If you’ve ever gotten download happy and stocked up on free apps for your smartphone but then neglected to use any of them after a cursory look, you’re not alone. Experts say we either really, really like our apps (enough to devote an hour a day to them) or lose interest in them very quickly. Sixty-eight percent of us open five or fewer apps a week, and we eventually delete 80 to 90 percent of them. The top app categories: weather, navigation tools, finance, sports, games, Facebook, and Twitter.

Interestingly, only 16 percent of us have ever paid for an app. Might so many free offerings be devaluing the app marketplace, home now to 1 million apps? That’s what newly minted RIM CEO Thorsten Heins implied at a conference recently when trying to convince developers to release their apps through Blackberry’s AppWorld, which doesn’t emphasize free apps so much as Android and iPhone.

Six technology kingpins, RIM included, just inked an agreement to protect personal privacy by adding privacy notices to their apps. (FYI, apps have been a sort of private-information free-for-all.) At the Digital Book World Conference in January, one media researcher told a reporter that our take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward apps is figuring heavily into the development of new, more enticing apps. We have a feeling that the best apps are yet to come.

Image credit: Creative Commons/MSVG@flickr.com