Proposal: An Ephemera API for iOS
I just broke & repurchased my iPhone. I wasn’t on Wifi when I set up the new one, so I decided to bypass the restore from iCloud procedure vs. wait 3 hours to redownload all of my apps. I love this kind of clean slate in general, but this time something clicked for me about why I was enjoying it so much: none of my existing apps were there, so I didn’t have any of the baggage. Of course, I went to the purchased section of the App Store and redownloaded the stuff I use in my day to day.
- Foursquare
- Superproof (built from Xcode)
- Drop7
- Words with Friends
- Pivotal Tracker
- Reeder
- Spotify
In the next couple of days, I downloaded a couple more as needed.
- Prompt
- Yelp
- iBooks
- ArcLight Cinemas (easy access booking for movies)
But yeah, this is basically 2 pages of apps. It’s amazing. I don’t even really use folders at this point, and everything feels clean and brand new. Surely, this will get more cloudy as I download new things to try out, etc. But it made me realize a couple of things about the way I use Apps.
- Like many people, I download more apps than I actually end up using
- Some apps I use very infrequently, and 95% of the time I don’t want them on my Phone
- It’s difficult to manage which Apps get synced and which don’t.
These are all more or less related problems, but one subset of that last problem more vexing… There are lots of Apps I’ve downloaded which have actually become obsolete and I never want to use them again. I shouldn’t have to manually manage these apps - things like Sports apps good for a race like the Tour De France, or a season like MLB or the ESPN Fantasy Football App. This leads me to propose a Ephemera API (a Kill Switch, to put it another way) for the iOS SDK. The main purpose of this API is as simple: To allow application builders the option to programmatically remove an app from an iPhone (& iCloud). Tour De France is over? Kill it. Remove it from my Phone & don’t throw it back when I sync again. I can think of other uses as well: games like 1 Single Life would have more impact. Die once, remove the app from the phone.
This feels like an interesting option to me, something that Apple would never implement but nonetheless would solve some specific problems related to syncing, and provide an innovation vector for apps that want to impose a very specific life span.
