Keep it simple: smartphone world is full of failures that didn't follow that maxim Samsung believes you can't have too much of a 'good' thing while the iPhone succeeded because it made things simple

iPhone 5C: Apple supplanted rivals like Symbian by showing how to offer a simpler user interface. Photograph: Glenn Chapman/AFP/Getty Images

There's no knowing where as a child you'll learn the lessons that you retain into later life. When much younger, I devoured the science fiction stories of Larry Niven, who described worlds with flash mobs, instantaneous matter transfer, faster-than-light hyperdrives and aliens with which we could share a language and atmosphere.

Still, he was right about flash mobs. But one of his short stories – The Soft Weapon – taught me a valuable lesson about user interface design. It concerns two rival spacefaring crews who discover an ancient alien artefact that can be turned into all sorts of things: a gun, a laser, a matter disintegrator, a universal translator. One of the groups, a pirate crew which has taken the other (nice) ones hostage, decides it's obviously an ancient soldier's weapon, for use on the battlefield. But one of the other group realises that no soldier would want such a device. "You'd get stomped while you were trying to figure out which setting to use," he concludes. (The story's conclusion rests on who would want such a device. I won't spoil it.)

Niven's insight – that overcomplicating a device is a bad thing – is one lost on some companies and lots of geeks who think that we're all fighting the "specification wars", where any bigger number trumps a smaller one (unless you're timing something). Add in another app! And another menu too! Is that a kitchen sink?

Nokia's downfall came about because its Symbian smartphone software was awash with redundancy and complexity. There were screens that offered three ways to do the same thing. The iPhone supplanted it because it made things simpler – not because it suddenly made it possible to do more (it didn't).

The arrival of Android, which allows manufacturers to "skin" the base operating system, has had some dire effects. While pure Android (found on the Nexus range) suffers only from a Microsoft-like tendency to descend into jargon in the settings, Samsung has decided that you can't have too much of a good, or indeed bad, thing. Thus its phones offer features like air gesture, air command, smart stay, smart scroll – and that's just for reading. (They drove me mad in testing. I turned them off.) For the camera, you get choices including drama, eraser, dual shot, sound and shot, animated photo and story album. And while you're choosing between them, the moment you wanted to photograph is gone – just like the soldier in The Soft Weapon.

I'm wary of the tendency to stuff more and more consumer devices with features to make them "better". Japanese hi-fi companies suffered from this syndrome in the 70s and 80s and ceded the premium ground to companies like Bang & Olufsen which succeeded through minimalism. The Japanese led to a race to the bottom, with no improvement in usefulness.

The kitchen-sink approach appeals to our desire to have more stuffbut complexity carries a cost, in attention if nothing else. We might not fly faster than light, or zap matter – but even if we do, we'll still need simplicity.