[coldtea]

>My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind the privacy considerations.

This is a common misconception (also concerning desktop OS "bloat").

As long as those apps are not running at the same time and competing for CPU resources, they could have 100000 apps installed and no issue at all.

Especially with sandboxing and automated resource management in iOS (probably Android too, but not too familiar with it).

[endemic]

Hmm, not necessarily. Unless the user is careful, it's possible that many of those apps would request data in the background, etc., which would result in performance issues.