10 Apps Every iPhone User Should Consider Uninstalling

With the storage on iPhone models now going as high as an entire terabyte, it's easier than ever to hoard apps on your phone. The practice of cleaning your phone out of all the unnecessary, or sometimes harmful, baggage has itself become unnecessary with the ever-growing size of an iPhone's storage.

One great way to keep up with any possible apps you really don't need anymore is to go into your iPhone's settings and navigate to General and then iPhone Storage. In that menu, you can view the apps you have installed alongside the last time you used them and how much space it is taking up.

However, there are undisputable benefits to getting rid of apps. Be it an issue with the app itself that could be compromising your data and privacy, or just an oft-unused app leeching away at your battery life, there are plenty of apps on your iPhone that it might be time to take a second glance at.

At the end of June, the third-party Reddit app Apollo closed down for good. As one of the best third-party Reddit apps available on iOS, its shutdown was a serious blow to users that preferred it over the official Reddit app.

The app's shutdown came about after changes to Reddit made changes to its API. The changes, which were likely prompted by similar policies instated at Twitter, would have slapped developers of third-party apps such as Apollo or Android's RedditIsFun with enormous charges to keep the app up and running. Christian Selig, the developer behind Apollo, claimed that the changes would have cost him $20 million annually.

The announcement of the changes sparked a mass protest across the platform, as some of the biggest subreddits blacked out for a day. In spite of the efforts of Reddit's user base, the company didn't change course and Apollo — along with other third-party Reddit clients — has shut down. Any of these apps still sitting in your app library are probably worth deleting.

The iPhone comes with a large number of apps pre-installed on the phone, but not all of them are useful for everyone. Whether it's not having a need for an app's services or preferring a different app that does the same job, some of these apps will never get used. However, That doesn't mean they need to sit in your app library forever.

Apple allows users to uninstall a large number of their default apps which includes specific Apple services such as Music, Podcasts, Find My, and Apple TV. However, users are also able to uninstall some of the most basic apps populating their phone such as Contacts, Calculator, Clock, Notes, and even Files. The list of built-in apps that can't be removed is actually shorter than the list of ones that can be.

Even if you aren't particularly bothered by some of these apps cluttering your app library, it's still advisable to consider getting rid of any of them you're not using. A great deal of the default apps on an iPhone have services that run in the background, which can adversely affect the phone's battery and performance. Deleting unneeded default apps can lead to a faster phone with longer battery life.

Love them or hate them, QR codes have become a normal part of the world today. The little square codes have existed since 1994 and have blown up in popularity due to a double whammy of circumstances. First, the advent of smartphones put a quick and easy way to scan these codes straight into the pockets of most consumers. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic caused many things that may otherwise be physically distributed, such as restaurant menus, to be made accessible digitally with QR codes instead.

In the earlier 2010s, when QR codes were gaining more use by the average consumer, it was normal to have an app dedicated to reading them. Nowadays, iPhones come straight out of the box with the ability to scan QR codes. The functionality is built into the default iOS camera app, so there's no need to have a separate app for scanning QR codes. Whether it's survived a few phone transfers too many, or you just didn't know it was no longer needed, it may be time to part way with any QR code scanners still on your iPhone.

Without a doubt, there are a ton of third-party weather apps on iOS. For a long time, downloading a weather app was a necessity to replace Apple's default option on the iPhone. Nowadays, that no longer holds up. In 2020, Apple bought the weather app Dark Sky which had been a popular choice amongst both Android and iOS users.

Apple's purchase of the app later led to a big upgrade of the Weather app in iOS 15. The independent Dark Sky app remained available to download on iOS until the end of 2022, and with it now gone, the default Weather app is more usable than ever. The best of Dark Sky has been integrated into Apple's Weather, and the app naturally has the best compatibility widget and complication-wise across the iPhone and the Apple Watch.

It's more than a solid choice for basic weather needs, and it doesn't require any payment to access certain features of the app, unlike many weather options that lock features such as a future radar behind a premium paywall. If there's still a third-party weather app on your phone, especially one that requires a subscription, it may be time to see if Apple's Weather app can fulfill your needs.

On its surface, the reasons to reconsider having a flashlight app may seem as simple as the reasons behind reconsidering a QR code scanner. The flashlight app is defunct by iOS itself now, with the ability to toggle the phone's light now not even a part of an app anymore. iPhone users may now turn on their flashlight using a simple button in the iOS control center, complete with varying levels of brightness. This reasoning alone makes it worth getting rid of any flashlight apps on an iPhone.

