iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

The release of any new operating system brings a slew of slight problems and annoyances. iOS 7 is no different. With that in mind, here’s how to fix some of the more common annoyances.

Disable Parallax

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

Parallax is iOS 7’s new moving home screen. When you tilt your phone, the wallpaper shifts with it. It’s a cool parlour trick, but not really useful. It’s also incredibly distracting on the larger screen of an iPad. Worse is the fact that disabling it is hidden away. To turn it off head into: Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. Turn that “On” and parallax is disabled.

Disable Control Center Within Apps

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

[related title=”MORE” tag=”ios7launchguide” items=”1″]Control Center is the handy new feature where you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to get quick access to various system toggles. It’s great, but not all apps are ready for that gesture to exist. Subsequently, sometimes you’ll accidentally pull up the Control Center drawer when you’re playing a game or using an app. You can turn off Control Center in apps though. Just head to Settings > Control Center and toggle “Access Within Apps” off. It still works on the home screen and the lock screen.

Improve Battery Life By Disabling App Background Refresh

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

We haven’t done extensive tests with this, but running iOS 7 on an third generation iPad drained the battery significantly. The fix turned out to be disabling “App Background Refresh”. This is the smarter multitasking feature that keeps apps running in the background and refreshing content. It also appears to drain a lot of battery life in our case. To disable it, head to Settings > General >Background App Refresh and toggle the setting to off. Your mileage may vary, but it helped our battery life a lot.

Get The Old Notification Center Back

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

Notification Center sees a huge overhaul in iOS 7. You now have a calendar view showing what’s coming up on your calendar, as well as a quick summary of the weather. If you want something closer to the old Notification Center, you can pop into Settings > Notification Center and change a few options around. Turn off the “Today View”, “Today Summary” and “Tomorrow Summary.” Then set up your notifications for apps you’d like information from.

Disable Automatic App Updates

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

Automatic App Updates is a new feature in iOS 7 where iTunes automatically downloads and updates all your apps for you in the background. That’s handy, but as we all know, sometimes an app will introduce a bug or feature that you don’t want. If you’re not comfortable with automatic updates, you can turn them off by heading into Settings > iTunes and App Store and toggling the “Updates” setting of “Automatic Downloads” to off.

Make Messages Display A Person’s Full Name

iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)

By default, Messages no longer shows a contact’s full name. This is handy when you have friends with obnoxiously long and very specific names, but chances are you know a few people with the same name. This can cause confusion. To reenable the last name display in Messages, head to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Tap the “Short Name” option under “Contact” and change it to whichever selection you prefer.


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