Earlier this morning, Bijan Sabet, a venture capitalist, tweeted out a screenshot of his 13-year-old daughter’s iPhone home screen:
Its color-coded arrangement is striking, as is the prominence given to Instagram. But it is even more notable for what is missing: the phone app. The only thing that looks like it can communicate voice is Facetime, secreted away in the “green” folder.
Sabet’s daughter is probably not unusual—the era of teens spending hours gabbing on the phone are long over. As Danah Boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (pdf) points out in her book, “Parents in previous generations fretted about the hours teens whiled away hanging out or chatting on the phone. Today’s teens aren’t spending hours on landlines, but they are still conversing—updating others on social network sites, posting pictures and videos, and sending text messages to friends.”
Also missing: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Spotify, Whatsapp, Twitter. Make of that what you will.
By way of comparison, these are the most popular homescreen apps, according to homescreen.is, a service that gathers data on what apps are on people’s home screens.