The Home Screen Audit: We Lived With 124 Apps for a Year and Let 19 Stay

There's a version of this piece where we pretend '124apps' is a coincidence. It isn't. When we started this site we had a working spreadsheet of 124 apps spread across four phones — two iPhones, two Android handsets, one of them a cheap Motorola bought specifically to see how budget hardware copes with modern app bloat. A year later, after testing, deleting, reinstalling and deleting again, the spreadsheet is down to 19 permanent entries. The rest were redundant, intrusive, or simply not worth the storage.

This is the audit. Not a 'best apps of 2026' roundup — you can find those anywhere — but an honest account of what survived real UK life: payday, rail disruption, bin day, a smart meter that sulks, and a GP surgery that now only takes appointments through an app.

How we decided what counted as useful

Four tests, applied without much sentiment.

1. Does it do one job faster than the alternative? The alternative is usually a website, and quite often the website wins.
2. Does it work when the signal is rubbish? Train wifi, basement kitchens, rural bus stops.
3. Does it ask for things it doesn't need? Contacts, permanent location access, notifications for marketing dressed up as 'updates'.
4. Would we notice if it vanished tomorrow?

Anything failing two of those got cut at the quarterly review. Harsh, but a home screen is the most competitive property in Britain.

What earned a permanent place

One current account app. Singular. Ours happens to be Starling, but Monzo or Revolut's UK offering would do the same job. What mattered was the instant notification when a direct debit leaves the account, and the ability to freeze a card from the top deck of a bus. The second bank app we'd been keeping 'just in case' went straight in the bin, because two banking apps means two sets of security prompts and one set of confused thumbs.

LNER, paired with a split-ticketing site. Trainline is fine until you clock the booking fee on a journey you could book direct. LNER's app sells tickets for other operators too, adds no fee, and keeps the digital Railcard in the same place. Combined with a split-ticketing tool, our average Advance fare on a Leeds–London run dropped by about a tenner a trip. That's the sort of result that keeps an app on the home screen.

The NHS App. Not because it's beautiful — it really isn't — but because it has become the front door to repeat prescriptions, appointment history and, in our area, GP messaging that actually gets answered. The GOV.UK One Login step is a faff the first time; after that, fingerprint login makes it a ten-second job.

One council app for bins. Ours is gloriously dull: it tells you which coloured bin goes out, pings a reminder the night before, and links to bulky waste collection. No social features, no gamification, no ambitions beyond that. It is the most-used app in our house between November and February.

A parking app, region-dependent. RingGo covered most of our testing, with PayByPhone required for a handful of car parks that hadn't got the memo. Coverage is patchy and the convenience fee stings, but standing in the rain feeding a meter is worse.

The energy supplier's app. Octopus, in our case, mainly for the half-hourly usage graph and for submitting a reading without hunting for a torch. One caveat: this only earns its place if you're on a tariff worth monitoring. On a fixed deal with a supplier whose app is a glorified bill viewer, use the website.

What we deleted, and why

The deletions were more interesting than the keepers.

• Duplicate budgeting apps. Two of them read the same bank feed and told us the same thing in different colours. The bank's own spending insights won.
• Delivery apps. Kept a fortnight, deleted after realising we were paying a markup to avoid a ten-minute walk. A £3.99 delivery fee is a remarkably effective uninstaller.
• A habit tracker with eleven notification types. Gone within a week. It replaced one habit (remembering things) with another (dismissing prompts).
• Loyalty apps that duplicated each other. If a supermarket scheme already lives inside another app you use, the standalone version is dead weight.
• Anything with a three-day trial and a £7.99 monthly wall behind it. We now have a hard rule: no subscriptions discovered by accident.
• A second weather app. Britain has one weather. You do not need four forecasts arguing about it.

What we refused to install at all

This is the section that gets us called joyless, and we'll take it.

• Apps demanding access to your contacts before showing a single screen. No bin collection in the country needs your address book.
• Council apps that want full ID verification to tell you when recycling goes out. The website does it with a postcode.
• 'AI-powered' wrappers around things a search engine handles in one query. Especially the ones charging £5 a month to summarise text you could have skimmed.
• London-only services. Cycle hire schemes, the various minicab apps that don't operate outside the M25, anything whose reviews are all from Zone 1. Our testers are scattered across Leeds, Bristol, Glasgow and a village in Norfolk. If it doesn't work there, it doesn't get a recommendation.

The uncomfortable lesson: downloads don't mean useful

The most-downloaded app in our spreadsheet for three months running was also the one we opened least. Store ratings are inflated by prompts fired at the moment of maximum goodwill, and 'top free' charts reward marketing budgets rather than utility. Meanwhile the council bin app — software with perhaps two reviews and a logo knocked up in PowerPoint — saved us more time than everything in the top ten combined.

So the rule we now use is painfully simple: one job, ten seconds, no nonsense. If an app can't clear that bar, it doesn't get past the lock screen.

Nineteen apps. It'll probably be fifteen by spring. That isn't a failure — that's the entire point.