Walt Mossberg, writing for The Verge:

Over the past few days, I’ve methodically deleted 165 apps from my iPhone, about 54 percent of the 305 apps I had on the phone when I started culling the herd. When I was done, I had significantly decreased the phone’s clutter: I’d gone from 15 home screens to eight, and reclaimed nearly 8GB of free space, about a 24 percent gain in my case.

And:

But this isn’t one of those columns about digital housecleaning or how to free up more space on your iPhone, valuable as those are. It’s easier to save space by offloading most photos, video, and music to the cloud anyway. No, this column is really about the fact that I think the novelty of the app itself has worn off. We’ve reached peak app.

And:

Before going on, I want to make it clear that I am not against apps as a software type. Just the opposite: I believe them crucial to mobile devices. I personally find that, for many targeted tasks, a well-designed app is much better to use on even a large phone than is a mobile web browser, even if both the app and a web page are tapping the same online services.

For instance, I’d use Facebook and Twitter much less on my phone if I had to use them through the browser, partly because they make it easy to open and close referenced web pages right inside their apps, with just a click.

And it’s still possible to create a sensation with a great app that introduces genuinely new experiences — like Pokémon Go with its augmented reality interface. But one reason that Pokémon is so newsworthy is that such blockbuster apps are rarer and rarer.

It’s easier to make a wave in a pond than an ocean, and that’s where we are now. The same is true in the businesses of movie/TV/journalism production. It is harder and harder to make content that stands out in that ocean of content that you’re competing against. That is the nature of any maturing business.