Although at first you may think that uninstalling an app is the same as deleting it , the reality is that, at least on iOS (effectively, Apple’s operating system for iPhone) they do not mean the same thing. Moreover, the steps to follow are slightly different when we find both options, even though to reach them it is necessary to follow them.
This is because, since the arrival of version 11 of iOS, which happened on September 19, 2017 (which was officially announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference), Apple decided to differentiate between uninstalling and removing an application.
Not in vain, as we have already explained to you in previous moments, while deleting an application is the ideal option when it comes to deleting it completely, the same will not happen with the uninstallation option, as we will explain in detail in the next section.
What does it mean to uninstall an app on iOS?
Since the official arrival of iOS 11 Apple decided to go a step further, and give a slightly different meaning to the function of uninstalling an app . And it is that while on a PC uninstalling a program necessarily means erasing it completely from the hard drive, on iOS the same does not happen.
In fact, if we choose to uninstall an application on iPhone or iPad, instead of deleting it completely, we can derive the app to the cloud and reserve the data from it . In this way, we can continue where we left off when we want to reinstall it again in the future.
Uninstalling an app on iOS
To uninstall a certain app in iOS we must open the Settings application that we find on the home screen of our device. Then, we touch the General tab and then on iPhone Storage .
We scroll to the bottom of the screen, until we find the list of different applications that we have installed on our device. We touch the app that we want to uninstall, and click the Uninstall app option.
Then we confirm by clicking on the Uninstall app button that will appear in the pop-up menu that will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. Remember: this will remove the application, but will keep both the documents and the data associated with it.
On the other hand, in the iPhone storage section it is also possible to allow our iPhone to automatically uninstall unused applications when the device originally has little storage space.
To do this, we will only have to touch the Enable option, which we will find next to Uninstall unused applications . The system will inform you automatically of the amount of space that you could recover once you opt for this functionality.
