I've noticed that my phone's home screens have become a bit cluttered and figured it's about time to clean it up. So I tried searching online and found tons of recommendations and suggestions, but figured I would ask users here if anyone has any tips for productivity or efficiency, or just something that works for you. Might give me some good ideas to try out, and hopefully can benefit anyone else reading this thread.

Do you have tons of home screens or just one with a ton of folders? Do you use many widgets or not at all? Do you organize apps by how frequently you use them? Or how similar the apps are to each other? By color of the app icon? Or something else entirely?

Seriously, any help/suggestions/ideas would be appreciated.

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.

Ideally an all-in-one app with sync to a Windows or browser app. For paid apps, preferably a one-time purchase rather than subscription. I like organizing and customizing, so user freedom is pretty important too. Bonus points if you've found the app useful for ADHD.

Google Calendar worked pretty well, but now I'm looking to build habits for hobbies and studies, while also keeping up with occasional appointments. I think it'd be much simpler to just have everything under one app.

Web devs: what's up with this trend? For enterprise apps, I get it…single sign-on needs to detect what your email domain is to send you to your identity provider. For consumers, I feel like it's gotta be one of these reasons:

• Users don't know about the tab key being able to move to other fields on a page
• Mobile users don't really have a tab key, despite there being "previous/next field" arrows on the stock iOS keyboard since its inception (Android users, help me out please)
• Users tend to hit Enter after typing in their username, leading to a form submission with a blank password
• Security, maybe? In the past I have sent a link and a password in separate emails or separate communication methods entirely. Are you hashing/salting these separately for better MITM mitigation?

Did your UX team make a decision? Are my password managers forever doomed to need a "keyboard combo" value for every entry from now on?

Non-devs: do you prefer one method over the other? If so, why?

Tildes maintainers: selfishly, thanks for keeping these together :)

I've noticed this changing over the years from my options when interfacing with a website or app going from "yes" or "no", to "yes" or "maybe later". I've tipped over the point from being mildly annoyed by this trend to now being angry about it.

Navigate to my bank's web portal to pay bills, "did you want to try and qualify for this new Visa card?"

Launch and use an app, "leave a rating!"

It's even a part of Windows now. When running through update prompts, setting up a Microsoft account is "yes" or "remind me in 3 days". The answer is no thank you!

I want to be able say no! And don't ask me anymore, ever again! How often should a product be allowed to nag you into doing something you have absolutely no intention of doing? It feels like a situation where the dial on the nags could just keep getting turned up to try and force people into just submitting into whatever it is they're nagging us to do. They'll just keep prompting you over and over until you get fed up and just say yes.

Is this mindset actively being pushed by large companies to take away our ability to say no, and stop asking? Are there rules in place for this kind of thing?

I just got a new phone, and I opted to download all the apps I usually use manually, rather than having them transfer over automatically. It's like a nice cleanup thing that I get to do every couple of years. I feel like I partially should just have a list somewhere of the apps I usually use and was wondering what people would download first (plus if I forgot anything)

For me, this was my process yesterday:
Password manager - Bitwarden - mostly so I can copy/paste my logins for everything
Authentication - Not listing these but ya know
VPN - MozillaVPN - just something for hostels and travelling
Browser - Firefox Beta or Nightly - for downloading my new wallpaper and general use (including Tildes!)
Sleep + Alarm - Sleep as Android
Car things - My car app, EVGo/Electrify America - getting around and things
Rideshare - Uber and Lyft - When I'm in a new city!
Food - Doordash, Grubhub, asian specific food apps - to eat when I'm lazy!
News - Boston Globe, AP News, BBC - Kinda obvious what they're here for
Todo - TickTick - Checklists and all that
Fitness - Fitbit, my smart scale app, and my gym app - general fitness stuff
Language Learning - Duolingo and Lingodeer!
Banking + Investment + Payments + Insurance - not listing these but yeah!
Music + Podcasts - Spotify
Streaming - D+, Netflix, Vudu, Peacock, Max, Movies Anywhere, Dropout, Hulu, Prime Video, Twitch - General Streaming
Books - Kindle and Audible
Messaging and Social Media - Signal, Beeper, Messenger, Discord, Slack, Instagram, etc. - just daily entertainment and connections
Games - Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Nonograms, Don't Starve, Cards of Terra, Bloons, etc.

Bonus Q: I've been thinking of trying to add Obsidian to my general day to day, how? Might ask a question about this later though!

I opened up the Google Earth app on my phone wanting to browse random beautiful and interesting places, but it doesn't seem to have a good way to do it. (Maybe this is a limitation on the mobile app, and the desktop app is better?)

For example, if I try searching for "wetlands", it only shows me a list of maybe 10 places near my current location.

I tried searching the web too, but I mostly get "listicles" like "10 amazing places on Google Earth" but they're practically unreadable with the webpage being covered with ads.

I found Earth View Gallery https://blog.google/products/earth/most-stunning-images-from-google-earth/ and it's nice but it's just a gallery of images with no contextual information (at least when viewing on mobile). It shows me beautiful pictures but no information about where the picture is from... I would have expected it to link to the spot on Google Earth.

Anyway if you happen to have some recommended places for me to check out on Google Earth I'd love to see them! I like:

• wetland-type habitats like marshes, pond systems, mangrove swamps
• beautiful natural scenery in general
• abandoned and/or ancient architecture

But open to any interesting recommendations in general.

Edit: It does seem to be slightly better on desktop. Searching on Google Earth works better, and Earth View Gallery does link to the location on Google Earth. I wish Google Earth had like, a built-in community feature for me to check out other people's public projects.

my old regular app has been dead since it got underwent featurecreep and got bought out by underarmour.

lots of apps now have way too many features.. social this, calorie burning that. i know its probably a good thing for them to branch out but i'm one of those luddites that prefer simple and to-the-point apps with no social features, no account needed, etc.

all i really need from the app is gps distance tracking and a clean interface with some basic readouts for pace and whatnot. having audio readouts for pace every kilometer was a nice feature but ideally the app would be simpler than that.

if all else fails i know i can just fallback on one of those 'full featured' apps like strava but i figured i'd ask here before i got too tied into any particular app (creature of habit)