[Thanks to this article at iGeeksBlog for solving my problem. If the method I describe here doesn’t work for you, please visit their site. There you will find more solutions that I, luckily, didn’t need. Forthwith, what should you do when iOS 14 won’t let you delete apps?]
The Problem
About a week ago, I decided to delete an app from my iPad. It’s the start of college baseball season (Go Stanford!) and I use iScore to score the games. (iScore is a terrific product. Been using it for years. Usual disclaimers.) iScore is designed for baseball and softball at any level. In the major leagues it makes sense to keep a long list of players, moving them among teams due to trades, free agency, and other more obscure actions. In college, a player will be in the lineup for five years maximum (assuming injury gives them an additional year of eligibility). The easiest way to clear out everything is to delete the app and reinstall it.
I’m running iPadOS 14.4 on a 2016 vintage device. Apple made some “small” changes starting with iOS 14. Sadly, the company failed to update their website with this tidbit of crucial information.
The traditional way to delete an app is to long-press the icon, wait for them to start jiggling, then click the little X in the top left corner of the icon. But when I long-pressed the iScore icon, I got this:
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Oops. No jiggling. Worse, no X. I went looking and was lucky to find an article at iGeeksBlog that solved the problem.
The Solution is Not Obvious
What you need to do is not intuitive at all. Open the Settings menu, then find Screen Time:
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Click “Content and Privacy Restrictions, then look for this:
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If you click “iTunes & App Store Purchases” you’ll see this:
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But the Fix is Easy
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Apple hid such an essential item in this obscure place. But here we are. Hit the back button and turn off Content and Privacy Restrictions:
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Now when you long-press an icon, you’ll see this:
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What you do next should be obvious.
