I know that I have had iOCD for
a while now. It was tough at first, but I gradually learned to live with it. It
was becoming easier each day to handle this ailment, when suddenly I realized I
have come down with appOCD.
appOCD is of two kinds.
1. alphappOCD, a milder, not so rare, variety that inflicts a lot
of smartphone users, but is too mild to bring about significant changes in
lifestyles. This form of appOCD is caused by exposure to/knowledge of new apps
being created for iOS and the desire to try them out on one's smartphone.
People suffering from this disease download umpteen apps from the Apple Store
and then spend umpteen hours trying these apps out and attempting to convince
themselves that the app they are fiddling with right now is absolutely
necessary for their lives to continue normally.
2. ultrappOCD, the more rare and intense form of this disease that
I am suffering from. This disease is brought about by an aggravated form of the
alpha version combined with the desire to keep an app once it has been
downloaded, coupled with the need to organize these apps in a single screen on
the phone to maximize accessibility and minimize clutter.
Suffering from ultrappOCD is not fun. I have to habitually perform
a whole series of actions daily which add nothing of value to my day or my
life, and for the time invested in these rituals, I detest myself every night.
1. Every morning, after I wake up, I have to read several
different Tech news and Tech gadget sites and skim through several hundred tweets
to find the coolest new apps that have sprung up while I was sleeping.
2. Once I have my list of apps for the day, I now have to go to
the App store and find and download these apps. Some days there are no new apps
to download. These are the worst days because I have to now perform this action
several times a day in the hope that a new app will show up for me to download.
Some days the amount of money spent in procuring apps is more than the total
expense on food for that day.
3. I then have to organize these downloaded apps on my phone into
one screen so that I can remember where the app is, and how I can access it.
Initially, I was just downloading the apps, without any attempt at classifying
and categorizing them. But when my phone became about 15 screens wide, finding
any app became increasingly hard. So I had to resort to categorization of apps.
I tried several different classification and grouping approaches until I
settled down on a process that works for me. Till iOS7 came along, keeping all
the apps on one screen was impossible even with the most efficient
classification schema because only a dozen apps were allowed per category. with
iOS7, this constraint has been relaxed and that has made my disease much more
bearable. So now I can have unlimited number of apps in 16 app groups, which is
the maximum number of groups that I can fit into one screen.
4. I have to make sure that the app groups are named correctly and
consistently - with a one-word noun in sentence case identifying the need for
that group of apps, e.g., Productivity, or Movies.
5. then I have to check how much physical memory I still have on
the phone, and if need be, delete something else to make room for the apps. On
the worst possible days, I either have to delete songs from my iTunes playlist
to make way for the new apps which is not good for my iOCD, or have to delete
some older apps, which is not good for my ultrappOCD.
6. I have to now try out these apps to gain some proficiency in
using them and assessing their merits and demerits.
7. Based on my experience with using each app, I have to now go
and review them or critique them and rate them.
8. Finally, I have to write a summary of every new app with its
merits and demerits in a journal of reviewed apps using a document-writing app.
With smartphones becoming more and more prevalent and affordable,
I forecast that not so far in the future we will have a whole set of idiseases,
and a brand new area of medicine will be created in response. There will be
iDoctors armed with iMD and iMBBS degrees, with a plethora of iMedicines at
their disposal treating iDiseases at iClinics and iHospitals. And my name will
be often mentioned in those iesteemed circles with reverence as the first
person to contract an idisease named appOCD.
