iOS App Monitoring

Learn 5 ways you can monitor the apps on your iPhone or iPad in iOS 8. You can check to see how much battery each app has used in the last 24 hours or 7 days. You check to see how much storage space each app is using, and even delete some content for some apps. You can monitor and adjust the privacy settings to control what information apps have access to. You can also adjust the notifications settings for apps and see what is new for recent app updates.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.  On today's episode let's look at how you can monitor your apps in iOS8.
So you can monitor your apps in many different ways. For instance, for battery usage, for storage, and also which apps they can communicate with and which information they have access to.
Let's go to Settings and under Settings, General and under General, Usage and then tap Battery Usage there at the top. You're going to get a list of all the different apps you are using and the percentage of battery that they are using. Keep in mind you have to measure this against a few things.
First of all if an app should be using more battery then don't be alarmed if it is. For instance if you had your phone plugged in but unplugged it and then took an hour long run using an app to track you via GPS then you would expect that to take the lion share of battery usage. If it takes ninety percent of battery usage then that makes sense if you weren't using any other apps and, of course, using GPS is going to use a lot of power.
On the other hand if you notice that a game that you only played for ten minutes out of a whole day of use is using forty percent of battery power, well that's a lot of battery power for just ten minutes out of an entire day. So keep that in mind as you look through this list and maybe don't make any quick judgements based on one look. Maybe look on several consecutive days to see which apps are using the most power.
Next, let's go up a level and then go under Storage and tap on Manage Storage. Here you will get a list of your apps and how much storage space you are using. Now if you tap on them you get a bit of a breakdown but usually not too much. Just Documents & Data. So I can see only very little documents and data is being used. So most of that is actually for the size of the app itself.
However some other things give you more details. Under Photo & Camera gives you a bit of a breakdown there. You can see most of the space there is being used by Photo Library. If you go to even more apps, apps that actually have bits of media attached to them like for instance the Podcast app, I can actually look at some of the video podcasts I've got and not only can I see how much space they are taking up. I only have this one right here but I can actually swipe right to left and delete the content right from the Settings app here. I don't have to go into the individual app itself. The Video app does a similar thing as well.
Next at the top level here in Settings let's look at Privacy. Under Privacy you've got a list of all sorts of data that you can tap on and see which apps have access to them. So I can see, for instance, several apps here have asked for access to my Contacts and I've granted it. Usually when you first run an app it does this. I can revoke that access here. Or if I have said No here is where you can fix that. Sometimes you run into that if you say no I don't want to have this app to have access to my Contacts and then you find out that now the app doesn't work quite as you expected and you want to give it access. This is where you can do it.
You have various things here like which apps have access to your photos, your camera, all sorts of different information so you can go in and also you can look across or even to third party apps like Facebook and Twitter sometimes to see which ones have access to that.
Under Location Services you can see which apps have access to Location Services and all sorts of information about that. So if you look at all the arrows there a key for those is at the very bottom here. It tells you that a solid purple arrow means that it recently used your location, a grey one means that it has used it in the last twenty-four hours, and a hollow arrow uses geofence, which is when you are in a small area like a ballpark or a store it will kind of know you are in the store and perhaps even where you are in the store.
You can also give and revoke access for apps for when it has location access here.
The last one I want to show you to monitor your apps is go into Notifications. This tells you which apps can pop-up notifications on your screen and how they can do so. For instance if we just go into Phone here we can see how notifications appear, whether they are not there at all. Whether there are banners or alerts. We can see if the icon itself can have that number next to it. How many are shown in Notification Center, like the last five that kind of thing.
This is very useful especially if you play a lot of games you can go in and find that game that keeps notifying you of something and you don't really want it to bother you. You can turn off Notifications or tone them down as well, especially the sounds. You can for a lot of these turn off sounds so that perhaps a notification does pop-up but it does't actually make your phone buzz or make an audible sound when somethings happens. So you want to go through these and monitor your apps.
Notice that if you turn off Notifications completely then the app jumps down to this Do Not Include section at the bottom which means there are not notification settings for it. So only things where you actually have notifications turned on in some way are here at the top.
I have a lot of those Game Center numbers next to the icon so I want to turn that off and now I won't see that number there every time I look at the icon on the home screen.
One last way I want to show you how to monitor your apps is by going to go into the App Store and tapping Updates at the bottom right hand corner. Here you will see your updates. If you have everything set to Defaults it is going to automatically update apps which is fine and you can actually see the information about each of the app updates here. If you have that turned off then you would actually use this to manually update each app.
So what is great here is I can tap on these and see what is new in those versions. You have quite a big history here of these. So when you notice something has changed in an app or you notice that there is a blue dot next to an app you can now see what has changed.

Comments: 163 Responses to “iOS App Monitoring”

Richard Greene

10 years ago

Excellent summary of how to take control of what the iOS is doing for its users. There is far more effort from iOS 8 apps to get me to turn on some battery draining feature. I understand that the developer wants me to get the most benefit from his app, but it should be my decision. Thanks very much, Gary. As always.

bob weber

Really, really helpful. I've wondered if my battery was going out. Now it looks like a legion of apps are sucking out its vital body fluids.

Gary Ward

Thanks, always learn something with your lectures!
Are you going to have a book on IOS 8, I hope?

Gary Rosenzweig

There will be an updated version of My iPad for iOS 8 coming out very soon, yes.

Comments Closed.

iOS App Monitoring

Comments: 163 Responses to “iOS App Monitoring”

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