iOS 10: Four things you should do before downloading Apple's new software

iOS 10 is about to land. It will bring with it a whole host of new features – as well as some small things that you'll need to change.

The update includes a range of changes to the way that your phone works that you'll want to be ready for.

The new features are mostly useful. But they are largely good because they allow you to find more of what's on your phone – and that might not be all good.

Notifications

Notifications are now better, bigger, more interactive and much improved. But that also means that stray ones that you don’t want are bigger and harder to ignore, too – and have a tendency to block up the screen so that you can’t do the stuff you want.

To fix that problem, it’s a good idea to get rid of any unimportant notifications by heading to the relevant part of the Settings app.

Hide anything that just badgers you – games that send you notifications to remind you to play them, for instance – and anything else that’s annoying. For the stuff that’s not too important but that you still don’t want to miss, you can remove them from notification centre but not hide them entirely – that way, they’ll pop up in your lock screen but not stay in the notifications pane that you drag down from the top.

Clear out your apps

Apps can do a lot more now – with new ways of hooking to the rest of the phone, they’ll appear in other places like the home screen, the lock screen and within Siri.

That’s great, so long as you like the apps you have. If you don’t, then it’s worth getting rid of them – saving space as well as the bother of having them appear when you don’t want to.

Pick the important widgets

On that same point, it’s worth deciding what apps you want on your widgets screen. This page – accessed by swiping right on your lock screen – can be the most useful thing in the world or the most pointless, depending what’s in there.

You can add or remove apps by clicking on the edit button at the bottom of the screen. Probably the best way to find out what you want to use is to add everything at first – then see what you find useful, and get rid of the stuff that isn’t.

Photos

The new Photos app uses artificial intelligence to pick out details of your pictures and collect them into themed memories so you can look back on them. Which is all well and good – but a bit of a shame if they end up being filled with screenshots and accidental selfies.

So it’s a good idea to get rid of the rubbish that fills up the camera roll ready for looking back on all your nicer memories.

Fortunately, Apple provides a really easy way to do that. If you head to the Photos app and click into albums, you can find a folder especially for screenshots and selfies, which you can delete. Then you can scroll through everything else to find other pictures you’d rather be rid of, if you wish.