Your iPhone and iPad probably have dozens or hundreds of apps on them – but some are best deleted. Including an app from Apple itself! s
You must uninstall these apps
Did you know that the average iPhone user has about 80 to 90 apps on their iPhone? That sounds like a lot, but it’s not surprising when you consider that it already has 43 apps installed by default when you take it out of the box. Yet there are many apps that are better off without getting rid of them. For example, because they get in the way, are unnecessary, or simply take up extra space. You better delete these apps!
1. Preview
Let’s start with an app from Apple itself: Preview. This has been installed as standard on your iPhone and iPad since last year. With the app you can open and edit all kinds of files, such as PDFs, photos and videos. That sounds useful – but the app has a downside. Preview takes over all kinds of file types from the Files app without being asked. When you tap a file in Files, it no longer simply opens in Files, but your iPhone or iPad automatically opens Preview. This makes something as simple as swiping through photos suddenly impossible. Very annoying – but easily solved by removing Preview from your iPhone!
2. Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator
Do you still have your two-factor authentication codes in the Google or Microsoft Authenticator app? That could be better. Apple also offers this functionality with the Passwords app. Your codes are protected with Face ID or Touch ID, and they are also filled in automatically in Safari when a website requests them. So our advice is to dive into your old Authenticator app, look up which accounts you have connected to it, and go through all of those accounts and save them to Passwords instead. This ultimately saves you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend retyping codes. And if you need another reason, the codes also sync directly to your other Apple devices, like your Mac!
3. Google Photos
Another Google app that in many cases it is better to remove: Google Photos. The app has a built-in function that synchronizes all photos from your library with Google’s server – and the funny thing is that you often activate that function without realizing it. Not only does this drain battery life, but it also takes up a lot of storage on your Google account, and your photos end up on a server that you may not even trust. Deleting the app is the quickest solution – diving into the app and disabling backups via your profile photo at the top right is a less drastic option.
4. Social media
It is no news to anyone that social media is quite addictive. But even with that knowledge, most people still keep apps like Instagram, TikTok and Reddit on their phones – resulting in some doom scrolling. What makes a big difference is if you don’t have those apps on your phone. You can still access it via your browser, but that works a little less pleasant – and you need more taps to get there. This makes it a lot less addictive. Plus, it frees up some storage on your iPhone!
5. Unused apps
Of all those dozens or perhaps hundreds of apps you have on your iPhone or iPad, you only use a small part regularly. So it’s not a bad idea to dive into Settings to clear unused apps. To do this, go to ‘Settings>General>iPhone Storage/iPad Storage’ and sort the apps by ‘Last Used Date’. At the very bottom you will find the apps that you have not used for a long time. Then it’s a matter of dragging the app to the left and choosing ‘Delete’.
And all those built-in apps?
With 43 pre-installed apps, you might think it would be useful to uninstall some of them. Think of apps like Tips, Shares and Freeform, which many users ignore. But in the end you don’t gain much from that: you cannot delete the underlying ‘libraries’ of these apps, i.e. the files on which the apps rely. So they always take up space – even if you ‘delete’ them. In that respect, you gain a lot more by removing third-party apps, or Apple apps that are not baked into iOS or iPadOS. For example, the latter includes Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iMovie and GarageBand.