5 iPhone apps you no longer need
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For many, the home screen of the iPhone is quickly overloaded. There are simply too many apps on the small screen. TECHNOLOGY BUTTON has five tips on which of them you can safely delete.
With the new app library, iOS now makes it easy to keep the home screen tidy. Still, there are good reasons to uninstall unnecessary apps. They consume memory and can compromise your privacy. You don’t often think about that, but apps like QR code or document scanners often want to have access to microphones in addition to access to the camera. In this way, you may reveal more data than necessary. Especially when an integrated service can simply take over this function.
Also read: Thousands of iPhones must be destroyed every month
1. Get rid of flashlight apps
Flashlight apps come from a time when many functions were not yet fully thought out. As the first Apple smartphone, the iPhone 4 from 2013 with iOS 7 had a built-in flash. Apple integrated the matching flashlight function in iOS right away – without an app. However, this was only very static: either on or off. With additional apps from the App Store, however, you could even set how bright the small LED should shine. Today iOS is much more mature and can do this without any additional apps. Just open the control center and press and hold the flashlight icon. With the slider that appears, you can set the brightness in several stages. An extra app is no longer required.
2. QR code scanner in the iPhone camera
QR codes can now be found almost everywhere. You can find them glued to street lights, in restaurants as a digital menu or for automatic connection to WiFi networks. They usually consist of many small black squares arranged in a square. But other shapes are possible – such as circles or conventional barcodes.
Since iOS 11, the iPhone recognizes QR codes automatically. Simply hold the camera on it and the system shows the link that is hidden in it. An additional app that requires access to camera, location, storage and more is no longer necessary.
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3. Notes instead of documents scanner app
There are numerous apps in the App Store that promise to make a real flatbed scanner superfluous. Smartphone cameras are not quite that good yet, but the documents photographed in this way are useful if you only need them to remember or study for university, for example. This is only possible in iOS with the Notes app without any additions from the App Store. When creating a new note, all you have to do is click on the camera symbol and the option “Scan document” appears.
The iPhone automatically detects the outline of the paper and crops the image accordingly. The image is automatically straightened and contrast and brightness adjusted so that it is easy to read. iOS even recognizes the text in the picture, so you can search for certain words in it or copy the content. Then you can scan more documents or complete the process. The notes app recognizes the recordings created in this way as scanned documents. If you save them on the iPhone, iOS automatically converts them to PDF files.
4. Built-in screen time control for parental control
Of course, when you have kids, you don’t want them to be on your iPhone all the time. That is why there are numerous apps in the App Store that are used for parental control. This allows time limits and password locks to be set for certain types of apps or individual apps – such as games. However, the free apps in particular often spy on children’s behavior. Because some access to the system is necessary to define restrictions. If you give it to the app, it can diligently collect data.
To prevent this from happening, iOS has had a built-in screen time control since version 12. This can be found in the settings and gives parents numerous options for setting app limits for their children. And to protect them from data-hungry apps.
Also interesting: How to share your WiFi password via iPhone
5. Remove bloatware
At this point there is no single app to be mentioned. But there are also many things preinstalled on iPhones that a large number of users do not need. For example, do you have Spotify? Then you don’t need Apple Music on the home screen. The same applies to Apple Books, stocks, and the Apple Office apps Keynote, Numbers and Pages.
There are a total of 26 apps that are pre-installed but not absolutely necessary. The full list of uninstallable apps is on the Apple support page . You can safely delete these candidates like any other app, saving some memory. If you do need them, the apps are always available for download from the App Store.