My honest top five is not the list I would put on a resume. Maps, because I have no internal compass and never have. Notes, which currently holds eleven unfinished podcast ideas and one grocery list from 2019. Spotify, mostly for the same four albums I have been rotating since college like a man who owns exactly one shirt. Messages, which is less an app than a room where my friends happen to live. And a weather app I do not trust but consult obsessively, the way people used to read horoscopes.

Notice what is missing. No social apps, and not because I am enlightened. I looked at my screen time once and had to sit down for a minute. The apps I actually love are the boring utilities that quietly keep me from getting lost, forgetting things, or wearing shorts into a cold snap.

Turns out my favorite apps are just the ones that treat me like a man who needs supervision.