Engineered Eloquence

The Nicety of a Clean Install

Generally speaking, every time I get a new phone, I try to start from scratch. This approach gives me the ability to think again what I’m prioritizing in my use of the tool: what apps I install, how I set up my home screen, perhaps even interrogate why I decided something different in the past. But it has been getting harder to do a truly clean install given the demands inherent in the technologies of the modern age.

As an aside, I know I don't need to start over every time; it isn't necessary in the same way it used to be, when operating systems slowly gathered cruft and a fresh install would clear that all out. I’m sure mobile operating systems have areas that are nice to clear every so often, but the nature of it is obfuscated from the user.

I install apps on my Mac and I know that the app has more than the package that launches it (system files, preferences, etc.) that will need to be cleared out eventually. I install apps on my phone and the nature of the OS paradigm leads me to believe that deleting the app is enough.

As an aside to this aside, I am a serial app downloader on iOS, so if there is cruft that comes along with that behavior, I’m glad I’m oblivious to it.

Perhaps it is now a self-imposed cruft; too many apps I no longer use, the settings I wanted to change but never bothered, the new features of an OS that were hampered or ignored by choices made in previous versions.

That last one is the main reason I like the fresh install: updates to the onboarding experience, the Home Screen defaults, changes to individual apps and settings, all of which I may never see or use because I am coming from a daily workflow and state that was dictated by my last phone or the last version of iOS. Apple learned things that they improved since last time; have I not learned a thing in the interim?

Funny enough, Apple must be thinking along the same lines because there will soon be an option to restore Control Center to a default state. As I got into iOS 18, I noted that Control Center was a completely different arrangement from my preferences in iOS 17. Some of things a natural byproduct of the update, but it felt like more than that.

My first inclination was to go to settings and remove items I didn’t need, but that interface had changed too. This dynamic led me to think about starting over, wiping my phone and reinstalling the fresh OS, but it makes little sense to wipe my phone just to reset one feature.

The nature of iCloud has also made it harder to start fresh. When you start off in any modern Apple OS, you are asked for your iCloud credentials and even if you don’t restore from a backup, there are plenty of things that sync over from previous versions, previous decisions that may no longer feel like they fit your current state.

Some of these things are life savers, like Health data and text messages; I remember the days before some of these things automatically backed up and synced and the move to a new phone could spell data loss (and did for me a few times). But some things that sync end up just being a morass of bad decisions that I may never get around to cleaning up, like old and obsolete Shortcuts or years of unkempt Safari bookmarks.

So as of right now, I’ve just been dealing with the idiosyncrasies of an in-place update and I look forward to the time when I get a fresh install. Along the way, I’ll focus efforts on cleaning up the self-imposed cruft I’ve learned to just deal with and await the ability to reset to default some of the aspects of the system without a full refresh.