Get Ready for the New Year With These iPhone Maintenance Tips

There is a couple of weeks left in December and then there will be a new year in just a couple of months. With holiday breaks and vacations coming up, the end of the month is a good time to take care of your phone.

If you're like many of us here at MacRumors, you have a lot of photos that need to be cleaned up, old apps to be deleted, contacts to clear out, and more, so we thought we'd put together some useful suggestions.

I have about a thousand photos of peeling paint on the ceiling, marks on the floor, downed trees, efflorescence in the crawl space, rain gutter overflowing, and dozens of other little home issues that one photograph. If you're in the same situation, now is a good time to organize those images into albums, pull them off of the iPhone, or destroy them.

If you want to add something to an album with the Share Sheet, open the Photos app on the iPhone and select everything you don't need. If you want to keep a copy of it in your Photos app, you can move it over to the Files app.

If you have more than one contact, the feature for merging them was added in the latest version of the operating system. The Contacts app will let you know if there are duplicate items at the top of the screen.

If you don't talk with old contacts anymore, this is a good time to purge your Contacts list.

Delete Unused Apps

If you want to get rid of apps you're no longer using, the most efficient way is to open the settings app, go to general, and choose iPhone storage. You can see what's taking up a lot of room and you can get rid of what you don't use anymore to save Home Screen space on your phone.

Delete Old Messages

A lot of images can take up a lot of space in an old iMessage. You can see what's eating up the most space in the app by looking at the messages in the settings. To remove old content, tap into a category.

It can take some time to load.

Clean Up Old Reminders and Notes

It's a good idea to clear out old Notes and Reminders from unused apps while you go through photos, messages, and unused apps.

I don't know how to keep on top of Notes, and it can get cluttered with stuff I don't need anymore. It's not a big deal, but it's nice to empty it out occasionally. Deleting notes is as easy as opening the Notes app and scrolling to the left.

Review Your Notification Settings

It's easy to download apps, forget about them, and get more notifications you don't need. Deleting apps doesn't solve the problem, but you may want to keep other apps.

You can manage all of your apps in the Notifications section. Adding apps to the App Summary will allow you to only hear from them once a day in order to clear out notifications.

Check Up on Battery Usage

If you look in on your battery usage every now and then, you can see what apps are consuming the most battery life and where changes can be made.

You can see the last 24 hours and the last 10 days of app usage under the settings section. If you want to maximize battery, it's helpful to know if battery was drained through active use or background activity.

If you have apps that update in the background when you don't need them, you can turn them off. To turn on background refresh on a per app basis, go to general.

More Tips

There are more management categories you can explore.

• Go through your files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Box, or any other cloud service that you use.
• Clean up your email inbox, deleting old emails to save space and to get to inbox zero.
• Do a checkup on 1Password or your password management app to update any old passwords, close out old accounts, or get rid of data you no longer need.
• Rearrange apps into folders for a more organized ‌Home Screen‌.
• Go through your ‌Home Screen‌ and Lock Screen widgets to make sure everything is still relevant and nothing is there that's not in use.
• Update locations in the Weather app to clear out old vacation spots or other weather information you don't need.
• Update your Favorites in Maps.
• Update your Apple Music playlists.
• Update all your apps and make sure software updates are installed on all devices.
• Install HomeKit firmware updates on any devices that need updating.

Have a Suggestion?

Do you have a list of things you want to do at the end of the year? We would appreciate it if you would tell us in the comments.