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Big Mac · May 1, 2009, 04:14 AM

I'm really wondering why Apple is so resistant to the concept of providing folder organization for the SpringBoard (the home screen on the iPhone/iTouch). It's absurd to not have any way to categorize apps aside from manually sorting page after page of apps. Apple's own commercials show iPhones with many pages of apps. Is Apple not aware that such an arrangement is less than optimal? I'm not even talking about hierarchical folders, which we've had on the Mac OS since the Mac Plus. Perhaps if the original Mac came out today instead of 1984, there wouldn't be any Finder folders on it either.

This should be a no-brainer, right?

JKT · May 1, 2009, 04:24 AM

I would imagine it is down to trade-offs imposed by the hardware - it is probably to restrict people from using too much RAM for their app management, would be my guess. Technically it isn't difficult to add the feature, but to make sure it always works and works well within the confines of the piddly amount of RAM they have available to them and must leave available to everything else? Even if they did add folders, there would probably still be severe restrictions on how many you could have and how many apps you could put in them.

Maflynn · May 1, 2009, 07:06 AM

I consider myself an average user of the iPhone, I don't have a ton of apps, I have a few screen panels nothing over the top. With that perspective, I have little to know need to have folders to organize my iPhone's applications

Furthermore, the people I know, who have an iPhone also tend not to need or want any such mechanism.

I just don't the cost in complexity, resource usage and work effort justify the benefit

Big Mac · May 7, 2009, 09:48 AM

Originally Posted by JKT

I would imagine it is down to trade-offs imposed by the hardware - it is probably to restrict people from using too much RAM for their app management, would be my guess.

I don't think folders would require any additional RAM. It would just be an addition to the FS, right? I guess Apple just doesn't want to provide the option.

ajprice · May 7, 2009, 11:36 AM

There's a jailbreak app that makes folders on the system, so it is possible. I don't have JB on my iPhone anymore, but it was ok at the time to have things in folders, one for games, readers etc. and saved a lot of screen switching. For me, folders or a drag and drop icon organiser in iTunes is an either/or thing. As it is, you start off trying to keep a screen for games and a screen for something else etc, but as you download more stuff it all gets messed up with bits and pieces everywhere.

JKT · May 7, 2009, 01:29 PM

All those icons have to be loaded into RAM and the Springboard development team have probably been told that they can only ever use a maximum of x KB or MB no matter what. Perhaps they just haven't been able to implement a folder system that works within the constraints that have been imposed on them. By the way, the actual act of managing your apps (wobbling and dragging them around) is going to need RAM too - adding folders into the mix could increase the demand. Anyway, this is pure speculation on my part. It could just as easily be Apple being obtuse as anything else...

Rumor · May 8, 2009, 03:50 AM

I would rather see an icon management area in iTunes than folders. Currently, the biggest pain is trying to organize every app one by one, through each screen. A drag and drop method without having to do it on the iPhone would be ideal, IMO.

jasong · May 10, 2009, 06:18 PM

I doubt the lack of folders has anything to do with available RAM. Showing a folder would take up no more RAM than an icon, and drilling down into a folder would again be no more RAM intensive than switching screens. They just don't want to do it for whatever reason. I'm in the camp of not really needing the feature, and I never used the categories on my old Palm either, but some kind of app management will need to happen eventually.

JKT · May 11, 2009, 05:09 AM

It isn't showing a folder that I am suggesting would need more RAM, but having e.g. 50 folders on your iPhone each containing 9 pages of apps would. If my supposition is correct, the folders would have the same restrictions on how many apps they could contain in total as the current springboard so what would be the point of adding them?

Undoubtedly some form of app management will need to happen and I hope it is soon - I'm just having to restore my iPhone right now* and if and when I get it back to the state it was previously in, I'm going to have to reorganise all my apps again.

* I am damned annoyed at Apple for it - when synching with my PowerBook (rather than my iMac which is my main machine) wiped out most of my third party apps on the Phone and the back up prior to the synch didn't work so I can't restore it to the previous state prior to the cock-up. Grrrrr...