System tower · floor

How to update apps on iphone when it is already automatic

The odd thing about how to update apps on iphone is that on almost every phone asking the question, it is already happening. Apple’s wording is plain: apps downloaded from the App Store “are automatically updated by default”. The switch is on unless somebody turned it off.

So the search is nearly always standing in for a different question, and which one you have decides what to do.

The manual route, for the first of those, is three taps and it is in a place people do not look: open the App Store, tap your picture at the top right, tap App Updates, then tap Update beside the app you want or Update All. The account picture is the whole difficulty: it is the route Apple documents, it is not labelled “updates”, and people who go looking for a tab conclude their phone has no update screen.

Singular changes nothing: to update an app on iphone one at a time you tap Update beside its name rather than Update All, on the same screen. That is the route to use when you want one thing changed and everything else left exactly as it is — which is the only reason to update by hand at all once the automatic switch is on.

A small detail from Apple worth knowing when you want to confirm something actually happened: after an app updates, “it appears in the list of apps below Updated Recently” on that same screen. That list is the receipt.

Now the switch itself, and the trade that comes with it.

Turning App Updates off is a legitimate choice — people do it to keep a version of an app that works, to control what changes on a phone they depend on, or to stay off mobile data. Apple states the consequence in one sentence and it is not the one people expect: “When you do this, you receive notifications from the App Store each time an update for one of your apps is released.”

In other words the choice is not between updating and silence. It is between updating quietly and being told, repeatedly, about every update you are declining. On a phone with sixty apps that is a considerable amount of being told. It is still the right setting for some people; it is worth knowing what you are agreeing to.

The mobile data question deserves its own moment, because two different settings govern it and people usually only find one. There is a Cellular Data switch for the App Store as a whole, and there are separate settings for automatic downloads underneath it. A phone that updates half a gigabyte of apps on a train is obeying the second while you were looking at the first.

And the fourth question — the one about Safari, Mail, Photos and the rest — has an answer that is short and final. Those apps are not in the App Store, they have no update button, and Apple says why: they “are updated whenever you update iOS”. If one of them is behaving badly, the fix is a system update or nothing, and no amount of looking in the App Store will produce a version to install.

One last setting on that screen deserves a warning label, because it produces a symptom people find frightening. Offload Unused Apps is an automatic switch that removes apps you have not opened, leaving the icon in place with a small cloud beside it. The app is not deleted and your data is kept — but the first time it happens to something you needed in a hurry, on a train, with no signal, it does not feel like a helpful feature.

The floors below take it four ways: the routes, the automatic settings and what each costs, the updates that are not app updates at all, and what to do when one particular app refuses.

What this tower will not do

It will not tell you to update everything immediately. Automatic updating is the sensible default and it is already on, which is why this floor is mostly about the other four questions.

It will not pretend switching it off is free. Apple documents the notifications that replace it, and on a phone with a lot of apps that is the real cost.

And it will not send you looking for a Safari update. There is not one, there never was, and the pages that describe finding it have not checked. What holds instead is simple: the default behaviour, the manual route, the settings screen and the notification trade-off are all quoted from Apple’s own documentation, listed below.