It’s impossible to give your iPad a truly dramatic speed boost via software, as I recently explained. Even iPadOS 27 is so tightly bolted down that you can’t add or remove the system components that might help. Blame the platform’s iPhone origins, along with Apple’s decision to keep iPadOS a spin-off instead of a distinct entity.

What you can do is trim the fat, making your iPad as lean and mean as possible. In this piece, I’m going to zero in on some of the apps that might be causing you trouble, and why that is. You’ll pick up on a couple of themes here. Note that the newer your iPad is, the less impact you’ll see from deleting apps. In most circumstances, it’s only “ancient” iPads like my 2020 iPad Pro that might see a tangible difference.

Brand

Apple

Storage

256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB

Facebook

Everything that’s wrong with mobile apps

Putting aside arguments against privacy concerns, and algorithms steering culture into isolated bubbles, there’s an immediate practical problem with Facebook on iPads: bloat. While the app nominally requires about 489MB, that can balloon to 1 to 2GB or more once it builds up its cache for smoother performance. And since Meta is hellbent on cramming as many functions into the app as possible, such as AI, the Marketplace, and Snapchat-style video shorts, there’s no telling how much larger it’s going to get in the future.

This matters because of swap space. As a rule, your iPad needs at least 5GB free to ensure smooth operation, preferably 10GB or more. Facebook doesn’t take up as much room as some other apps, but on a 64 or 128GB iPad, deleting it can be a shortcut to preserving swap space while holding onto more essential apps, whether that means productivity tools or your favorite game. If need be, you can always log into Facebook via the web.

Facebook is also a busy app, not only pre-fetching media, but tracking your location and pestering you with notifications about the accounts you follow. With it gone, you’re removing a small slice of the background traffic that bogs down your iPad.

WhatsApp

A necessary evil?

Look, I get it — for millions of people around the world, WhatsApp is not only their texting app of choice, but their primary option for voice and video calls. I don’t rely on it that heavily, but I do use it to keep up with an EUC group in Alberta, and here in Ontario, I’ve got a group chat going with family members. For some of you, keeping the app installed on every device may be non-negotiable.

If nothing else, it’s important to be aware of how much storage WhatsApp can consume, which is potentially far worse than Facebook. If the app is set to automatically download photos and videos in chats, there’s no limit to how big it can get. It could actually eclipse the size of games like Resident Evil 4, or high-end productivity apps like Photoshop. For that reason, you should probably head to Settings -> Storage and data and toggle off every option under Media auto-download, then tap Manage storage to identify and delete files that might already be encroaching on swap space.

Auto-downloads can also available bandwidth. Photos aren’t a big deal, usually, but videos are large enough that if you’ve got other internet activities running (on your iPad or elsewhere), WhatsApp might slow them down.

News apps

Just be selective

Being in journalism, and wanting to stay informed about the world in general, I tend to accumulate a lot of news apps on my devices. Apart from Apple News, I’ve downloaded apps for everything from Reuters and the New York Times to custom RSS feeds.

By themselves, news apps don’t matter that much. But a collection of them can occupy a substantial footprint, and with a focus on breaking stories, they can be very aggressive about fetching data and pushing notifications. It’s actually those notifications that prompted me to clear house — I was often getting several alerts about the same event. You should have at least one or two news apps on your iPad, but there’s no sense dragging down performance (and your attention span) with overlapping content. For in-depth reading, you should just open up Chrome or Safari, taking advantage of their offline reading functions if you really want fodder for your commute.