After poor battery life, the next biggest complaint I hear from iPhone owners relates to storage space. Or, more specifically, running out of storage space.
Whatever you started out with will feel bounteous and near impossible to fill, but add a few games, take a few photos and videos, and soon you’re back is up against the wall.
But you can take charge of your storage space, hopefully having to put off buying a new iPhone with more storage capacity.
Must read: Ex-Apple employee solves infuriating iPhone notification bug… by buying a Samsung
The place to start on your storage cleansing journey is Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Here, not only will you get an overview of what’s eating up your storage (apps, system, photos, media, and other), but you can also do a deep dive into the apps that are using the most data.
Here I’m learning that I have too many photos (or memes) saved, too many audiobooks downloaded, been flying my drone a lot, and Twitter, YouTube, and WhatsApp, and Facebook are each taking almost a gigabyte of storage.
My iPhone space hogs
Tap on an app in the list and you get a deeper dive. Here I can delete the app and free up all the storage or offload the app and keep the documents and data on my iPhone.
Sometimes I get the ability to see the data that’s stored by the app and get the option to manage it (the DJI Fly app gives me this option).
The DJI Fly app lets me see what data is stored
Other apps don’t give me any way to delete the data beyond deleting the app. If I don’t want to delete the app then I’ll have to fire it up and see if there’s a way delete data or clear the cache.
In my example there was a Manage Storage feature in WhatsApp that let me delete videos, and I had some downloaded videos in YouTube. As for Twitter, I deleted and reinstalled the app and freed up a lot of space.
A recommendation that iOS is giving me is to offload unused apps and free up almost 8GB of space without losing data. I take iOS up on this. It’s just one click, so a no-brainer. If I have to download something massive again down the line, but I’ll live with that.
Apps that have been offloaded get a little cloud icon with a down arrow next to their name to indicate they need redownloading.
Offloaded app
This brought me back to having well over 10GB of space free, so that was good enough for me.
