What are your favourite 5 apps on your phone?
These are the five apps that get the biggest workout on my phone: Kindle, AntennaPod, Australian Newspapers, BBC Sport and YT Music.
Looking at the list, I realise they have something in common. They are not primarily endless feeds engineered to keep me there. They all take me somewhere beyond the phone.
I converted to electronic books about twelve years ago, and Kindle has been indispensable ever since. I love the slightly ridiculous thought that I can carry an entire library around in my pocket. Wherever I am, I can open a book, read, or look something up because it has come up in conversation.
AntennaPod gets used every day. I listen to podcasts while walking, travelling or doing other things. What I enjoy most is the possibility of surprise: a story I have never heard, an idea I had never considered, a person whose experience opens a window into a world I know very little about.
Australian Newspapers keeps me connected with what is happening around me and further afield. BBC Sport does much the same for sport. I am a football tragic, and despite living on the other side of the world, I can follow games, clubs and competitions as they happen.
Then there is YT Music. My tastes are fairly eclectic, so having an enormous catalogue of music available wherever I happen to be still feels a little miraculous. Music accompanies walks, drives, work and those moments when I simply want something playing in the background.
A generation ago, all of this would have required a bookshelf, a newspaper stand, a radio, a television, a sports desk and a record collection. Now it fits in my pocket.
But portability is not really what joins these apps together. The best apps for me are the ones that help me stay mentally connected to a larger world. They are ways of asking, What is happening beyond the immediate boundaries of my own life?
Kindle makes me curious about books and ideas. AntennaPod about people and possibilities. Newspapers about the world. BBC Sport about the drama of competition. YT Music about sound and beauty.
The common denominator is curiosity. They make me interested in something beyond it. Books. Ideas. People. Events. Sport. Music.
That is increasingly what I want from technology. I don’t want a device that endlessly draws attention back to itself. I want tools that point beyond themselves, that occasionally surprise me, teach me something, remind me of something, or make the world a little larger.
The Afterword 
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