Maintaining and cleaning your iPad or iPhone is something you’ll need to do every once in awhile if you want to keep your device running smoothly. This guide is designed to help you get the most out of your iOS device’s battery life so you won’t need to constantly recharge your smartphone or tablet.
Here are some things you can do.
Cleaning Old iMessages Data
Messages don’t take up a whole lot of space, but some messages, like the verification codes you might receive from logging into Gmail or spam can definitely cause clutter. You’ll want to remove these. To do so, head into your iMessages and hit the Edit button on the top left corner and select the messages you wish to delete. Unfortunately, there’s no way to mass select everything, so if you intend on cleaning up a hand-me-down phone, you’ll have to delete these messages by hand. Be sure you don’t accidentally remove anything you want to keep.
End Multi-tasking Apps
Whenever you run a new application on your iOS device, the previous apps you’ve opened remain open. It can be a real drain on your battery life to have multiple apps running at the same time, so it’s always a good idea to close apps you don’t intend on switching back to. To do so, simply double-tap the home button and the multi-tasking app interface will appear. Just swipe each window upwards to close it.
Background App Refresh
Every app you have running on your iOS device is constantly refreshed to provide you with updates as they come. For example, your Gmail app will refresh to provide you with up-to-date email alerts. You can disable any of the apps that aren’t integral to you by going into the Settings → General → Background App Refresh menu. From here, simply deselect whichever apps you don’t need, such as Spotify or Stocks.
Reduce Motion
The newest iPhones and iPads have slightly animated icons and backgrounds. These take up a very small amount of battery life. If you’re unimpressed by the effect and wish to extend your battery life by just a little, you can disable it by heading into Settings → General → Accessibility and selecting the Reduce Motion option. Tick it on.
Change Facebook Video Settings
Facebook is an incredibly inefficient app that can take up a lot of your phone’s battery life as well as use your cellular data without your knowledge. If you absolutely need Facebook on your phone, head into Facebook and tap the “More” button on the bottom right of the screen. From there, enter into Account Settings and select Videos and Photos. From here, you should set your auto-play to “Wi-Fi Only.” It is automatically set to use your cellular data, which can cost you a lot of money depending on your data plan.
Manage Storage and Save Space
Music, videos, and photographs can take up a lot of space on your phone. This is to be expected. What isn’t expected is how some apps, notably Facebook (once again) can end up using a lot of space on your phone with app data.
Head into Settings → General → Storage & Cloud Usage and select Manage Usage to find out how much space each of your apps is taking up on your phone. In my example, I notice that Snapchat is taking up over 200mb of space. It makes no sense, considering every photo you download disappears in 10 seconds. If you want to purge Snapchat, Facebook, or some other app, simply tap the Delete App button and redownload the app from the App Store for a fresh installation.
