The App Details Screen

No matter which button was your starting point, eventually you wind up at an app’s details screen. There’s a description, a scrolling set of screenshots, info about the author, the date posted, the version number, a page of related and similar apps, the all-important reviews from fellow iPhoners, and so on.

Why are the ratings so important? Because the App Store’s goodies aren’t equally good. Remember, these programs come from a huge variety of people—professional firms in Silicon Valley, college students goofing around on weekends, teenagers in Hungary—and just because they made it into the store doesn’t mean they’re worth the money (or even the time to download).

Sometimes an app has a low score because it’s not designed well or it just doesn’t do what it’s advertised to do. And sometimes, of course, it’s a little buggy.

If you decide something is worth getting, you’re ready to download and install it. You may see any of these buttons:

• Get. Good news: This is a free app! Download away, conscience-free.

• $0.99 (or whatever). This app costs money. If you proceed, your Apple account will be charged automatically.

• . This button means you’ve previously bought an app, either on this iPhone or on another Apple touchscreen gadget. You don’t have to pay for it again. Just tap to re-download.

• Open. This app is already on your iPhone! Tap to open it.

Once you tap Get or the price, you’ve committed to downloading the program. The final step is to confirm that you’re you, using one of these three techniques:

• Use your Apple ID. The first time you access the App Store, and periodically thereafter, you have to enter your Apple ID and password. That’s Apple’s way of making sure some marauding child in your household isn’t trying to run up your bill without your knowledge. (Mercifully, you don’t have to enter your Apple ID just to download an update to an app you already own.)

• Use your fingerprint. If you’ve allowed the App Store to accept your fingerprint on the home button (in Settings → Touch ID & Passcode → iTunes & App Store), then you can skip the name-and-password business.

• Use your face. If you’ve got an X-class iPhone and have allowed the App Store to use facial recognition (in Settings → Face ID & Passcode → iTunes & App Store), then you don’t need a password or a fingerprint. Instead, you’re prompted to double-press the side button to commence the download.

The download begins!

Once you begin downloading an app, a pie chart on its Home-screen icon fills in to indicate the download’s progress. Tap the icon to pause or unpause the download. If you have a 3D Touch phone (“Flick”), you can hard-press the icon for a shortcut menu offering buttons for Cancel Download, Pause Download, and Prioritize Download—in other words, finish ahead of any other downloading apps.

If you’re still on the app’s App Store page when the downloading is done, tap the Open button to launch it and try it out.

A Welcome Note About App Backups

You don’t have to worry about losing your apps if something happens to your phone. The App Store remembers everything you’ve bought. You can re-download a purchased app at any time, on any of your iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touches, without having to pay for it again.

Rearranging Apps on the Home Screen

To enter Home-screen editing mode, hold your finger down lightly on any icon until, after about a second, the icons begin to—what’s the correct term?—wiggle. (If you press too hard, you may trigger 3D Touch—see “Flick”—and get frustrated.)

At this point, you can rearrange your icons by dragging them around the glass into a new order; other icons scoot aside to make room.

You can drag a single icon across multiple Home screens without ever having to lift your finger. Just drag the icon against the right or left margin of the screen to “turn the page.”

To create an additional Home screen, drag a wiggling icon to the right edge of the rightmost Home screen; keep your finger down. That Home screen slides off to the left, leaving you on a new, blank one, where you can deposit the icon.

Deleting Apps

While your icons are wiggling, most of them also sprout ’s. That’s how you delete an app you don’t need anymore: Tap that . You’re asked if you’re sure; if so, it says bye-bye.

You can use this technique to delete the preinstalled apps you don’t want, like Stocks and Watch, for example. You no longer have to hide them in a folder just to get them out of your face.

When everything looks good, press the home button—or, on X-class phones, the Done button on the right ear—to stop all the wiggling.

Restoring the Home Screen

If you ever need to undo all the damage you’ve done, tap Settings → General → Reset → Reset Home Screen Layout. That function preserves any new programs you’ve installed, but it consolidates them. If you’d put 10 apps on each of four Home screens, you’ll wind up with only two screens, each packed with 20 icons. Leftover blank pages are eliminated. This function also places your downloaded apps in alphabetical order.

