Tensorshare’s iCareFone is designed to take the place of iTunes for managing all the data stored on your iPhone. It’s capable of accessing, editing, and backing up everything from contacts and calendar appointments to photos and videos. It’s significantly smaller and more focused than iTunes, making it a little easier to get things done, but it’s not without its quirks. The application is also capable of some things that iTunes just doesn’t do, like fixing some iPhone crashes or identifying ways to free up storage space.
Installing iCareFone
You can download a free trial of iCareFone from Tensorshare’s website. Installing it on your computer only takes a few moments.
Using iCareFone
Once you launch the app, you’ll be asked to plug your iPhone into your computer if it’s not already connected. Once the phone is connected and unlocked, you’ll get a quick synopsis of your phone’s current status.
At the bottom of the screen you can access the categories that contain iCareFone’s many different functions. We’ll go through section by section to see what features are available to us.
File Manager
The file manager feature allows you to inspect the many files on your phone, including contacts, photos, calendar entries and more. You can access a specific type of file by clicking on its icon. You’ll need to turn off iCloud Sync for Contacts and Calendar events before you can play with any of those features, however.
Contacts
The contacts pane is fully-featured, allowing you to manipulate contacts with as much detail as macOS’s own Contacts app. Unfortunately, it’s limited in all the same ways that app is. Bulk editing is tricky, and you can’t make groups that transfer to your phone. However, you can edit all the fields available in each contact with changes reflected immediately on the phone’s contact database.
Music
The music tab gives users a lot of flexibility when it comes to adding or removing music files from their device. Because it functions much more like Finder and much less like iTunes, you don’t need to fiddle with sync settings or carefully curate your iTunes library. Simply click “Import,” select the files you want to add to your device, and you’re done. Music can also be transferred directly from your phone to your PC or Mac.
Photos
This tab exposes all the photos stored on your device and in your iCloud Photo Stream. You can download and backup anything that’s currently on your phone, saving full-sized JPGs to your phone or adding new images to your Camera Roll from your computer.
Apps
Here you can view all the apps you have installed on your phone. Apps can be removed in bulk by ticking their check boxes and clicking the “Uninstall” button, which will be a timesaver for users looking to clear out their storage space.
Calendar
The Calendar section makes your calendar events visible as a list that can be sorted by time, title or notes. Calendar events can be exported as Excel, text or XML files, which can be highly efficient for working with calendar data outside the Apple ecosystem. You can also import new calendars to your phone this way or add individual events. Again, bulk deletion is available by ticking the checkboxes for events and using the “Delete” button.
Notes
Like the other sections, the Notes pane allows you to view the Notes stored on your phone. If you have iCloud Sync enabled, you won’t see too many notes, since they mainly exist on Apple’s servers. That makes this portion of the app less useful than other sections, but you can still add and export your notes as needed.
Clean & Speedup
The Clean & Speedup tab offers a few options for cleaning out your phone’s storage. The section scans your phone to get a sense of what kind of files you have on your device, then returns a report detailing the files that can be removed.
It’s not completely clear what kind of files fall into each category. “Junk Files” are probably files that are no longer used, and “Temporary Files” likely includes cached content. Clicking on “Photos” will bring you to the Photo pane of File Manager, and the “Apps” section brings you to the Apps pane. Large Files is unique here and identifies files above a certain threshold for deletion.
Backup & Restore
Backup and restore is by far the most useful feature of iCareFone. It not only backs up the standard iPhone data you’d expect, like contacts and photos, but it digs deep for app data. This includes stuff like ebooks, email attachments, WhatsApp messages and a ton more. And while iTunes also backs up most of this data, it doesn’t allow you to select which apps you back up or access the data from your computer’s hard drive. iCareFone allows for both.
Ads Remove
This pane simply shows you instructions for installing Tensorshare’s iPhone ad-blocking software.
Fix iOS Stuck/Repair Operating System
These two options are designed to help recover your iPhone from a crashed state. I wasn’t able to test this personally, but it could be useful for managing a troublesome iPhone.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to ditch iTunes, iCareFone is a good alternative. It provides many of the same features as well as a few more, but the user interface could use a little more polish. You can download the Mac or Windows version of iCareFone from the Tensorshare website. iCareFone
