Paul Jacobson

Is the iPad Pro, the "everything" device?

Remove Facebook from your phone at your peril

I recently decided to remove Facebook from my phone. I made the decision after finding myself opening the app and frequently being pretty underwhelmed by the updates Facebook insisted on notifying me about.

Although I was tempted to delete the app altogether, I decided to remove the app from my home screen instead. This means I’d need to find it in my app drawer to open it.

The immediate benefit was that I didn’t find myself opening the app because I was bored and then wondered why I bothered. The downside had been that the main utility Facebook has for me has been buried: I’ve started missing birthdays!

Yup, probably the most valuable part of Facebook to me is the birthday calendar and not checking the app obsessively means I have started missing birthdays. I can’t seem to work out how to sync birthday calendars with my phone yet (I think I know how to do it) so I’ve been reliant on the app to remind me.

Aside from that, my decision to remove Facebook from my phone has been worthwhile so far. I don’t open the app out of mindless habit. I don’t have that regret when I do and I have replaced Facebook’s spot on my home screen with Feedly instead.

Much better use of that attention-grabbing spot.

If you’ve been dissatisfied with your Facebook experience lately and you’re tempted to remove it from your mobile device, just consider the loss of the features like the birthday calendar and decide if it’s worth it.

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Comments

6 responses to “Remove Facebook from your phone at your peril”

  1. (((Toni G))) avatar
    (((Toni G)))

    It’s the first thing I disable on any phone.

    Reply
  2. nuclearpengy avatar
    nuclearpengy

    Welcome to the dark side. 🙂

    Reply
    1. Paul avatar
      Paul

      It may as well be. Removing the app icon from the home screen is probably analogous to a site being on the second or third page of Google search results: easy to forget that it’s there at all.

      Reply
  3. Mladen avatar
    Mladen

    I never install it any more. If I want to see what’s happening I open it in the web browser. Now if I could just quit twitter…

    Reply
    1. Paul avatar
      Paul

      Twitter is still pretty useful to me and I don’t have that many notifications so it doesn’t bother me much. Facebook is really persistent when it comes to notifications.

      Reply
      1. Paul avatar
        Paul

        Likewise. I use Twitter for news updates quite a lot. Besides, I don’t receive nearly as many notifications in Twitter and, when I do, they are usually because someone is talking to me or something useful has popped up. I spent a bit of time really customising my Twitter notifications, though.

        Reply

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