Manual Updates

When you tap Updates, you’re shown a list of the programs with waiting updates. A tiny What’s New arrow lets you know what the changes are—new features, perhaps, or some bug fixes. And when you tap a program’s name, you go to its details screen, where you can remind yourself of what the app does and read other people’s reviews of the new version.

You can download one app’s update, or, with a tap on the Update All button, all of them…no charge.

Automatic Updates

If you have a lot of apps, you may come to feel as though you’re spending your whole life downloading updates. They descend like locusts, every single day, demanding your attention.

That’s why Apple offers an automatic update-downloading option. Your phone can install updated versions of your apps quietly and automatically in the background.

To turn on this feature, open Settings → iTunes & App Store. Under Automatic Downloads, turn on Updates. (If you’d prefer that the phone wait to do this downloading until it’s in a Wi-Fi hotspot—to avoid eating up your monthly cellular data-plan allotment—then turn off Use Cellular Data.)

From now on, the task of manually approving each app’s update is off your to-do list forever.

Augmented Reality (AR) Apps

Apple has embraced AR in a big way, and some of the results are thrilling.

AR is where you use your phone as a viewer for the world around you—and the computer superimposes graphics on it. As you move the phone, the sizes, angles, and distances of the simulated objects smoothly change in real time as though they really existed. (Pokémon GO is an AR app. So is Snapchat, when it adds goofy glasses and antennas to your live image.)

In 2017, Apple gave AR a huge boost with its release of ARKit, a set of tools that make it easier for software companies to develop AR apps. In iOS 12, Apple offers ARKit 2, which expands that idea even more—for example, you and a couple of buddies, all armed with iPhones, can play a communal game that creates critters, or balls, or explosions between you, which all of you see from your respective angles.

Apple and Pixar worked together to create a new file format called USDZ, which will let apps move those imaginary 3D objects among different apps.

The Measure app, new in iOS 12 (“Flyover Tours”), is one example. But the App Store is full of other people’s AR masterpieces:

• IKEA Place (free). You inspect a catalog of living-room furniture. You tap the item you want, choose a color for it, and then tap the iPhone screen to plop it down on the floor. Now you can walk around the room, checking out how it looks from various angles and in various positions. The idea, of course, is to let you try out furniture at home before hauling it in from a store. (Houzz, Overstock, Amazon, and other companies have similar apps.)

• Porsche Mission E (free). As a sales tool, this app is pure genius: It lets you see exactly what a $90,000 red Porsche Boxster convertible would look like in your driveway. Or garage. Or bedroom, for that matter.

• Hair Color by ModiFace (free). Use your phone like a magic mirror. Tap a new hair color from the scrolling palette at the bottom of the screen, and see how you’d look with that dye job.

• Sky Guide ($3). Point your phone at the sky, and see the stars—labeled and, in the case of constellations, conveniently connected by line segments. Works in the daytime or the nighttime. It’s a perfect use of AR, because it provides ordinarily invisible information about whatever you’re looking at. (The free Night Sky is a similar app.)

The world is full of people, places, and things with a story to tell. Imagine an app that identifies the repair history of a used car you’re considering. Or an app you can hold up to your airplane window that labels the cities and streets below. Or an app that shows how you’ll look after plastic surgery. Or one for house hunters that shows your furniture in a candidate house.

The mind reels.

The Abandoned Apps

Here’s some bad news: 32-bit apps don’t run in iOS 12. Only 64-bit apps do.

What that means theoretically is that your apps now run faster and can handle more complex tasks. But what it means practically is that in one fell swoop, Apple has killed off the 15 percent of App Store apps that haven’t been updated since 2015.

If you’ve been an iPhoner for a long time, you may feel it in the gut: Apps like Flappy Bird, the original Tetris, and Dora’s Great Big World no longer run in iOS 12.

