It looks like you won't be able to totally delete Apple's pre-installed apps in iOS 10 after all

Jeff Dunn

Jun 15, 2016, 21:08 IST

Tech Insider/Jeff Dunn

For all the changes Apple announced this week for its forthcoming iOS 10 update, perhaps the feature that's gotten iPhone loyalists most excited is the ability to remove the software's pre-installed apps.

In other words, if you're one of the many people who never uses Mail, Stocks, Compass, and the like, iOS 10 will make it so you can prevent those apps from chewing up space on your home screen.

That's still true. Less true, though, is the notion that you'll be able to delete those stock apps completely.

Speaking on the latest episode of The Talk Show - a podcast hosted by prominent Apple blogger John Gruber - Apple's SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi explained that you can't totally delete stock apps in iOS 10. Instead, you just remove their icons from the home screen (with the same "jiggling" effect as anything else) and lose any user data and configuration files associated with them.

As noted by MacRumors, those apps remain on the device for security reasons, and because they're technically baked into the OS as a whole. If you ever choose to restore them from the App Store, they won't be "re-downloaded" so much as brought back into view.

So what's this mean for you? Not much, really. The stock apps will still consume storage space, but they've never been big hogs in the first place - Apple says the whole suite uses less than 150MB combined - so it shouldn't be a major burden. The important thing is being able to tidy up those untouched folders on your home screen. You can still do that.

Still, the more you know. If you were hoping for a totally clean break from the likes of iBooks and Voice Memos, you won't quite be in the clear anytime soon.