Change the default apps

Want to swap Safari for Chrome? In iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, you can!

Apple’s iOS and iPadOS apps are great, but they aren’t always the best choice for everyone. That’s why the App Store is filled with alternatives: Carrot Weather (and until Apple bought it, Dark Sky) as alternatives to Apple’s own Weather; Fantastical instead of

Calendar; Firefox instead of Safari, and so on. But while Apple was happy to let you install your chosen alternatives, it kept its own apps as the default – so if you clicked a link, it’d open in Safari; if you clicked an ‘email us’ button, it’d launch

Mail. That’s changed in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.

Simple, not Siri

It’s only changed a little bit, though. For now, you can only change the defaults for two kinds of app: your web browser and your email app. In the longer term, we’d expect to see the ability to swap out the defaults for other things, so for example it’d be good to swap Calendar with Fantastical, Reminders with your favourite to-do app and so on.

As you can see, swapping the default mail and browser apps is simple. Unfortunately, getting them to stay swapped right now is a little trickier. There’s a glitch that means the apps often revert to the system defaults after a software update, and we’ve found that Siri flatly refuses to respect our email choices: when we ask her to send an email, she always wants to do it with the default iPad Mail app. CARRIE MARSHALL

JARGON BUSTER Default apps are the apps your iPhone or iPad is set up to use automatically: Mail for email, Safari for web browsing and so on. GENIUS TIP! Don’t delete Mail if you want to keep using Siri Shortcuts such as “Send an email to…”. For now, Siri doesn’t recognise thirdparty mail apps.

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to change the default apps on iPhone and iPad YOU’LL NEED iOS/iPadOS 14 For the time being, you can’t change the default calendar app to use a third-party option such as Fantastical.