14 DAY TRIAL // As the years pass, iOS customers are finding that more and more of the stock apps bundled with their Apple smartphone or tablet are becoming useless. Some of them were useless right from the start, yet the company has been very reluctant to pluck them out.
Apple prides itself on not shipping phones with bloatware, this being one of the reasons why the company’s advertised storage capacity is among the closest to reality from all smartphone vendors out there (if not the closest).
But the OS itself still takes a great deal of space on the phone, and for those who are buying the 8GB iPhone 5c, for example, every megabyte starts to count.
Which is why Tim Cook & Co. would be doing themselves a huge favor by handpicking some apps for extermination in iOS 8. Here are just a few, right off the bat (you’re welcome to share your own discontinuation plans in the comments section below).
1. Videos Does anyone honestly use the videos app in iOS? It was useless when it shipped and it now it’s even more useless with solutions like VLC Player finally available on the platform. Apple’s Videos app doesn’t even play half the formats VLC has been trained to run, and that’s only one player from the hundreds available on iTunes.
2. iTunes Store Apple is refusing to split up the App Store and the iTunes Store into separate apps on the desktop, yet somehow they’ve agreed to do it on iOS, which is precisely the place you don’t want crowded with app icons that you hardly ever tap once a month (or ever, in some cases). The iTunes Store and services should be a single app with multiple tabs inside. They should put all the iTunes/iCloud centric settings in there while they’re at it, because the Settings pane is getting pretty crowded.
3. Game Center Why is Game Center an actual app? It’s just a service that lives as a simple banner or notification in all the compatible games out there. No need for a locally-stored interface. Since it only works with an Internet connection anyway, why not simply bring it up from the Apple servers every time?
4. Stocks Since when has trading become so ubiquitous that everyone with an iPhone is automatically filed under potential AAPL / GOOG / EXXON investor? If we were to poll this issue I’ll bet not more than 5 percent of the install base actually checks quotes on the iPhone, and even that’s a stretch. Not to mention that avid traders probably have their own preferred apps and services to track their stocks with.
5. Weather Yes, weather. iOS should ship with a simple, constantly-on weather report on the lockscreen and / or in Notification Center, and just do away with the standard weather app. Whoever wants a whole display filled with weather information has already downloaded their preferred solution from the App Store. Not saying that the Weather app in iOS isn’t decent, but it could serve a much better purpose by transcending into a lockscreen widget.
6. Podcasts The Podcasts app has been suffering from issues since day one, and Apple should just give up trying to fix it. Instead, it should be integrated in iTunes. Plus, with the rumored iTunes Radio standalone app on the way, who needs three music/media apps on the same screen?