A frozen iPhone game is a huge bummer. You lose your spot and have to start a level over again, get thrown out of your enjoyment, and feel angry that technology has failed you. Thankfully, there’s several steps you can try to make things run more smoothly on your phone and prevent the game from freezing again.

Restart the App

The simplest answer when an app freezes is to restart the app. To do this, double tap your home button. You’ll be able to swipe sideways through windows of every app your phone currently has open. Find the frozen game, and swipe it up. That will close the app and restart it. Hit the home button again to go back to the home screen, and then re-open the app.

Update the App

It’s easy to keep clicking “later” when an app tells you it has an update available. Forget to update for too long, though, and the app might start misbehaving. Sometimes the version you have downloaded has a glitch that the company has since fixed, therefore by installing the update the app now runs smoother.

Head to the App store and then click on “Updates” in the bottom right corner of your screen. Scroll through the list of available updates until you find the game that keeps freezing, then update it. Playing the updated version should be much smoother.

Update Your Operating System

Maybe the reverse problem is true: Your game is updated but your iOS isn’t. Developers change their games to be compatible with the latest versions of iOS, and if the two are out of sync, things could potentially go wrong. Go to Settings, then General, and then click “Software Update.” Once that’s done, try playing the game again. If it was a compatibility issue, having both the game and iOS updated to their current versions will solve it.

Free up Some Storage Space

Sometimes a phone with nearly full storage won’t run as quickly as a phone with lots of space. You can attack a storage problem in several ways. First, put your photos somewhere other than in your phone’s storage. Cloud back-ups or external hard drives are great options.

Image via Flickr by liewcf

Next, clear any old text message threads that are taking up space on your phone. Then, find out which apps take up the most storage space on your phone. Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCoud Usage. Under Storage, tap Manage Storage. You’ll see a long list of apps with the biggest ones first. Delete and re-install these to clear out the unwanted data.

Reset Your Phone

Before you try this, turn your phone off and back on again to see if that helps. Doing a factory reset is always a last resort, as you have to back up your data before you can wipe the phone clean. When something seriously glitchy is happening with an iPhone, sometimes a reset is the only thing you can do. Try to reset your iPhone to eliminate any stray data or malicious apps that are preventing it from working properly.

Once you’ve done the factory reset, you can restore your phone’s photos, text messages, notes and the likes. Just select “Restore from iCloud Backup” (or “Restore from iTunes Backup” if you backed up on your computer), and your phone will be back to your original settings. After this, give the glitchy app or game again to see if this solved the issue.

Not every app is created equal, and some are more prone to freezing than others. Most of the time, one of these steps will fix whatever issue was causing the game to freeze, leaving you with a clean playing field from now on.

As a pretty active Instagram user, it’s safe to say I check my Instagram feed a good number of times throughout the day and plenty lots of time on the app. Recently stumbled upon by Cult of Mac, a neat little program by the name of Feeday adds your Instagram feed to the notification center of your iOS device. While this may not seem that significant — it definitely saves on time taking to constantly open and reload your feed right within the Instagram application.

To get started all you need to do is head on over to the App Store and download Feeday, which is free to download with in-app purchases. After that you’ll want to login with your Instagram account in the app, add the widget by opening your notification center, go to the “Today” view, tapping “Edit” and make the Feeday widget viewable.

Quick version:

• Download Feeday from the App Store (free).
• Open the app and connect your Instagram account.
• Add the widget in your notification center.
• Boom! You’re good to go.

As noted by the folks at Cult of Mac, the free version only supports a maximum of three thumbnails, while the in-app purchase ($0.99) allows you to view a total of 9 images. The only caveat is that you can’t like, comment, or share any pictures — the only thing you can do is simply view them. All in all, it’s a decent little widget if you follow a lot of people on Instagram or find yourself checking it often.

With Apple’s over-hyped music streaming service finally released, all users are eligible for a free three month trial. That being said though, there is a single catch. After the three month trial is finished, users will automatically be enrolled to pay the full price depending if they choose the family bundle ($14.99/month for 6 people) or the single user price ($9.99/month). Luckily though, there is a pretty simple way to get around that just by following the steps below.

1. Open the Apple Music app, tap the Profile Icon in (upper left corner) and select “View Apple ID”.
2. Enter in your Apple ID information and you’ll go to your “Account Settings” page. From there look for the “Subscriptions” section and select “Manage”.
3. Select the option that says Apple Music and turn the automatic renewal button to off.

After those three simple steps, you are all good to go!

On Thursday night, Apple published a support document, acknowledging that the company is aware of the iMessage bug causing Apple devices to respring or reboot. The document includes a temporary fix and states that a software update will be published soon to fix this issue.

The issue, also known as Effective Power, is caused by the way Unicode decodes characters. Resulting in a memory overload, causing the device to respring or reboot. The issue goes a step further for many users, as the bug restricts certain users form being able to open Messages.app on their devices.

Apple is aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update. Until the update is available, you can use these steps to re-open the Messages app.

According to Apple, to temporarily fix this issue follow these steps:

Step 1: Invoke Siri by either pressing and holding the home button or saying “Hey Siri” when your device is plugged in. Once Siri is present, ask Siri to, “read my unread messages.”

Step 2: Siri will attempt to read the message. (Though, it is impossible to read unicode in English.) Siri will then ask you if you would like to reply, say yes.

Step 3: It doesn’t matter what you say. The part that matters is the message being sent.

Step 4: Once the message is sent. You should then be able to open your messages app as normal. You then want to delete the entire thread containing the Effective Power message, or you may go into the thread, tap and hold the Effective Power message, tap more and then delete the message.

The document states that this only a temporary fix and that a software update will be pushed out soon (presumably iOS 8.3.1 or iOS 8.4, which is still in beta stages).

Now that Muscle Nerd has officially deemed the iOS 8.1.1 jailbreak from TaiG safe, you can now upgrade to the new iOS 8 update and jailbreak your device yet again. Reddit user, michaelbui, has written a pretty straight forward and simple guide on upgrading to iOS 8.1.1 and re-jailbreaking your device if you’re running into any trouble or just need some help along the way. If so, be sure to check out the following steps below.

1. Download iOS 8.1.1 from iTunes (or use this website).
2. Restore your device to iOS 8.1.1 and set it up as a new device.
3. Turn off Find My iPhone, the pass code/Touch ID, auto lock and turn on Airplane Mode.
4. Download TaiG jailbreak.
5. After you have downloaded the TaiG jailbreak, open up the program and plug your iOS device in.
6. There should be two boxes checked, uncheck the second box which is the third party Chinese App Store. After that, click the “X” to exit the window that pops up.
7. Click the jailbreak button, and let it process and jailbreak your device. It will reboot your device a few times, so don’t worry about that.
8. If all goes right, you’ll see Cydia on your spring board. Open Cydia let your device reboot after preparing the file system.

Once all is said and done, michaelbui suggests that you install system-cmds from Cydia and you’ll be good to go. Enjoy!

[Reddit]