Apple Might Finally Let Us Hide iPhone Apps We Don’t Use

There’s no way to delete native iPhone apps so even if you don’t have any need for the Stocks or the Weather app, you can’t get rid of them, but it appears that at some point in the future Apple might finally allow us to hide iPhone apps that we don’t require. New code has been discovered in iTunes metadata which reveals that the company might make it very simple to hide such applications.

AppAdvice reports that Apple appears to have quietly added new keys to iTunes metadata which say “isFirstParty” and “isFirstPartyHideableApp,” the keys reportedly show up on every app in the App Store.

This suggests that users might soon be able to hide native applications that aren’t widely used, like Stocks and Compass, the keys are currently set to false which means that the ability to do this hasn’t been enabled yet, but it’s likely that an announcement might be made at WWDC 2016 where Apple is set to unveil iOS 10.

Even though it seems like a simple job to allow users to hide apps they don’t use, it’s actually a very complex process to make this happen, as many apps are linked to other apps or features on the iPhone and if they’re removed they might cause problems elsewhere on the handset.

As usual, there’s no response from Apple on this, so we can’t really be sure if it’s going to go through with this. I guess we’ll find out for sure come WWDC 2016.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apps, iOS 10, iPhone, wwdc 2016