I deleted 5 default iPhone apps and saved gigabytes of space

One of the smaller reasons some people enjoy iPhones is the lack of bloatware. You’re probably familiar with the idea, but if you’re not, that refers to pre-installed apps that are either useless to most people or an active annoyance. People most often complain about this with Samsung phones or Windows 11. Recently, in fact, the backlash to Microsoft’s attempt to jam AI into everything became so intense that it was forced into a rare retreat.

iPhones aren’t immune to accusations of bloat. Some people consider Apple Intelligence pointless in its pre-Gemini incarnation, for instance. I actually keep it installed, but there are still a number of apps I’m comfortable deleting on any new iPhone without a second thought. You might do the same if you’re trying to maximize the space on a 128 or 256GB device.

Stocks

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

I realize that for some of you, Stocks may actually be one of the most important apps on your phone. Even if you’re not a wealthy executive or investor, you might have retirement income riding on the success of a mutual fund or stock grants.

Most people don’t have any stocks to speak of, however, since they’re either just scratching by, or have their retirement plans resting on something else. Heck, if you do own a stock portfolio, you may be reasonable enough to know that outside of a crisis, there’s rarely a need to be able to check prices anytime, anywhere. Investment is best played as a long game. And if you do need to check your investments every day, it’s not hard at all to use web tools.

I realize that there are some advantages to using a native app, such as trend data, lockscreen widgets, and Apple Watch complications. But as Lewis Black once put it when talking about stock tickers on news channels, all the Stocks app usually does is remind that “someone’s getting rich, but it ain’t you.” I might’ve deleted an expletive in there.

Freeform

Just who does Apple think the average user is?

Credit: Apple

Conceptually, I actually like Freeform. The idea is that it enables free-flowing brainstorming sessions or mood boards, which you can pepper with photos, text, drawings, diagrams, web links, and even PDF files. You can collaborate with up to 100 people across iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Vision Pros, jumping into Messages or FaceTime conversations as necessary.

The first problem is that for its intended purposes, you probably already have something that’s better, or enforced by your employer. For a mood board, you might use Pinterest, or simply one of the many notetaking apps that are available, like Apple’s own Notes. In the working world, brainstorming is often achieved though company-wide apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Freeform is also exclusive to Apple devices. While that might not matter if you’re using it by yourself and you’re a diehard Apple fan, many people are in multi-platform households or workplaces. I know if I were in charge of an office, I’d be hesitant to tie critical functions to something that wouldn’t let Bob from Editorial contribute from his home devices, or let me switch the company to whatever ecosystem is the most cost-effective.

Freeform is also far from ideal on something as small as a smartphone, at least until the iPhone Fold makes its debut. There’s not much screen space for viewing boards, much less trying to sketch. The iPhone port seems to exist for the sake of completeness.

Image Playground

A weak version of better AI tools

Messing around with Image Playground is admittedly fun if you’re new to iPhones, or generative AI more broadly. It still blows my mind, sometimes, that you can type in a sentence in plain English and have an app come up with an image that’s never been seen before — albeit riffing on art previously created by humans.

That novelty wears off pretty fast. There’s a relatively narrow set of included art styles to choose from if you don’t include the ChatGPT filters, and if you do use them, you might as well use ChatGPT’s own app for most image generation tasks. Apple’s own pipeline seems to be overly conservative, refusing to produce anything that could be in any way be edgy or copyright infringing.

So why would you use Image Playground? The only practical purpose I’ve found is creating avatars for Apple accounts. It’s pretty simple to import photos and have the app apply a creative twist on them. If that doesn’t sound like it has any value, you might as well make Playground the first app you delete.

Journal

Another brick in the wall(ed garden)

Apple likes to promote the Journal app as a convenient way to record memories and improve your mental health, using content that’s already at hand from the company’s other apps and services, such as Photos, News, Music, Maps, and Fitness. The mental health angle is so strong that the app is filed under the App Store’s Health and Fitness category, and it prompts you with ideas related to concepts like “gratitude” and “purpose.”

Journaling can indeed be helpful for some people, even if I don’t do it myself. My biggest objection, however, is one shared with Freeform — the Apple ecosystem. Journal is not only restricted to Apple devices (or iCloud), but actively discourages you from taking your journaling elsewhere. You’ll lose access to all that convenient content insertion, no matter whether you can print or export your entries.

If you are going to start a journal, it just makes sense to use an app you know you can take from one device to another for the rest of your life. Along those lines, the best “app” is probably a paper notebook. That’s a more meditative experience with fewer distractions.

Apple News

Not bad, just redundant

Credit: Apple / Pocket-lint

A common complaint you’ll find online is that the “mainstream media” isn’t covering story X or Y, or that if it is, it’s deliberately omitting vital info. There are gaps in mainstream coverage to be sure, but often you can find what you’re looking for if you expand the number of sources you’re browsing. Apple News is potentially helpful in that arena, since you can mix national and local publications, as well as ones for niche industries and hobbies.

I have a couple of issues with the app, beginning with the fact that it’s not much use without a News+ subscription. Without one, you get a very limited selection of curated articles, often scattershot if it’s not local news. If you really want to be informed, you can probably get all you need for free out of apps like AP News, Reuters, or (gasp) whatever’s most popular in your area.

On the content front, Apple News is simultaneously too mainstream and missing major outlets. By too mainstream, I mean that many of the included options wouldn’t be out of place on a ’90s newsstand, and cater to a very narrow definition of culture — there’s Rolling Stone, for example, but not Pitchfork. At the same time, access to publications like the Washington Post, New York Times, or The Guardian is either limited or non-existent, since those companies can make more money by not splitting revenue with Apple. I’d only bother with News+ if you’re already paying for an Apple One subscription.