Why the heck does my iPhone keep doing this?

[oxcat1]

For about the last 6-8 months, pretty much every time I go to use one of my 'not everyday' apps, the iPhone has to download the damn thing before I can use it! Any idea why?

Photo attached. The little clouds show the apps will need to be downloaded before use. The trouble is that I am often not in a WiFi-area when I want to use the app, so it is essentially useless until I get home.

I have selected each app in turn and downloaded it, but then a few months later, when I want to use it again, it's in the cloud again, and useless.

Any idea why, and how to stop it?

This happened to me and I had to turn off “Offload unused apps” in Settings > General> Storage! Hope that helps :D

Yes, I would suspect that Offload unused apps is active. So the app you have not used for a while has been removed but it's data kept so when you try to use it the app downloads again.

See the cloud symbol to the left of the app name, that means the app is not on the phone but is in the cloud storage.

That was turned on! Thank you. Hopefully that will help. Was so annoying before!