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Apple, Let Us Delete Apps for Good
Adam C. Engst
Begin mea culpa!
Move along, there's not much to read here, because I failed to find how
Apple designed this functionality. You cannot 'delete' apps from your
account, but you can hide them, and unhide them later if you wish.
Hiding an app removes it from your Purchased list. As far as I can
tell, the best way to hide an app is in iTunes: Click iTunes Store,
then click the Purchased link in the Quick Links box on the right.
Click Apps at the top, mouse over an app icon, and click the X button
that appears in the upper left corner. To unhide an app, you must click
your email address in the upper right corner to load your iTunes
account, scroll down to iTunes in the Cloud, click View Hidden
Purchases, click Apps, and then click the appropriate Unhide button.
Although an Apple [1]support article claims you can hide apps in iOS
too, swiping left and right on items in the Purchased list did nothing
in iOS 6.0.1; in iOS 5 it works. Unhiding purchases in iOS 6 does work:
in your account, available from the bottom of the Featured screen,
there's a Hidden Purchases button under iTunes in the Cloud. To address
my final complaint, the Purchased list in iTunes can be sorted, as can
the Purchased list on an iPad; only the iPhone and iPod touch can't
sort the list.]
[2][tn_Hide-apps-iTunes.jpg]
End mea culpa. Read further only if you'd like to see how someone who
spends a lot of time on this stuff can still be unaware of deeply
hidden functionality. I could complain about how a better and more
discoverable interface would be to enable app hiding from the Apps
screen in iTunes, and how it's very odd that this doesn't work in iOS
6, but the fact is, the article asks for a feature that does exist.
__________________________________________________________________
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I recently set up my iPhone 5 from scratch (see '[3]Solving iOS 6
Battery Drain Problems,' 28 September 2012), and one of the things I
lost was my app selection and home screen organization. This was no
great hardship, mostly because I have long been overwhelmed by the
number of iOS apps I have on my devices, to the point where I mostly
use Spotlight to launch anything but apps on my Dock and first two home
screen pages. This is, I believe, evidence that Apple's Springboard
home screen concept needs to be scrapped and replaced with something
that both scales to accommodate large numbers of apps and enables
information-centric screens that let you avoid launching an app just to
see some data. Whether Apple will ever do this, it's impossible to say.
But what Apple could do ' and should do ' is give us full control over
our apps. You can, of course, choose which apps appear on any given iOS
device, and delete apps that you don't want. You can even, if you sync
via iTunes instead of iCloud, delete them from your Mac.
To delete an app on an iOS device, tap and hold on any app icon, until
the apps all start to jiggle, and then tap the X button on any
non-default app to delete it. In iTunes, click Apps in the Library
section of the sidebar. Then select an app, press Delete, confirm that
you want to delete the app, and in the second dialog, click Move to
Trash. (As an aside, if you use a relatively small SSD or are generally
low on disk space, look in your Mobile Applications folder '
Control-click any app in iTunes and choose Show in Finder ' and you can
manually delete old versions of apps that are still sticking around. I
cleared over 7 GB of unnecessary files that way.)
[4][tn_Delete-app.jpg]
[5][tn_Move-to-trash.jpg]
Deleting apps in these ways are somewhat fussy procedures, though, and
should you ever set an iOS device up from scratch, you will have to
look through all your apps to determine which you want. If you're
syncing with iTunes, that may not be too bad, but if you're downloading
from the Purchased list in the App Store app, it's going to take time
to sort through everything. That's because, no matter what, you cannot
delete an app from your Purchased list.
This has been an annoyance for me, and for writers like me who test a
great number of apps, for some years. For instance, back when iOS was
inadvisedly caching iTunes Store authentications for 15 minutes, thus
enabling accidental in-app purchases by kids, I downloaded a free app
with in-app purchases called Fishies to test the scenario. I don't even
remember what Fishies does any more, and I certainly don't want it for
anything. But no matter how hard I try to eradicate it, Fishies
stubbornly sticks around. The same is true of an untold number of other
apps ' after the release of Passbook in iOS 6, I quickly downloaded the
United app, the Target app, the Starbucks app, and the Valpak app, just
so I could see what the Passbook experience was like (the Valpak app is
the best for getting coupons into Passbook, seeing how they work, and
deleting them with Passbook's excellent shredder animation). Of these,
only the United app is likely to be of any use to me going forward, but
I'm stuck with the rest until the end of time.
I haven't raised this issue previously because I figured I was an
outlier due to my position as a technology writer. But I think the
greater world has now caught up with people like me. Nielsen reported
earlier this year that iPhone users have an average of 41 apps. That's
an average, and with the massive number of iPhone users out there, that
says to me that there are millions of people who have as many apps as I
do or more. And a commenter on another article said that he has trouble
in iOS 6, because the App Store app crashes whenever he tries to load
his 3000-app Purchased list ' I thought my 360 apps was a lot! Clearly,
it's just too easy to download free and inexpensive apps.
That's not even the entire story. 21 percent of iOS apps are launched
only a single time, and only 35 percent are launched 11 or more times,
according to the app analytics firm [6]Localytics. (That 35 percent is
actually pretty good; only 23 percent of Android apps are launched 11
or more times, and in general app retention improved from 2010 to
2011.) Still, assuming that it's safe to say that an app that isn't
launched at least 11 times has basically been ignored, nearly
two-thirds of all iOS apps are sitting unused, cluttering our devices
and our accounts.
So Apple, give us control over our purchases, and let us eradicate
those apps from our accounts. Just because we pick up a newspaper on
the way to work doesn't mean we have to keep it for the rest of our
lives, and apps shouldn't be any different. Downloading or purchasing
an app is an extremely lightweight action, which isn't bad, but such
simple actions should be easily reversed as well.
Oh, and in the process, please provide the capability to sort the list
of purchased apps in the App Store app by name as well as by purchase
date? It's damnably difficult to find anything in that massive
scrolling list if it isn't among the most recent apps.
References
1. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4919
2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-11/Hide-apps-iTunes.png
3. http://tidbits.com/article/13303
4. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-11/Delete-app.png
5. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-11/Move-to-trash.png
6. http://www.localytics.com/blog/2012/app-user-loyalty-increasing-ios-beats-android/