4 Popular Android Apps NOT to Install

All the rage these days is the fad of installing a dedicated app on your mobile computing device for one’s most used online applications. One reason for the popularity of this activity is that many of these apps are absolutely free. Over time one may find that their screen has become over populated with icons. My question to you, dear reader, is this: why bother? It is so much easier, as the Eagles might opine, in the long run, to simply make favorites of those type of apps. Instead of eroding the finite memory allocations that are meted out to mobile. Worse still is the fact that these dedicated apps may often function like the toolbars that I heartily advise avoiding on your desktop. They may direct you to the vendors of products that pay the price to corral you, the customer, to their services. Until the poor computer crashes under the weight of competing tool bars from all over the place.

Facebook

Facebook is nursing a modest 3.6 star rating at ‘press time’ on the Google Play Store. That doesn’t sound too bad. But well over one million users rated it a paltry 1 star. That doesn’t count frustrated users like me that didn’t bother to add a review. I downloaded it onto my Android tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich. It never really worked well and I was relieved after I deleted it. The pro version didn’t seem to do anything either. Facebook is a great thing. But it doesn’t mean that you need a separate app to use it. Conclusion: save your 13.63MB or so for other stuff.

Twitter

Twitter is pretty cool. Though out of the over 702,000 downloads 89,000+ took the trouble to give it a one star review. The 5.9MB it requires is not overly demanding. But it is misleading according to one reviewer. Who in giving it a 3 star rating claimed it jumped to using 12MB after installing it. Even the users that gave it good reviews seemed to have one peeve or another. Several reviewers had qualms with its notification features. Others, though giving it 3 or 4 stars, said that the Twitter Android app had other issues. Like the lack of ability to update one’s profile. Conclusion: Stick with the online version.

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail is another example of what you really don’t need on your menu, short cuts that eventually lead to the wrong fork in the road. The information highway is already overly cluttered with advertising. I love my Yahoo! Mail and 3MB is fairly lean for a mobile app. But I soon realized that it was a mistake to install this app on my Android tablet. The problem that I have experienced with Yahoo overall is that they really want to sell you stuff. Conclusion: apps that want to run in the background, to feed you notifications, like this one, spell less battery life per charge.

The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel always seems to be the provider that I choose when I need to know the weather. So it’s natural to download and install the dedicated Android version, right? Wrong! Remember the theme of this post. Just make it a favorite and save yourself the 4.1MB. While they do seem to have the best weather report, users comments often cited faulty radar updates. They are the biggest provider in this category with the most commercials. Do you really want to inject all of that entrenched advertising into your smart phone or tablet?