It’s difficult to remember a time when you first brought your shiny new iPhone home and proceeded to excitedly download any (and every) app that your heart desired. All of the social media apps, from Facebook to Snapchat — check. Any app with GPS that could make travel easier — check. News apps to keep on top of current event — the more the merrier. The possibilities were endless and the world of apps was your oyster.
And then came the side effects of having, using, and running too many apps: inevitable battery decline and a whole lot of storage space eaten away. If you’re sick and tired of getting that “full storage” pop-up or your phone can’t seem to hold a charge for very long any more, focusing a critical eye on the apps that you have downloaded may be your best solution. Donald Lewis, senior developer at Indivisible Game, helps pinpoint the one app you should delete immediately for better battery life and more storage space.
Facebook — maybe
There’s a really good chance that the Facebook app is the cause (or one of the causes) of your storage space woes and battery decline. But here’s the deal: it could be Facebook — if you use the app a lot. It may also be one of several other intensive apps that you’ve downloaded. And that’s where it becomes important to take a good look at your device and app usage.
“There is no one definitive answer to this question since different apps will affect different devices in different ways,” Lewis confirmed. “However, some general advice can be given about how deleting apps can help speed up and improve the battery life of an iPhone.”
First of all, Lewis says, any app that is constantly running in the background can slow down an iPhone and eat into its battery life. “This is because these apps are using up resources even when they’re not being actively used,” he said. “Deleting these apps can free up these resources and improve the performance and battery life of your device. Another thing to keep in mind is that some apps are simply more resource-intensive than others. Games, for example, can be notoriously heavy on an iPhone’s resources and can slow it down significantly. Deleting games or other high-resource apps can help speed up your device.” (For the record, yes, Facebook and Snapchat are resource-intensive, as are map apps like Google Maps, so if you have more than one or more navigation apps downloaded for convenience, you may want to consider keeping only your favorite).
Once you get a handle on which apps are the most taxing on your phone’s battery, the next best thing you can do is delete, delete, delete.
“In general, then, deleting apps can free up resources and improve the performance and battery life of your iPhone,” Lewis said. “However, it’s important to note that different apps will have different effects on different devices, so it’s important to experiment and find out which apps are causing your device to slow down the most.”
To see which apps are taking up the most space on your iPhone, go to Settings > General > [Device] Storage. Do the same for battery by opening up Settings and going to Battery > Battery usage by app.
