How To Turn Off Offload Unused Apps

Technology has become so advanced in recent years, particularly when it comes to our smartphones.

Apple is one of the leaders in the smartphone market, releasing a new iteration of their iPhone each year, as well as lots of new iOS updates for iPhone users.

One of the more recent additions in the past few years was the ability for your phone to offload any unused apps.

Now this might sound handy at first. Save any background thinking power for the apps you do actually use? Perfect!

But it’s not always handy when you go to open that one app you use every now and then to find that you have to tap its icon to reinstall it on your phone. That’s just incredibly annoying, particularly if you want to use it in a hurry.

So how do you prevent your iPhone from offloading unused apps? That’s the exact question that we’re going to answer for you today!

We’ve put together a short guide to give you all the info you need so that you can have your iPhone working for you, rather than against you.

Let’s take a look at how to switch off the setting allowing your phone to offload unused apps so that it will be ready to go the next time you need it!

How Can I Turn Off “Offload Unused Apps”?

The good news is that it’s super easy to turn off the offload unused apps feature on your iPhone. All you need to do is:

Open your settings via the home screen
Tap into the app store section in the settings
And lastly, scroll down the settings for the app store and make sure that you tap the on/off switch for the offload unused apps feature

And it’s as simple as that! You should know when the setting is switched off if there’s a grayed out button where there was a green one before.

If the button for the “Offload unused apps” feature is still switched to green, you’ll know that it’s still working.

If you ever want to turn this feature back on, you can easily head back into your settings to change it back.

It can be handy to have if you’re particularly low on storage, but you should also have a much better idea than your phone of which apps you need to have installed so that you’re ready to use them as and when you need them.

By switching off this offload unused apps feature, you can avoid any future hassle when you need to open that specific app in a pinch.

Why Is My Iphone Offloading Apps?

The main reason that your iPhone has started to offload any unused apps is because your phone is low on storage.

This is a feature that was introduced as part of the iOS11 update, and is intended to make it quicker for your phone to do all the actions you’re asking it to.

When you have lots and lots of apps installed that you don’t actually use all that often, it still takes up storage space.

This can then slow things down when you ask your phone to run several different apps at any one time.

If you find that this is a constant issue that you are having to deal with, then you can easily switch off this feature via the settings menu, as we have outlined above.

Why Is My Iphone Offloading Apps?

Your other option is to go through all of the apps you have installed on your phone. Are there any that you genuinely don’t use and wouldn’t mind going without?

It may be best to delete them and only download them when you need them to make things easier for your phone.

It will also be worth thinking about what is taking up so much storage space on your phone, and whether there’s any other media it would be worth deleting to give you more space to play with.

Is Offload App The Same As Clear Cache?

No, the “offload unused apps” feature isn’t quite the same as clearing your cache. If you were to clear your cache, that would get rid of any background data such as cookies that your phone or Apple device has been using.

For example, that’s why your phone will prompt you for a password the next time you try to log in to something after you’ve cleared your cache.

When you offload your unused apps, it simply deletes the app from your phone, and instead keeps all of the data it needs to run it next time, such as passwords.

So offloading any unused apps on your phone is a handy way to free up some memory if you don’t want to delete everything to do with the app entirely.

Should I Disable Unused Apps?

It all comes down to personal preference. As annoying as it is to see that one app you use once in a blue moon has to reinstall itself first, it may be worth deleting permanently if you very rarely use it.

You can always reinstall it again if you change your mind, but just bear in mind that the unused app is taking up valuable space on your iPhone.

In Summary

And there you have it! You now know that in order to switch off the “Offload unused apps” function, all you need to do is adjust the settings you have in place.

You can do this by opening your settings from the home screen, tapping on the app store part of the settings menu, and then scrolling down to “Offload unused apps”.

You should then be able to tap the button so that it switches off, and it doesn’t offload your unused apps unless you ask it to.

The whole point of the offload unused apps function is to make it easier for your phone to operate when you’re low on storage.

To prevent it deleting something that you do actually use, albeit sporadically, it will be worth looking through what other things you can delete via the storage settings.