Free up iPhone Space

jack presley

http://www.cultofmac.com/420988/simple-iphone-trick-frees-up-storage-space-you-didnt-know-you-had/

On first look, the story was issued on 1 April so I was wary but after reading some of the comments I gave it a go and went from 1.6GB free to 2.2GB.

adox

jack presley wrote: »

http://www.cultofmac.com/420988/simple-iphone-trick-frees-up-storage-space-you-didnt-know-you-had/

On first look, the story was issued on 1 April so I was wary but after reading some of the comments I gave it a go and went from 1.6GB free to 2.2GB.

Tried this and it does indeed work. Tried on my 5s and it initially went from 1.1GB free to 1.3GB so a slight improvement.

When I returned to my home screen I noticed that the Safari app was darkened out a little and had the word cleaning under it. This happened one by one with memory hungry apps, Facebook, Flickr etc and now I'm at 2.1GB free.

Must be clearing the cache or something like that. Certainly more convenient than the usual uninstalling and re-installing the apps one by one to free space.

Sad Professor

It's kind of an unintentional April Fool's joke in that the author doesn't really understand what he's doing and how pointless it is.

All this does is clear performance-improving caches, which the system will automatically delete when necessary anyway. Doing it before it's necessary is silly as that space is already effectively free and clearing it will just delete frequently used content that will probably have to be downloaded again, slowing performance and draining battery life in the process. So the increase in free space is probably temporary at best and you are sacrificing short-term performance to achieve it. And all for free space that you don't currently need and which the system will automatically make available when you do.

whiterebel

Freed up a gig for me after 4 attempts.

And then Sad Prof spoiled it........:p

GhostInTheRuins

I wouldn't be surprised if doing this also removes photos and music synced from iTunes. I've seen my phone do that before when short of space.

In all honesty though it's about time Apple introduced a system wide way of deleting caches from apps of your choice. Some apps can build up ridiculous sized caches (eg Spotify) that you can only remove by deleting and re-downloading the app.

Sad Professor

GhostInTheRuins wrote: »

I wouldn't be surprised if doing this also removes photos and music synced from iTunes. I've seen my phone do that before when short of space.

It will clear cached music. That is music you have recently streamed. But it won't delete music you have specifically downloaded/synced or made available for offline listening. And I assume if you are using iCloud Photo Library with the save space option turned on it will delete any full size photos on the device. But like music, these can just be downloaded again when needed.

In all honesty though it's about time Apple introduced a system wide way of deleting caches from apps of your choice. Some apps can build up ridiculous sized caches (eg Spotify) that you can only remove by deleting and re-downloading the app.

This wouldn't solve the problem. The reason some app caches aren't cleared by the system is because the app is lying to iOS about what is cached data and choosing to manage the clearing of it by itself - which is fine when it does it well but when it doesn't you have a problem.

I've experienced this with numerous apps. A good app developer will fix the problem, a bad one won't.

jack presley

Sad Professor wrote: »

I've experienced this with numerous apps. A good app developer will fix the problem, a bad one won't.

Unfortunately even the larger organisations have apps that don't do it. I regularly have to delete/re-install Twitter and news apps from BBC, RTE, CNN, Sky News etc.