To install or not to install?

Or how many apps can you install on an iPhone?

There are thousands of applications for the iPhone, with many users having installed literally over one hundred of them. But can we install that much? Is it allowed? Can we install 200 or 300 apps or more?

No software limits

The answer is quite simple. In fact, there are no software limits on the number of applications that can be installed on your iPhone. In other words, iOS, which is an operating system running on your shiny iPhone, does not care how many apps you have installed.

Apple gets a sizable percentage of the profit from app sales. That means that the company is interested in selling as many applications as possible, and it is not in their interest to place a limit on how much money you can pay them.

The only software limit on installing apps to the iPhone relates to models prior to the iPhone 3GS. Their firmware is not updated any more, and since many apps require iOS 4 or iOS5 firmware, the number of apps available for old iPhones is not really growing.

Hardware limitations

The only limitation on the number of apps that you can encounter is a hardware-related one. In human language, that means that that you can install as many apps as the amount of memory you have available will allow.

In other words, with a 32 GB iPhone, you can install twice as many apps as you can with a 16 GB model. Although, it depends on what kind of applications, you install, as their sizes can be quite different, ranging from hundreds of kilobytes to hundreds of megabytes.

Check the free space

Checking how much space you have left on your iPhone is a no-brainer. Just plug it into your computer and launch iTunes to find out how much of that memory can be used for new cool applications that you want.