The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increasing number of connected devices have propelled the proliferation of offered applications, causing “applications exploding.” In the context of IoT, filtering and selecting the most relevant applications in a given situation is a challenging task. Thus, developing techniques that can alleviate applications exploding and meet users’ requirements is highly demanded for IoT development. This survey focuses on applications exploding in the IoT and reviews some of the existing techniques, such as intelligent sensing, content distribution network, microservices, and 5G, which help mitigate the effects of applications exploding. Furthermore, the survey discusses how to describe user requirements and offer application services to better match the two. In addition, this survey presents the smart home as an instance of typical IoT applications and explores how adaptive users’ requirements for food ordering can be better met when various food provider applications are available for choice. Finally, partially resolved and unresolved bottlenecks brought by applications exploding are put forward to be further researched by the technical and scientific community.