A side effect of iOS’s folders

When Apple released iOS 4.0, one of the new features I was most happy about was the introduction of folders. At the time, I had 9 or 10 screens of applications on my iPhone 3G, and constantly flicking through them to get to a certain app was starting to feel severely counter-intuitive and unnecessarily tiring. The ability to organise my apps in folders was quite welcome, and the implementation of the feature rather ingenious, typical of certain UI solutions from Apple. 

Now I have only 5 screens of apps, and everything’s tidier, although in recent times I have also noticed a trend in my application usage which is a sort of a flip side of this useful feature: I tend to ‘forget’ and use less all the apps stored in folders. 

I know, it’s strange — especially because I’m very picky when it comes to buying an iPhone app. I can count on the fingers of one hand the apps I tried on the spur of the moment, without knowing anything about them other than a description and a couple of screenshots. I can safely say that I’ve always had a strict policy regarding which apps to install on my iPhone, always deleting those I didn’t find much useful or that I ended up not using after a while.

But the other day, browsing my iPhone during a coffee break, I opened the News folder, and realised that two apps I previously checked on a daily basis — AP Mobile and NPR News — had been lying there for a long while, practically forgotten. I also realised I’d forgotten putting the Engadget app there. Same thing happened for other two folders. 

This is just a brief observation, and I have no ‘solution’ to offer. I’m still a bit baffled by what has been happening, and what I’ve decided to do for the moment is to take some of those neglected apps out of their folders, to let them regain some prominence. I guess it’s time for another iOS spring cleaning though. Maybe next week, when I’ll have my new iPhone 4.