If that's not enough, there's a much more alarming reason to stop using flashlight apps. Most users are familiar with the idea of an application harvesting data that gets sold to advertisers, but the idea of an app as seemingly innocent as a flashlight selling user data seems farfetched. Unfortunately, the idea is all too real. The apps themselves also request a frankly obscene amount of permissions for an app that ultimately just toggles an LED on the back of a phone. Between the functionality the iPhone itself provides for flashlight needs and the privacy concerns with using a dedicated app, it's more than worth considering deleting any flashlight app.

It isn't all that uncommon to need to scan a document into a computer or phone for any number of reasons. Be it for the sake of having a digital backup or for the instantaneous delivery of a signed document, scanning documents can be a huge convenience for any number of reasons. However, not everyone has easy access to a printer for scanning documents.

As with many other things, smartphones have eased the document scanning process. As with many simple but useful functions, there is an absolute trove of apps that allow you to scan documents into your files on iOS. While some of these apps do have some unique functionality, such as sending faxes, there's very little need to actually have one. In what's possibly one of the most underappreciated and underrated iPhone features, the Notes app allows users to scan documents and create PDF files of them. With a flat surface and steady hands — or a stand — users can easily generate great-quality scans of any given document. 

While the results aren't always perfect, it's definitely worth ditching a dedicated app for if you don't have a need for some of the specialized features that come with it.

There are plenty of controversies and issues surrounding Meta, but that doesn't stop their apps — including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads — from having a commanding presence on the top charts of the iOS app store. All of the aforementioned apps sit within the top 50 free apps on iOS, but it may still be worthwhile to consider uninstalling any of these apps.

Earlier this year, a former data scientist from Meta alleged that the company is using Facebook to mess with your phone in what's known as "negative testing." Essentially, these allegations state that Meta can drain the battery on your iPhone. Moreover, if you care about how secure your messenger app is, then it'd be best to drop Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, which do not offer end-to-end encryption.

What could be more concerning is Meta's dubious track record of caring for the mental health of its users. Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, which came off the back of a whistleblower revealing the adverse effects Instagram has on the mental health of teenagers. What made this particularly egregious wasn't just the negative mental health effects but that Meta knew and chose not to act on that information in any meaningful way.

Perhaps most famous in the pantheon of negatives in the Meta family is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when users' Facebook data was handed over to third parties like Cambridge Analytica. The whole issue recently resulted in a $725 million settlement that Facebook users can consider filling submitting their claim for part of the settlement. While considering that, it may also be time to consider ditching any given Meta app on your phone.

Elon Musk took over Twitter in late 2022 and — for better or worse — there have been a lot of changes to the platform since then. Changes started with verification badges being available to all users via a Twitter Blue subscription, although those badges can now be hidden, and have worked all the way up to the app completely being renamed to X. Within those changes have also been much more controversial issues, such as the rate limits that were placed at the start of July. Between all of these issues, many have looked for alternatives to Twitter that are free of many of the ongoing changes on Musk's Twitter.

There are frankly a ton of these alternatives, but the most popular include Mastodon, Hive, Bluesky, and Meta's Threads. If you have installed and continue to enjoy any one of these apps, then absolutely keep them. However, the likelihood is you may be waiting for a Bluesky invite or may be part of the engagement drop Threads has seen since launch. If you just aren't using these apps, then it's almost definitely worthwhile to uninstall any of these apps.

VPN usage has seen a steady increase in recent users, and recent research found 52% of a sample surveyed used a VPN on iOS. Users are commonly met with ads for VPNs across social media that tout the privacy and security benefits of using a VPN. However, your VPN app may be worth a second glance.

While there are plenty of great options for VPN apps on iPhone, you may not even need one on your phone to begin with. A VPN might not be as safe as you believe, and while there can be benefits, a VPN still leaves users open to any number of social engineering attacks. Most users probably don't need to be using a VPN at all. Unless your use case involves specific circumstances where the added security is necessary, or you really need to browse a geo-locked app, it may be time to uninstall (and stop paying for) your VPN.

In 2022 Apple began pulling abandoned apps from the iOS app store. An abandoned app is an application that has received little-to-no developer attention or downloads within a certain timeframe. Once this timeframe has elapsed, the app is removed from the app store but remains on the phones of any users that have the app installed on their phone or any other iOS device. While some of these apps can be simple games or tools that don't need consistent updating and haven't received much attention in a while, some of these could be apps you simply aren't using.

Even if the app hasn't been removed due to a lack of support, it could still be worth looking into whether or not one of your favorite apps has had an update recently. With a quick visit to the app store, any given app's page will include when the last update rolled out. If you have an app that hasn't been touched in multiple years and definitely needs a touchup, it may be time to look for a replacement or just ditch it altogether.