that emerges is a drawer full of objects we decided to keep for no real reason, a bit like the PC of so many people I know, where icons pile up grid after grid.

This gap between what we install and what we use is the heart of the matter. We do not download apps because we need them; we download them because at that precise moment, someone put a button in front of us that was handier than the website.

Where people download the most

The differences between countries are real and fairly sharp. South Korea leads the rankings for installed apps per user, around 40, according to Google’s Our Mobile Planet study. On the front of raw downloads, India is in charge, with roughly 19.1 billion installs over the past twelve months, followed by the United States with 12.6 billion. These are gigantic markets with huge populations, and that explains a lot.

Italy has an imposing mobile user base, with about 41.88 million monthly active smartphone users. The most downloaded apps say a great deal about who we are right now: Iliad, Remini for retouching photos with artificial intelligence, and ChatGPT at the top of the list. We spend many hours a month inside communities and messaging, something I have already written about in my piece on the shifts that reshaped social media.

Two opposite ways of experiencing your phone

Roughly speaking, it seems to me that we split into two families. Some download an app for every gesture of the day, from the water they drink to the sleep they get, and treat the phone as a Swiss Army knife that always needs one more blade. And some keep the device Spartan, with few icons, no notifications, and see each new install as a small intrusion.

That second attitude even has a name and a bibliography. Digital minimalism, popularized by Cal Newport, suggests judging every tool by the real benefits it brings relative to what it steals from attention. The classic practice is the thirty-day declutter: strip out everything optional for a month, then add back only what passes a deliberate test of conscience. People who try it report better sleep, more focus, and a sense of having reclaimed their time. I understand that well, and it is the same instinct that led me to write about why my television is permanently off.

The two profiles often overlap with generations, though less than people assume, and I have reflected on how fragile those age labels can be in my piece on generational differences at work.

The fear of tracking has real grounds

Then there is a third category, the people who do not download out of fear of being followed. Here, I have to be honest, because the data confirms it. NowSecure research across tens of thousands of applications shows that around 75% of iOS apps and 70% of Android ones contain both sensitive data and tracking domains. Out of 378,000 Android apps analyzed, 62% request at least one permission considered dangerous, meaning they can access location, microphone, contacts, or other sensitive phone functions.

The British Which? A survey of more than two thousand adults puts it even more tangibly: 91% rank privacy among their top concerns, yet anyone with the twenty most popular apps on their phone would have granted, all told, something like 882 permissions. It is a figure that lands precisely because none of us ever counted them one by one as we tapped “Allow”.

When suspicion turns into conspiracy

That said, this is where I step away from a certain narrative. One thing is knowing that a weather app sells your location to an ad broker, a documented and irritating fact. Another is telling yourself that every download hands you over to a “system” that watches you to control you. The first is the data economy, as banal and predictable as a flyer in your mailbox. The second is a plot, and it rarely holds up against the facts.

We saw this almost as a laboratory case with contact tracing apps during the pandemic. Studies show that about a quarter of those who refused to install them cited privacy as the main reason, often woven into a general distrust of government rather than a concrete, verified risk. The wariness was understandable, but the target was often wrong: people feared state surveillance while, in the meantime, dozens of commercial apps collected far more without anyone crying conspiracy. Tracking exists, it is almost always for advertising, and it should be curbed with concrete tools, from permissions to system settings, not exorcised like a cabal.

My rule: once a month

I sit in the middle, and I have a simple rule. If I use an app at least once a month, it earns its place, and I keep it. Otherwise, I prefer to go without and do the same thing in the browser when the need arises. Nothing ideological, just attention maintenance, the same logic with which I eye certain software bloated with features, as I wrote about my complicated relationship with Microsoft Teams.

The example I always give is my son’s electronic school register. I check it only from the desktop, when it genuinely matters, and I have refused to install its app. I do not want his grades always in my pocket, ready to interrupt me with a notification halfway through the day. I would rather he keep track of them himself and tell me, and every so often, I peek to make sure. It is a small act of trust, and it frees up space on the phone and in my head.

Maybe that is the point. The right question is not how many apps we can install, but how many truly deserve a spot at our fingertips.

Related sources

• BuildFire, Mobile App Download & Usage Statistics: https://buildfire.com/app-statistics/
• VennApps, Mobile App Download and Usage Statistics 2025: https://www.vennapps.com/blog/mobile-app-download-and-usage-statistics-2025
• AppTweak, App downloads data by country: https://www.apptweak.com/en/reports/app-downloads-by-country
• Statista, The Average Smartphone User Has Installed 26 Apps: https://www.statista.com/chart/1435/top-10-countries-by-app-usage/
• 42matters, Italy Mobile App Market Statistics: https://42matters.com/italy-app-market-statistics
• DataReportal, Digital 2025: Italy: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-italy
• NowSecure, Mobile App Privacy Risks Research (2025): https://www.nowsecure.com/blog/2025/09/29/new-nowsecure-research-targets-mobile-app-privacy-risks-what-you-dont-see-is-hurting-you/
• Which?, How data hungry smartphone apps ask for access: https://www.which.co.uk/policy-and-insight/article/which-investigation-reveals-how-data-hungry-smartphone-apps-ask-for-shocking-levels-of-access-to-your-location-microphone-and-data-aZXTg4E5fiLt
• Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism (overview): https://www.todoist.com/inspiration/cal-newport-digital-minimalism
• Drivers of downloading and reasons for not downloading COVID-19 contact tracing apps: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9286248/