But as you grieve, remember that their software companies have had three years to update those apps—and chose not to bother.

Force-Quitting an App

The app switcher lets you manually exit an app, closing it down. To do that, flick the unwanted app’s mini-screen upward, so that it flies up off the top of the screen (facing page, right). You’ve just exited the app.

You’ll need this gesture only rarely. You’re not supposed to quit every app when you’re finished. Force-quit an app only if it’s frozen or acting glitchy and needs to be restarted.

A Word About Background Apps

Switching out of an app doesn’t actually close it; all apps continue running in the background.

Of course, if every app ran full-tilt simultaneously, your phone would guzzle down battery power. To solve that problem, Apple has put two kinds of limits in place:

• iOS’s limits. Not all apps run full speed in the background. Apps that really need constant updating, like Facebook or Twitter, get refreshed every few seconds; apps that don’t rely on constant internet updates get to nap in the background when they’re not in use.

  In deciding which apps get background attention, iOS studies things like how good your phone’s internet connection is and what time of day you traditionally use a certain app (so that your newspaper’s app is ready with the latest articles when you open it).

• Your own limits. You can’t control which apps run in the background, but you can control which ones download new data in the background. In Settings → General → Background App Refresh, you’ll find a list of every app that may want to update itself in the background. To make your battery last longer, you can turn off background updating for apps you don’t really care about; you can even turn off all background updating using the master switch at the top.

The bottom line: There’s no need to quit apps you’re not using, ever. Contrary to certain internet rumors, they generally don’t use enough battery power to matter. You may see dozens of apps in the app switcher, but you’ll never sense that your phone is bogging down as a result.

Back to App ()

This humble button may become your favorite feature. It’s a Back button that appears when you’ve tapped a link of some kind that takes you into a different app. For example:

• You’re in Messages, and you tap a web link (facing page, left) that takes you into Safari. A Messages button appears at top left (right).

  

• You’re on Twitter or Facebook, and you tap a link that opens a web page. Sure enough: The top-left button says Twitter or Facebook.

• You’re in Mail, and you tap an underlined date or time that takes you into the Calendar app. A Mail button appears in the corner.

• You’re in Safari, and you tap a link that opens in YouTube. Sure enough: The button says Safari.

And so on. This tiny enhancement can save you minutes a week.

X-Class Phones: Bypass the App Switcher

If you have an iPhone X, XR, or XS, a delightful surprise awaits. You can switch apps directly, without a layover at the app switcher.

All you have to do is swipe horizontally on the home indicator bar, the black or white horizontal line at the bottom of almost every app screen. Your first swipe should generally be to the right, because the app you’re using now is always at the far right of the lineup.

As you do so, the next-most-recent app heaves into view—full size, already running. No need to tap it or select it from among some cards: You’re there.

Keep swiping that bar to the right to summon older and older open apps; swipe to the left to return to the ones you’ve used more recently.

This feature makes your iPhone’s weird, rounded-bottom screen seem worthwhile.

The One AirDrop Setting

Realistically, you won’t be bombarded by AirDrop requests from strangers who want to show you family pictures. Even so, Apple has given you some control over who’s allowed to try to send you things by AirDrop.

To see the settings, open Settings → General → AirDrop.

You have these three choices:

• Receiving Off. Nobody can send you anything by AirDrop. You’ll never be disturbed by an incoming “Accept?” message.

• Contacts Only. Only people in your Contacts app—your own address book—can send you things by AirDrop. Your phone is invisible to strangers. (Of course, even when someone you know tries to send something, you still have to approve the transfer.)

  Note

  The Contacts Only option requires that both you and the other person have iCloud accounts and are logged in. Your Contacts card for the other person has to include that person’s registered iCloud email address.

• Everyone. Anyone, even strangers, can try to send you things. You can still accept or decline.

Screen Time

This big, bold graph shows how much time you’ve spent on your phone today so far, color-coded by app type (Social Networking, Entertainment, and so on). You get to see whether today you’ve been more or less addicted than usual (next page, left).

