In my experience, the first category of apps to delete are redundant scheduling apps. I once had three different scheduling tools synced to my iPhone and it constantly slowed down my calendar load times. The moment I consolidated to one, those glitches and delays vanished. Second, apps that auto-run social media trackers drain processing power in the background. Lastly, delete duplicate AI-powered toolsmany run local data processing, and I've seen clients' phones heat up just from having multiple versions installed.
Funny story: we were testing out a new mobile build and noticed even when the app was minimized, our gaming data pipeline kept pulling analytics in real-time. Multiplayer games that sustain live servers or push heavy updates can be one of the biggest drains on your iPhone's speed. Social media apps with auto-refresh, like Facebook, also tend to clog memory since they're designed to keep content cycling. My advicedelete or offload those apps you don't truly use daily, because the background activity matters more than most people realize.
I also work with developers regularly on their workflow and the same should be applied to iPhone performance. Facebook, Snapchat and Chrome are three apps I would always suggest people take out. Facebook is scandalous of background activity. The app keeps on syncing data as well as tracking location and making processes that use up battery and processing power even when you are not using it. I have heard of phones that were developed and their speed increased markedly when removed. It is not the case with Snapchat. It is camera first and therefore your hardware is not idle since the camera is always active. The app is also known to store a great deal of cache information which builds up. During debugging of mobile applications, I have experienced the bottleneck arising where camera intensive apps are concerned. Chrome may feature surprise, but it is a hog of resources in comparison with Safari. The Google browser has several background processes and compliments searches of Google services greatly. Safari is built in, which requires less memory and processing. Background processing is seen as the key here. These applications do not shut down completely as you may imagine. They are dynamic, update data, as well as consume system resources. The memory of your iPhone is too small and gets fragmented therefore the system attempts to work harder to perform simple tasks. My advice? Browser Safari, Camera built in natively, Facebook Web When necessary.
As the Director of Product Marketing at Huntress, a cybersecurity company founded by former NSA members, I've got a slightly different take on this — because bad things can happen if you delete a critical app in haste! In particular, you don't want to delete tools that help you defend against hackers and identity theft. The #1 app I'm thinking of, that you should never be in a rush to get rid of, is a password manager app. You definitely don't want to revert back to using easy-to-guess passwords like '123456', or using the same one over and over, or storing passwords in your notes app (that's asking for trouble!).