An Appy Start
I typically spring-clean at the start of each year, including a technological culling of permissions and operations, which often turns into a cursory look at the year past. This January was no different. Here is a list of hopes, thwarted dreams, optimism, and unfulfilled potential, in the form of selected applications on my phone.
I love to talk, and I love Whatsapp. I love what it represents: the ability to converse with those I’ve been separated from, either privately, in long, internet-enabled video calls. Or in groups, recreating the raucous laughter once synonymous with large gatherings through chaotically echoed ‘HA HA HAs’ in response to the most mundane observations. I credit many a long-distance friendship to it, maintained through the delayed replaying of voice messages recorded across time zones, the ability to relive the temporal excitement of a moment as it happens across the world. Imagine my heartbreak, then, when I opened Whatsapp the other day to a pop-up informing me that continued use of the service was contingent upon data sharing with Zuckerberg & co. It’s not that we cannot orchestrate a mass, coordinated migration to another messaging service. It’s the slight fracturing of reality, the knowledge that wherever we go, the rug might be pulled out from us again, and again, and again, our conversations drifting from platform to platform as we find ourselves unable to settle.
Money Manager
The ten months from March to December 2020 was the longest I’d ignored this app, ever since I started religiously tracking my expenses at eighteen. Information, for me, was control: knowing how much money I had, what returns I was getting on my time, where my money was going, what patterns it belied. It served me well, all the way till order was upended globally. After we entered a period of mass uncertainty, the systems of belief I’d held seemed to make a fool of me: so what if I had all this information. Look at where I was; I couldn’t know my way out of chaos. Enter a period of freefall. But we don’t live in a binary world, the opposite of successfully weathering a storm doesn’t mean living permanently with my head under the sand. 2021 didn’t immediately herald change, not on day one, not even on day two. But on the fourth day of the new year, I retrieved the app, dusted it off, and typed: damned cold Asahi, ten ninety-nine.
GPay
A litany of missed opportunities. Google Pay debuted mid-2020 in Singapore, offering lucky scratchcards and generous cashbacks for peer-to-peer Venmo-style transactions or in-store payments. Out of a mix of inertia, skepticism, and too-good-to-be-true-itis, I didn’t download it till the first of January this year, when the rate of rewards drastically plunged with the revised terms and conditions that come with any calendar renewal. To date, I’ve earned seven dollars and one cent. My friend has earned five hundred.
Trace Together
A rather contentious app in Singapore, this pandemically triggered government creation works to facilitate contact tracing by exchanging Bluetooth handshakes with other devices within a 10m range. It’s used in tandem with SafeEntry, a compulsory QR system that requires you to check-in wherever you go, and has prompted discussions on citizen privacy, especially with regards to how this data will be accessed and used. Although the Trace Together app is technically optional, without it, you can’t enter workplaces, religious venues, shopping malls, movie theaters, and other popular locations, narrowing the scope of your movements. Freedom is still available, just not unconditionally. When I open the app, a cartoon rendering of multi-racial individuals throwing their hands up in celebration greets me. You’re okay, the app says. You have had no possible exposures to COVID-19 cases in the past 14 days.
Google Maps
Where have I been in the last year? What roads have I traversed? How long would it have taken for me to commute towards each small reunion with an outdated sense of normality? Once upon a time, I flipped to Google Maps instinctively throughout the day, mapping out tiny futures, planning around traffic, factoring in detours and dallying. Now, my thumb hovers over the uninstall button, tempted yet unwilling to sever the tenuous connection to an alternate, geographically exciting life.
Huji
The breakout app of 2018, I was one of the 16 million people worldwide who downloaded the faux disposable cam app, designed by a Korean company to reproduce the Pentax-style pictures of our childhood. In a world of hyper-curation and image control, Huji introduced just a smidge of unpredictability — a light leak here, a blur of color there — while maintaining a consistent veneer of aesthetic nostalgia. That year, I snapped and snapped, amused by the ease with which life today could be filtered into that of the decade past. The stakes of the present were so low, it felt like nothing to let it go. But in 2020, I opened Huji less than ten times. So much has changed, and along with it, I realize, I don’t want to live like it’s 1998.
ReopenCU
An exercise in wishful thinking.
Access Dots
After Netflix’s Social Dilemma, a surge in paranoia over my tech-related privacy led me to unironically download a whole host of apps meant to increase my device security. Access Dots, created by a couple of developers in India, exists purely to alert you when your camera or microphone is being accessed, by flashing a green or orange dot in the top right corner of your screen. Besides leading to a small spike in my heart rate whenever a dot winks at me (usually during a call or when I swipe open my camera to take a picture), I can safely say that my life has remained exactly the same since downloading the app.
Libby, by Overdrive
Possibly the one truly great app on my phone, Libby is an e-reader platform that allows you to link multiple library cards to your account, granting you access to digital libraries around the world. For the book-lover, the app is comforting, it is enriching, it is fun, it is free. Even getting in line for a book is an affirmative process — yes, there’s none of that immediate gratification our modern world prizes, but there’s something else. Proof that people are reading; that there are precisely fourteen people waiting for the same title; that, although a solitary activity, reading is not a lonely art. Besides, the app promises, just hang in there. Your turn will come.
