1. Facebook
Although Facebook is one of today's most popular social media apps, being that it was the blueprint for many other apps, it can also be a huge contributor to your smartphone running slowly. Therefore, if you're not using it, you should consider deleting it, especially if you want a faster phone.
"Facebook loads a lot in the background, refreshing and syncing your data, caching videos, tracking your location, and preloading content," explains tech pro Steven Athwal. "It does all this for the user experience, but this all adds up. The cached videos alone grow into multiple gigabytes if you let them. Facebook's background activity is just eating into your storage, RAM, and CPU resources, so you don't need to be using it for it to be a storage hog."
2. Retail Apps
Every now and then, it's nice to have an app for your favorite retail or clothing stores to catch up on certain deals or get through the online shopping process a tiny bit faster. However, if you're not using it all the time and your phone is beginning to run slowly, you should ditch these apps and stick to shopping in your browser or in person.
"Retail apps store images, browsing history, and cached product data," adds tech expert Abu Sufyan. "If you only shop occasionally, using the mobile website instead will save storage and reduce background tracking."
3. TikTok
The famous video-sharing app is already buzzing for its new Terms of Service, and if that's sketching you out or your iPhone has been running super slowly these days, it might be time to delete it. Like Facebook, TikTok has become a notorious app for taking up space and slowing down your phone.
"TikTok also aggressively caches video content so they can prevent load times and give a more enjoyable experience to its users," notes Athwal. "But, this builds up fast without you noticing, slowly eating into your storage. TikTok also runs frequent background processes for features like notifications, content ranking, and location."
4. Unused Games
When you first get your iPhone, it can be really tempting to take up a lot of that initial free storage by downloading some new and exciting games. Unless you're able to spend hours of each day playing iPhone games, then there's a good chance that a lot of those apps go unused.
"Mobile games are some of the biggest storage hogs, especially those with frequent updates and downloadable content," says Sufyan. "If you haven't opened a game in weeks, it's quietly wasting space and resources."