But if you tap the graph, you open up a much more detailed, much more frightening page (next page, right). Now you see how much time you’ve spent in each of those categories per hour today, including a record of your longest session. You can fiddle with the graph like this:

• Choose Today or Last 7 Days.

• Tap Devices to choose which iPhone or iPad you want graphed (or All Devices).

Then comes a list of the apps you’ve been using, sorted by most time eaten.

Below that, the horrifying Pickups graph, showing how many times you’ve awakened your phone per hour; the average amount of time between pickups (aka your willpower grade); and which time of day saw the most pickups.

Below that: how many notifications you get, by hour or by day, and which apps are sending you the most.

Every Sunday, a Screen Time notification appears on your screen, announcing that your weekly report is available. Open the notification to see a colorful report, full of bar graphs and stats that show how much you, and your other family members, rotted their brains on their devices, and on which apps, and how many times you lost your will and went over your limits.

Downtime

For some people, just seeing those startling graphs may be enough to produce a change in behavior—like looking up from your phone now and then. But if you need a little reminder to help curb your addiction, tap Downtime, then turn on the Downtime switch.)

Here you’re supposed to indicate a slice of the day when you’re willing to quit using your phone—during dinner, maybe, or the couple of hours before bed.

Five minutes before the beginning of the Downtime, you’ll get a notification that warns you to wrap it up. Then, at the witching hour, most of your apps’ icons on the Home screens become dimmed and un-tappable. The only exceptions: You can still make or take phone calls, and you can use whatever apps you’ve chosen by tapping Always Allowed, described next. (And if you deem Instagram to be essential—well, you do you.)

Of course, it’s not so hard to bypass your own Downtime limits. You can always just open Settings → Screen Time and turn Downtime off. So what’s the point?

First, even a thin obstacle is, psychologically speaking, better than nothing. Second, you can put a password on Downtime so that you can’t turn it off. This, of course, isn’t intended for you as much as it is for your kids (see “Content & Privacy Restrictions”).

There may be some deep conversations at dinner tonight.

Always Allowed

When Downtime is on, your phone isn’t completely bricked. It’s still a phone—and you can designate certain apps as exceptions that you can use. It’s probably smart to block Facebook, Twitter, and Mail before bed. But maybe Spotify is harmless, so you can relax with some music, or maybe Books, so you can read. Or maybe Maps, so you can find your hotel.

To choose the permitted apps, tap Always Allowed. As you can see, Apple proposes that communication hubs like Phone, Messages, and FaceTime be kept legal, along with Maps. To add to this list, tap the next to the apps you want. (To remove an app from the permitted list, of course, hit and then Remove.)

App Limits

You can also set daily time limits for individual app categories. Maybe you want to cut back your social-networking habit to an hour a day. Maybe you think three hours a day watching videos is plenty (well, at least for your kid).

When you tap App Limits → Add Limit, iOS doesn’t show you a list of apps; it presents app categories, like Social Networking, Games, Entertainment, Education, and Health & Fitness. (Actually, who on earth would limit Health & Fitness?)

Apple’s reasoning is: “Well, if we blocked only Facebook, you might just go use Twitter,” so it lumps apps together into categories. Unfortunately, there’s no way to choose app limits on a per-app basis.

Anyway, tap the category that you’d like to limit (or several), and then hit Add. On the next screen, you can dial up the number of hours and minutes you want as the maximum per day. If you want the limit to vary on different days (to be less strict on weekends, say), hit Customize Days, change the time by day, and then hit Back. When everything looks good, hit again to go back.

At this point, you can tap Add Limit to set up another app-category time limit, repeating the process.

Content & Privacy Restrictions

This section was known, before iOS 12 came along, as Parental Controls.

If you’re issuing an iPhone to a child, or someone who acts like one, you’ll be gratified to discover that iOS offers a good deal of protection. That’s protection of your offspring’s delicate sensibilities (it can block pornography and dirty words) and protection of your bank account (it can block purchases of music, movies, and apps without your permission).

The setup is here, in Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions. The master switch at the top is there in case you ever want to shut off all restrictions in a hurry.

