How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

Every operating system has its share of annoyances, and iOS 8 is no different. From an obnoxious U2 album to recent contacts appearing where you don’t want them, here’s how to fix some of the worst annoyances.

A number of the annoyances left over from iOS 7 are still there, but the old fixes still work. On iOS 8, there’s a whole new set of obnoxious new features to deal with.

Turn Off Predictive Text

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

The new predictive text feature in iOS 8 puts a menu above your keyboard that predicts the next word you’re going to type so you can type faster. It’s supposed to get better over time, but if you’re not a fan, you can disable it. Just head to Settings > General > Keyboard and set the “Predictive” toggle to off.

Hide Recent Contacts

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

When you double-tap the home button in iOS 8, you’re shown the multitasking menu and a new Recent and Favourites menu for your contacts. This can be a privacy issue if you don’t want people to see who you’re contacting. To disable this feature, head to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and scroll down to “Show in App Switcher.” Set the toggles to off, and the recent contacts will be removed.

Get Rid of the U2 Album

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

When the release date for iOS was announced, Apple also gave away a free U2 album. Instead of just making it available to all, Apple pushed the album to everyone’s iPhones. If you don’t like U2, this is pretty lame. Thankfully, Apple eventually released a tool to remove it. Just head to this URL, type in your Apple ID information, and the album will be deleted.

Actually Delete Photos

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

iOS 8 now has a trash bin for photos. This is handy if you’re accidentally deleting photos somehow, but most of us probably don’t have that problem. If you want to actually delete photos from the Photos app head into Photos, then tap the “Recently Deleted” album. Tap “Select” then “Delete All”. There’s no way to permanently disable this function right now.

Avoid Quick Reply Overload

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

iOS 8 introduces quick replies to the messaging app. This allows you to quickly reply to a text message without leaving the screen you’re on. Unfortunately, if you have notifications set to “Alerts”, this function doesn’t work that well. If you start replying to a test as an alert and someone sends you another text message, iOS 8 completely deletes the message you’re typing. Weirder, with Alerts, you can’t just jump over to the Messages app to reply. Right now, the only real fix is to change notifications to “Banners”. This way, you can tap the banner to head to Messages, or pull down on the notification to quick reply.

Disable Auto-Destructing Videos and Voice Messages

How To Fix iOS 8’s Biggest Annoyances

One of the new features in iOS 8’s Messages is the ability to send video and voices messages that delete after a set period of time. Although we couldn’t even get this feature to work in the first place, it’s still kind of obnoxious if you want to actually save those messages. To fix this, Head to Settings > Messages then change the Audio Messages and Video Messages expiration toggles to “Never.” It’s still not totally clear what will happen to those messages if you have it set to delete never and the sender has it set to delete after 2 minutes.

Not every annoyance in iOS 8 is fixable. The new Tips app is pretty obnoxious to most of us, but there’s no way to delete it, and there’s no solid way to make quick replies really work properly with Alerts. Still, at least you can deal with the worst of the new system’s issues.


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