iOS, while not as bloated as most Android phones out there, has still managed to accumulate a number of default apps like Maps, Mail, Calendar, Contacts and the likes. It’s all pretty usual, until one day you realize that there you’re not actually using all of them. In fact, some of them might be such that you’ve never even opened since you bought your iPhone (I’ve never touched Stocks, for instance). Long time coming, but Tim Cook appears to have hinted at the possibility of allowing users to remove default iOS apps in the future.
Default apps are not exactly useless, but they can surely become an annoyance, especially if they end up taking space on your first Home screen page. Granted, you can shove them all in a folder and forget about them – maybe even move them to the very last page – but that’s a hassle. What if you were able to delete them?
iOS doesn’t allow deleting stock apps, however, that might change in the future, according to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. In an interview, Tim admitted that this is an issue, but that it is “more complicated than it first appears.”
There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone … if they were to be removed they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone. There are other apps that aren’t like that. So over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way
So while Apple’s CEO acknowledges that this is something they’d like to “fix” for the users, he remains unsure when Apple would do it. For now, iOS 9 is coming and we know well that it doesn’t offer any such feature. Meanwhile iOS 9.1 public beta has also been seeded already, and there’s no such function to offer deleting stock apps in there either. Hence, what the timeline of this “expected change” might be, we’re unsure. Maybe in iOS 10?
The issue of stock apps is not isolated to iOS, either. Android has been plagued far longer and greater by this, where even though the stock Android apps collection is fairly limited, most OEMs and even carriers choose to add what we call bloatware on their offerings, so much so that there is little to no space left for user apps in the phone (looking at you, Samsung). While manufacturers have realized the issue and begun to rectify it, Apple is acknowledging it for the first time, and for good measure.
(Source: BuzzFeed)
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