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Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at taming your apps in
iOS 7.
iOS 7 includes several functions to figure out what your apps are doing. How much storage
they are using. How much data they are using over your mobile connection and whether they
are using location services at the moment. Some of this stuff is old and some of this
stuff is new. Let's take a look.
So to get to all of this you are going to go into the Settings app. Once you are in
the Settings app you can go to various different places. Let's start by going to General and
then going to Usage. Under that you are going to see how much storage you have available
at the top. Then the list is going to quickly expand and you are going to see all of these
apps here. It is going to be sorted by the apps that use the most space.
For instance Audible, which stores audiobooks is using the most space for me. Which makes
sense. I've got a lot of audiobooks in there. I can see GarageBand, Spotify, etc. I can
tap on each one of these and I can see a breakdown. Usually most apps just say everything is Documents
& Data. But sometimes you get a further breakdown.
Like, for instance, if I were to look in the Podcast app you can see that actually shows
me video podcasts and audio podcasts. Not only can I see which ones are there but I
can actually delete them. I can swipe right to left and delete the podcast right from
inside of Settings. Of course I can also do that inside of the app. For most of these
apps you are going to have to go in. For instance in Audible there is nothing to do here. You
are going to have to go into the Audible app and that is where you can decide which books
you want to remove from your iPhone. Say ones that you have already finished but forgot
to remove. That will clear up some space.
Most of these apps are going to be like that. For instance in Pages it will show me using
the space but I can't do anything here. I go into Pages and I can remove documents in
there, delete them. So this is how to figure out what is using space on your iPhone or
iPad.
So now let's take a look at Location Services. So inside of Settings you go down to Privacy
and then Locations Services. Location Services means basically using the GPS on your phone.
Of course a lot of times it is not using GPS, it is using WiFi or cell tower signals to
figure out where your are. You can figure out which apps actually have that turned on
so they can access it. You can turn some off so they can't access it anymore.
You also can see arrows next to them. For instance camera has a gray arrow next to it
while Cyclemeter, an app that tracks people while they run or bike, has a purple arrow
next to it. I just turned that on so it should be actively tracking my location. You can
scroll through the list here and at the bottom it tells you what these arrows mean.
So basically a gray one means that it recently used the location services. So you would expect
the camera yes if I took a picture in the last twenty-four hours then it accessed the
currently location. This is not really going to wear down the battery if it is just occasionally
accessing it when you took an action.
Purple will though wear down the battery because it is actively polling it, it is using it
right now, but of course that is exactly what I want Cyclometer to do. However this can
be useful if say I finished my bike ride and I've forgotten to turn it off and I'm trying
to figure out why the battery is draining on my phone, I can see what is using GPS now.
I can also see what other apps are using it now. Maybe there is some app that I am not
using or I didn't expect to use GPS and I can see that it is and I can maybe stop using
that app if it is causing me trouble.
Also at the bottom you can see apps that use Geofence which are things like Reminders reminds
you to do something when you get home or when you get to work. It is going to have a kind
of outlined arrow there. So you can find out which apps you have that are using GPS and
you can actually switch them off or maybe perhaps go into the app and modify the functionality
so they use less battery.
So here is a new feature of iOS 7 and it is very useful. If you have ever gone through
your monthly mobile band width allotment or perhaps gotten a bill showing that you used
a lot of data and you want to figure out why, what app is using all this data. Well, with
iOS 7 you can figure that out. All you need to do in Settings is to go into Cellular and
it will show you underneath all of this, Use Cellular Data for and it shows you all of
your apps. Unfortunately this isn't sorted in any order but you can see exactly how much
data each app has used. You can figure out which ones may be using more than you would
like to.
You can also turn off the access to cellular data for certain apps. So for instance you've
got a game that uses a lot of cellular data and you want to remember not to play it while
you are over cellular or for it not to update graphics or something you can turn it off
here. You can also look through this list here.
The list is short and then at the bottom you get System Services which you can go into
and see data used by the system and a breakup of it. For instance I can look through here
and see that things like Gmail uses surprising little data and some games are using very
little data but I can look and find my music app and my music app I can see is using 247
MB and the answer to that, of course, is because I am using iTunes Radio. So I can expect that
one to be a little high. But others not so much and I really can get a good handle of
what the worst offenders are using this.
Another thing I like is that under System Services one of the things it shows you is
personal hotspots. So if you use Personal Hotspot and you are curious as to how much
data you are using as opposed to using other cellular data it breaks it down for you here.
Of course at the bottom of the screen you will notice a Reset Statistics button. So
these numbers are just going to keep piling up until you hit this and once you do everything
zeros out there. So now I can begin tracking to see over the next few days which apps are
using the most data.
So there are three different ways you can tame the apps on your iOS device.
I hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with
MacMost Now.