Apple iPads and iPhones can fill up quickly, and you can't add extra storage space via a memory card. If you find yourself struggling for space on your iOS device, it might be time to get rid of the apps you don’t use, along with the resource-hungry apps that are draining your battery quicker than you’d like.

Since the arrival of iOS 10 – Apple’s latest firmware update – it’s now possible to uninstall six of the 39 pre-installed apps (GarageBand, iMovie, iTunes U, Keynote, Numbers and Pages) and free up space.

The other 33 can only be hidden, which means the icons will disappear from your home screen. By doing this you can wave goodbye to a whole host of pre-installed tools including Find My Friends, iBooks, News, Stocks, Voice Memos and the Apple Watch app.

How to remove iOS apps and files

The process is the same whether you’re hiding or uninstalling a pre-installed app on iOS – simply tap and hold your finger on the application’s icon on the home screen. Once the icons start wiggling around, you’ll see a small ‘X’ appear in the corner of the icon.

Tap the X, then Remove. If you delete a stock iOS app from your home screen by mistake, you can recover it easily by going to the App Store and typing its name into the search bar.

It’s worth noting that if you want to clear space on your iOS device, simply removing app icons from your home screen won’t make a big difference. As stock apps are an important part of Apple’s OS, you’re simply hiding them rather than deleting them for good.

If you’re dealing with a slugglish iPhone, it might be worth ordering your apps by file size and usage to see which other ones are worth uninstalling.