Get Ready for the New Year with These iPhone Maintenance Tips

by Juli Clover

December is coming to an end and 2023 is just a couple of weeks away. With the holidays and vacations coming up, the end of the month is a great time to sit down and fix your iPhone a bit to get ready for the New Year.

If you're like a lot of us at MacRumors, you have a lot of junk in the form of photos to clean up, old apps to delete, contacts to clean up, and more, so we decided collect some useful ‌iPhone‌ tips organization and optimization that can save space and make your device less cluttered.

Clear old photos

This year I bought a house and I have about a thousand photographs of peeling paint on the ceiling, marks on the floor, fallen trees, efflorescence in the basement, overflowing gutters, and dozens of other small household problems that can be photographed. If you're in the same situation, it's time to organize these images into albums, extract them from the ‌iPhone‌ to a dedicated album on your Mac or other device, or delete them.

On ‌iPhone‌ just open the Photos app, select everything you don't need and add it to the album using the share sheet or delete it. You can also move it to something like the Files app to keep a copy that doesn't clutter up your ‌Photos‌ app, which is what I'm going to do.

Get rid of old/duplicate contacts

iOS 16 adds a handy feature to merge contacts if you have duplicates. Just open the Contacts app and it will tell you right at the top if there are duplicates that can be merged with one tap.

If you have old contacts you no longer talk to, it's also a good time to review and delete anything that doesn't belong in your contact list.

Delete Unused Apps

Apple offers you many ways to get rid of apps you no longer use, but, perhaps the most efficient way is to simply open the Settings app, go to the General section, and select ‌iPhone‌ Storage. From there, you can see what's taking up a lot of space, and you can get rid of what you're no longer using to save space on your ‌iPhone‌'s home screen. and storage space.

Delete old messages

Old messages iMessages, especially those with lots of images, can take up surprisingly large amounts of space. While you're uninstalling apps, check Settings > General > ‌iPhone‌ Storage > Messages to find out what is taking up the most space in the app. From there, tap a category, such as a photo or video, to remove old content.

Please note that uploading photos and videos may take some time.

Clear old reminders and notes< /h2>

Looking through photos, messages, and unused apps, it might also be worth deleting old notes and reminders from those apps accordingly.

I'm not good with Notes in particular, and it can get cluttered with content I no longer need. It doesn't matter much, but it's nice to empty it once in a while. To delete notes, just open the Notes app and swipe left. The same goes for Reminders.

Review your notification settings

During the year, it's easy to download apps, forget about them, and brush off the extra notifications you start getting and which you don't really need. Deleting apps solves the problem, but you may have apps that you don't want notifications from that you want to keep.

Settings > Notifications, you can manage all your apps by deciding which ones can send notifications and which ones can't. Removing notifications can help reduce distractions, and it's also helpful to add apps to your app summary so you only hear about them once a day.

Check your battery usage

It's useful to monitor your battery usage from time to time to see which apps are consuming your battery and what you're spending your time on, to see if there are areas you can make changes to.

Battery. You can see the last 24 hours and the last 10 days of app usage broken down by which apps used the most battery life. It lets you know if your battery is low due to heavy usage or background activity, which can be useful if you want to maximize your battery life.

If you have apps like ‌Photos‌ or Weather, which update in the background, when you don't really need them, you can disable background updates. Choose General > Background App Refresh to enable Background Refresh on a per-app basis.

More Tips

There are many other management categories that you can you can dive in, with some suggestions for organizing and updating below.

View your files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Box, or whatever cloud service you use.
Clean up your inbox by deleting old emails to save space and get rid of your inbox.
Check 1Password or a password management app to update old passwords, close old accounts, or get rid of no more.
Organize apps in folders for a more organized ‌Home screen‌.
Travel through the ‌Home screen‌ and lock screen widgets to make sure everything is still up to date and there is nothing that is not being used.
Update locations in the Weather app to clear old vacation spots or other weather information you not needed.< /li>
Update your Maps favorites.
Update your Apple Music playlists.
Update all your apps and make sure all devices have software updates installed.