Ah, the age-old question that plagues all mobile phone users: update or not? Specifically, should you really update your device to the latest and greatest version its software or operating system? What if the update makes it worse?

If you can charge your smartphone wirelessly, congratulations. You have arrived at the future, a time when the Herculean process of fumbling with a cable, inserting it into the bottom of your device, and waiting for the satisfactory tone feels archaic and silly. With one convenient, reasonably priced power pad, you can now set your smartphone down, wait for the ding, and go about your merry way. Cables are for suckers.

There's a special corner in Tech Hell reserved for app developers who try to sucker people into paying obscene amounts of money for an underwhelming product.

If you find yourself constantly missing text messages, you can set things up so that your phone's flash blinks whenever one comes in.

Photo bloat is real, people. Most of us forget about all of our selfies, food shots, and random photos shortly after we post them to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, et al. But your phone doesn't. The files sit in the camera roll in your Photos app, taking up valuable storage space that you could be filling with apps, podcasts, or if you're like me, a giant backlog of email. Eventually, things may get so bad that you're scrolling through Photos and deleting a few pictures every time you need space.

Ding! This needs your attention right now, notifications seem to say. Boing! It might be an emergency. Or, just as often: Boop! Somebody you love might want to talk to you. We get hundreds of notifications every day, and they are almost all lies.

There are way too many third-party phone camera apps. This can make choosing a good one unduly difficult. We recently highlighted a couple of my personal favourites in the iOS and Android Lifehacker Packs, but there are plenty more that people love to use. Here are the best of the bunch, according to our readers.

Should you install a public beta of iOS on your primacy iPhone or iPad? Most people caution against it — especially when a beta is in its earlier stages, since you never know what kind of bugs might brick that-which-you-use-your-iPhone-to-do (or your favourite apps).

iOS: If you’re the kind of person who uses a little creativity when organising the apps on your iPhone or iPad — by icon colour, for example — it might be time to take your device’s look to the next level. Sure, you can name your folders something descriptive and/or witty, like “yellow” instead of the category of the apps found within it, but here’s a trick you can use to ditch folder names entirely.

Adobe has decided to expand Photoshop's reach beyond traditional computing platforms. The company has announced that from early next year, you'll be able move between PCs running Windows or macOS and an iPad, using exactly the same PSD file. Photoshop for iPad shares the same code base as its desktop counterpart which ensures seamless transitions between devices.

Dear Lifehacker, I’ve been a long time user of Google News because I love being able to swipe through each post and stop on the ones that interest me. However, ever since that UI update that made everything white, I’ve noticed it stopped syncing properly in the background. Like I literally have to keep the app in the foreground as it downloads or it won’t download all the posts properly. If I read Lifehacker on Google News while online, it now seems to load unnecessary menus (or something) that makes my phone lag. Do you have an alternative to suggest?

For whatever reason, Apple launched iOS 12's Shortcuts app without offering users any kind of centralised hub for storing and sharing the useful shortcuts they create. So, this happens: You find a neat shortcut online, you pull up Safari on your iOS device and install it via some shared iCloud link, and it sits on your device forever.

Trying to find the perfect iOS apps can be tough, and we’re willing to bet that your iPhone or iPad is full of pages and pages of apps. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to come up with a short list of favourites. We understand. Allow us to help you with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for iOS.

The identity politics of tech are real. We become obsessed with the devices that power our lives, and they can drive us to heated arguments — however preposterous — with anyone who loves a competing product, platform, or service.

Fresh off the official launch of iOS 12 and the grand renaming debut of Apple's Shortcuts app — I asked people for their favourite Shortcuts. In no particular order, here are the best I've seen.

Take a bad photo on your iPhone? No problem, just bin it! Except, it hasn't actually been deleted, just moved, and anyone who knows where to look can find it easily. So, how do you make sure the photos you trash are gone forever?

Android/iOS: I have a reasonable but not overwhelming amount of media: Mostly books, followed by video games, followed by some collectable vinyls and CDs that I keep around. I also have friends who have rooms full of stuff: Stacks of books and floor-to-ceiling bookcases that are nearly bursting from overuse.

All of us could benefit from checking out Libib, a free service you can use to scan and catalogue your books, movies, music and video games.

iOS: While most Apple fans who love podcasts have probably switched to an app like Overcast or Castro, you might want to go back and spend a few minutes with Apple’s updated Podcasts app in iOS 12. There are a few new features that have finally made this app a viable alternative to the, er, alternatives. Here’s what’s new.

iOS 12 is out, and a lot of people are suddenly realising that they spend way too much time on their smartphones. Way. Too. Much. Time.

That’s all thanks to the Screen Time feature you’ll find within your device’s Settings menu — right under “Do Not Disturb”. Tap it, and your iPhone or iPad will give you all sorts of scary information: How many hours you’ve spent glued to it, what you did, and even how much you picked it up (to the hour, even).