All right. Once Restrictions is turned on, you can put up data blockades in a number of different categories:

• iTunes & App Store Purchases. Is your kid allowed to install apps? Delete them? Buy new levels, weapons, and features within apps? And is your Apple ID required to make a second purchase once you’ve made the first one?

• Allowed Apps. Here you can specify exactly which apps your kid is allowed to use.

• Content Restrictions. This is where you can spare your child’s sensitive eyes and ears by blocking inappropriate material.

  Ratings determine the effectiveness of the parental controls described in this section. Since every country has its own rating schemes (for movies, TV shows, games, song lyrics, and so on), you use the Ratings For control to tell the iPhone which country’s rating system you want to use.

  Once that‘s done, you can use the Music, Podcasts & News control, plus Music Profiles & Posts (the news and discussion within Apple’s music service), Movies, TV Shows, Books, and Apps, to specify what your kid is allowed to watch, play, read, or listen to. For example, you can tap Movies and then tap PG-13; any movies rated “higher,” like R or NC-17, won’t play on the iPhone. (And if your sneaky offspring try to buy these naughty songs, movies, or TV shows wirelessly from the iTunes Store, they’ll discover that the Buy button is dimmed and unavailable.)

  

  For some categories, like Music, Podcasts & News, you can turn off Explicit to prevent the iPhone from playing iTunes Store songs that contain naughty language.

  Web Content lets you shield impressionable young eyes from pornography online. All Websites means no protection at all; Limit Adult Websites means Apple will apply its own judgment in blocking dirty websites, using a blocked-site list it has compiled; and Allowed Websites Only is a “whitelist” feature. It means that the entire web is blocked except for the few sites listed here: safe bets like Disney, PBS Kids, Smithsonian Institution, and so on. You can add your own sites to this list, but the point is clear: This is the web with training wheels.

  That doesn’t mean you can’t override Apple’s wisdom, however. Within the Limit Adult Websites options, Always Allow and Never Allow controls let you add the addresses of websites you think should be OK (or should not be OK).

  Under Siri, Web Search Content lets you turn off your youngsters’ ability to say to Siri, “Look up naked ladies” (or whatever naughty web searches they dream up), and Explicit Language lets you plug Siri’s ears when your little monster says unspeakable things to her.

  The last categories here have to do with games that work with Apple’s Game Center technology. These controls let you stop your kid from playing multiplayer games (against strangers online), screen recording in games, or adding game-playing friends to the center.

• Privacy. These switches can prohibit the unauthorized youth from making changes to the phone’s privacy settings, which are described in “Privacy”.

• Allow Changes. In this category, you’ll find Allow/Don’t Allow options for a whole bunch of iPhone features that locked-down corporations might not want their employees—or parents might not want their children—to use, because they’re considered either security holes, time drains, or places to spend your money.

  They include Passcode Changes, Account Changes (meaning the email and social-media accounts you’ve set up in Settings), Cellular Data Use (limits you’ve set up for various apps), Background App Activities (which apps are allowed to run when they’re not the frontmost), and Volume Limit (“AirPlay”). Do Not Disturb While Driving ensures that your underling can’t simply turn off that important safety feature (“Do Not Disturb While Driving”), thereby defeating the entire purpose.

  TV Provider makes sure the rapscallion won’t attempt to change your cable-TV company (“The TV App”).

Family

Here are the names of any underage family members, as you’ve set them up in Family Sharing (“Family Sharing”). Tap a kid’s name to see a replica of your Screen Time screen—but this time, you’re changing the settings only for that kid. And, yes, that means you can also see the kid’s Screen Time graph of time spent.

Use Screen Time Passcode

Unless you add this four-digit password, your underlings can simply bypass whatever screen-time limits you’ve set up by opening Settings and turning off Screen Time (or the individual features within).

Turn Off Screen Time

If you’re offended by the entire notion of iOS as a nanny, always harassing you about your phone addiction, judging you on how much time you spend, and sending you weekly reports about your progress, just tap to turn it all off.