May 3, 2016

Update: On empty content apps

Two weeks after deleting all apps with streams from my iPhone, I’m extremely happy with the decision.

Tweetbot and Reeder have been by far the most difficult to live without. I’d go as far as to say I had an addiction to checking these two apps whenever I had an idle moment — and sometimes not so idle either.

I’ve dealt with the withdrawal by limiting these two apps to the Mac and iPad. To my surprise, two things happened:

  1. I didn’t miss any breaking news: checking less through the day didn’t make any nugget of gold fall through the cracks.
  2. I opened both apps less on the Mac/iPad: somehow the above reinforced that I was missing anything, my instant checking anxiety went down — maybe a carbs analogy would be appropriate.

Not cured, but taking my medicine

I eventually plan to have both apps installed again when I feel I have control. In the meantime, today 4 apps were installed 1 (3 old and 1 new):

  • The Economist Espresso: One by product this last two weeks was that I started reading print magazines again. I devoured an Economist last weekend — like the good old days. Since the whole magazine every week is a bit overkill, give the app a try.

  • NYT Now: I missed it, and the content the good kind of colesterol.

  • Morning Reader: it’s an excellent review of what’s happening in tech, and was I opening it a lot on the browser either way.

  • Linky: I’m reading more, so I have more to share! or so I tell myself. It’s a content producing app — although it’s more crap I’m dumping in the stream… so sue me.

Let’s see what happens in two weeks.


  1. Mostly because Instapaper was getting boring since I started to get to old articles.↩︎


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