Make sure your iPhone is up to date

Another of the fundamental tips to ensure that there are no software problems on the iPhone is to make sure that you are running the latest version of iOS compatible with it. It is possible that in the version that your iPhone currently has there is a bug that prevents, among other things, the correct installation of applications. And if so, you will find the solution to it in newer versions.

If you go to Settings> General> Software Update, the iPhone will connect to Apple servers to check for the latest version of iOS that exists for the device, so you will need to have an internet connection. If finally the problem you had was due to this, you should not have problems again when the terminal has been completely updated.

Check your internet connection

As you probably already know, downloading applications on the iPhone requires the internet, since it is the way your device has to communicate with the servers where these apps are hosted. It is always advisable to do it via WiFi, so in Settings> WiFi you must make sure that the connection is correctly established.

If you use mobile data you will also have to ensure it in Settings> Mobile data. Normally you have a lower speed than WiFi and if you also have a limited data rate and it has been exhausted, the speed will be even slower and this could cause problems when downloading applications.

Of course, keep in mind that incidents may have arisen in any of the connections. Therefore, it is recommended that you carry out a speed test and contact your operator in order to notify them of the problem and that they offer you a solution, since it could be a temporary breakdown in the area in which you are located or a problem of the router that demands to change it.

You may not have enough space

It seems obvious, but sometimes we forget that applications take up a certain amount of space on the phone. Depending on the app, it can even occupy several GB of the iPhone's memory, so it is advisable to have enough space for it. Normally, an indicator appears in the App Store when downloading the application indicating that there is not enough space available, but if this is not the case, you can check it yourself in Settings> General> iPhone Storage.

If you have little free memory left and you need to install the application, you will have to find a way to free up space. The methods that are usually more effective for this are to eliminate other apps that you do not use, photos and videos that you already have safe in a backup in the cloud, music, podcast... Once you have enough space you can install the application in question without problems.

Problems derived from the application

If at this point you have not been able to solve anything, it is probably not your iPhone that is having problems, but something related to the App Store and/or the app in question that is causing the problem. For this reason, we recommend that you read the following points in which we investigate these possible problems.

Application incompatibility

Fortunately or unfortunately (rather the latter), not all applications work on all iPhones and operating systems. This can be seen in the application's own file in the App Store, which will say what devices and/or versions of iOS it can work with.

Normally there can be two circumstances that make your phone incompatible with the app, the first being that the app has become obsolete and the developers have not updated it to remain compatible with newer iPhones and operating systems. The version history of this is also found in the Apps Store file, and you can even see how long ago the last one was launched. If it says “more than 1 year ago”, it is possible that it is already an obsolete application and that it will probably not be updated again.

The other possibility is that the app is up to date and it is your iPhone that is not compatible. Either because it's an app that requires hardware that your phone doesn't have, in which case you couldn't do anything, or it requires a version of iOS that you don't have installed. This last case is easily solved and that is, if you did not follow an advice that we gave you earlier in this post, you should go to Settings> General> Software update and install the most recent version of iOS for your iPhone.

The app may no longer exist

There is a curiosity in iOS and that is that if you have downloaded an application that has already been removed from the App Store, you can keep it on the phone and it can continue to be fully functional. Although, yes, you will not receive updates. And although it will not appear in the app store in the search engine, it can appear in the list of downloaded applications.

If the app you're trying to download comes from that section of the App Store, that may be the reason why you can't download it. Normally the apps removed from the store end up even being deleted from that list, but for a while they remain. Unfortunately in this case there would be no solution for you to have it again, but you already know at least the cause. What you can perhaps do is visit the developers page in case there is a new app re-editing the functions of the one that has been removed.

The App Store may be crashed

Just as a physical store can collapse if it is full of people, this also happens on the internet. Apple has servers perfectly prepared to support millions of users downloading content simultaneously, but it is not ruled out that at any given moment there may be a certain collapse that makes the download slower than usual or even impossible.

Related to this there are also other problems in the servers that make the App Store not be provided normally. This can be consulted from a website enabled by Apple in which the status of its services is reported. If you find that there are problems, unfortunately there is nothing you can do but wait. Luckily, these types of incidents are usually solved quickly, so probably in a matter of a few minutes you can be downloading apps without problems.