There is nothing more maddening than a slow, stuttery iDevice or a battery that seems to drain all too quickly. But fortunately, the most frustrating problems on your iPhone or iPad are ones that are fairly easy to resolve. Below are five easy fixes to the most commonly seen problems on iOS.
- Battery Drain
- The Background App Refresh option can be turned off by going to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. Rather than disabling the feature altogether, you may want to turn it off for apps that don’t need to be refreshed.
- While Location Services can improve your experience by providing your current location to apps, it can also drain your battery. Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. We recommend that you disable Location-Based iAds, Popular Near Me and the Frequent Locations feature at minimum.
- You may also determine that certain apps are battery hogs in general and you can choose to uninstall them. Go to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage to see which apps are draining your battery the worst to make an appropriate decision on what to remove.
- Frozen or Slow User Interface
- If your iPhone or iPad is either running slowly or not as smoothly as usual, go to Settings > General > Usage > Manage Storage to determine if there are unused apps or old photos that may be pushing your storage capacity to the limit and slowing down the device. Remember, any app you’ve purchased, even if you choose to uninstall it, can be downloaded from the App Store from the cloud later without an additional charge.
- Disable the parallax wallpaper effect. That’s the feature that makes it seem like the background on the home screen is moving when you tilt the phone. To disable it, click on Settings > General > Accessibility and turn on the Reduce Motion option.
- Connectivity Issues
- If experiencing connectivity issues with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or your cellular network, enable Airplane Mode for 30 seconds, toggle it back off and try again.
- For cellular connections that have been lost due to “No Service,” you may not be re-connected once you are in range again. Only a restart of your phone may resolve the issue.
- Unresponsive Screen
- While a frozen screen is probably the most frustrating of all issues, it is also the easiest to fix. Most problems are fixed with a simple restart. If your phone has completely locked up, press and hold the power button and the Home button at the same time until you see the Apple logo. This will reboot your device.
- Failed Messages
- Having trouble with iMessage or text messages? Ensure you are connected to the Internet either through Wi-Fi or cellular, click the red exclamation point next to the message, and click the “Try Again” option.
- If the problem continues, try force restarting your device by holding the Home and Power buttons.
Poor battery life is a problem every user must deal with at one point or another. Disabling background apps from refreshing, changing location services and removing faulty apps can greatly improve battery life.
Have another issue you can’t seem to resolve? Email our technical support specialist, Randy Crenshaw, at randy@techorchard.com for help!
