Change the default apps in iOS 14
Want to swap Safari for Chrome? In iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, you can!
REQUIRES
iOS/iPadOS 14
YOU WILL LEARN
How to change the default apps on iPhone and iPad
IT WILL TAKE
5 minutes
APPLE’S iOS AND iPadOS apps are great, but they’re not 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 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 has changed in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.
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 favorite to–do app, and so on.
As you can see, swapping the default mail and browser apps is simple. But 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.