“Offloading Apps” could be preventing you from getting severe weather warnings

If you are anything like me, you depend on your phone as one of your three methods to get severe weather information. However, a recently new feature with Apple’s iPhone could be preventing you from getting life saving information from the apps you trust.

During the recent round of severe weather, I noticed that one of my go-to apps was not alerting me when watches and warnings were issued for my area. After a little investigation, I found that I had turned on the iPhone’s “Offload Apps” feature a few weeks ago when I was running low on storage space. The feature is simple, it takes the apps you use the least and removes them from your phone while keeping any data you saved in the app. If you need the app, all you have to is click the icon and it will be re-installed. However, when an app is offloaded, you no longer get alerts from the app. I did a quick check and found a little cloud icon next to the app icon which means the app was offloaded.

Turning Off “Offloading Apps” Feature

After missing out on severe weather alerts from an app I trust, I decided the offloading app feature needed to be turned off. Here is the step by step instructions on how to disable the iPhone feature.

First, enter the iPhone settings menu. Scroll down to the “ITunes and App Store” menu

Second, scroll to the bottom of the menu and turn off the option “Offload Unused Apps”

With that you have successfully turned off the offload apps feature. Hopefully, this will ensure that you are getting alerts from weather apps that you trust and keep you from missing out on life-saving information. As always we recommend you have three methods of obtaining weather information just for situations like this.

We invite you to join the discussion on weather apps at TalkWeather.com