To be blunt, it’s just a brick.

As smartphones become more a necessity and less a luxury in our day-to-day lives, it’s important to take a step back and consider how we got there. Is it the simplicity of navigating the world thanks to Google Maps? Is it the convenience of having email right at our fingertips? Is it the ease with which we can communicate with family and friends through calling, texting, and various social networks?

The answer is, has been, and will always be, apps. Even the most basic of functions on your smartphone—phone, messaging, calendar—are apps, though you might not think of them that way. We at Quixey like to define apps broadly—as simple tools that add functionality to a platform.

With that definition in mind, consider the way you call people on a smartphone. The call feature appears as an icon on every home screen, but you don’t think twice about its similarity to other apps because it’s the most fundamental aspect of your phone. However, just because you have a default calling app, doesn’t mean that it’s the only, or even the best one available.

So what you think of as the “phone” in your smartphone isn’t glued to your home screen. You can download a number of calling apps, like Viper, to replace it. Similarly, you can select from a number of alternative messaging apps, like biteSMS, to swap for your default texting app. What your device offers is a clean slate for you to customize. It’s up to you to pick apps that maximize functionality.

The different apps you download, from games to organization tools, in some sense serve the same purpose—they’re add-ons that breathe life into your smartphone.  So taking a good hard look at the way your apps are arranged is valuable—which ones do you let just sit there, because they came with the phone? How can you swap out certain apps to make your phone better? The app ecosystem has exploded over the past few years following the success of Apple’s App Store (which hit 25 billion downloads earlier in 2012), proving that there won’t be a shortage of unique apps to choose from anytime soon.

In some ways, a home screen is the ultimate form of expression. When you use a device all day, every day, you project everything about yourself onto its interface. Some smartphones are littered with games and gimmick apps. Some have all apps neatly organized into folders. Everyone’s home screen is unique, and that’s because we all value certain apps differently depending on the way we access them on a daily basis.

A smartphone without apps isn’t a smartphone at all. Take away the nearly-limitless potential of added functionality on each of our iOS, Android, or Windows devices, and we might as well be carrying around dusty old rotary phones. That’s why we at Quixey care so much about enabling the user to find apps that do exactly what they want. If they’re the key to transforming your smartphone from a brick into an invaluable do-it-all device, then we want to make sure you can do just that with as little effort as possible. So take a good look at your smartphone’s home screen and imagine how it would look if it was just blank.

We know, we cringed too.