iDiseases

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.