We summarized five of the biggest reasons to download iOS 10 today, but as BuzzFeed reminded us, there’s another big one we left out: You can finally, at long last, delete the stock Apple apps you don’t care about.
Don’t have an Apple Watch? Delete the Watch app. Do you find the concept of vibrating air waves insulting? Be gone, Music app. Are you trained in the art of celestial navigation? You don’t need no stinkin’ Compass.
The process is the same as removing any other app – long-press an app until it jiggles, then tap the ‘x.’ Here are the 23 apps you can remove from your home screen:
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Compass
- Contacts
- FaceTime
- Find My Friends
- Home
- iBooks
- iCloud Drive
- iTunes Store
- Maps
- Music
- News
- Notes
- Podcasts
- Reminders
- Stocks
- Tips
- Videos
- Voice Memos
- Watch
- Weather
Really, that just reminded me how many apps are pre-loaded onto our devices that we’ll never use.
Still, it’s worth noting that this is really more of an aesthetic choice than a space-saving one; Apple says the above 23 apps only take up about 150 MB all together.
It’s also worth noting a few caveats. Straight from Apple:
- If you remove Contacts, all of your contact information will remain in the Phone app.
- If you remove the FaceTime app, you can still make and receive FaceTime calls in Contacts and the Phone app.
- If you remove the iBooks, Maps, Music, or Podcast apps, they won’t be available to use with CarPlay.
- If you try to remove the Watch app from an iPhone that’s paired with an Apple Watch, an alert asks you to unpair your Apple Watch before you can remove the app.
That said, sometimes you don’t realize what you had until its gone. You can restore removed apps by looking them up in the App Store and downloading them like any other program.
Cheers to Apple for finally doing the sensible thing after 10 major iterations of iOS.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.