iPhone 5s storage problems
Jillstar
Posts: 1,273 Forum Member
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Hi,
I've had my iPhone 5s for a couple of months now, but recently it told me I didn't have much storage left (my phone is a 16GB). When I connected it to my phone it said the majority of my storage 7.44GB is taken up by 'other'.
I use iTunes Match to listen to my music via wifi so I don't think my music should be taking up much space. I have updated my iPhone once since I bought it. I had an iPhone 4 before and it took longer than a couple of months for that to be full. My iPad also doesn't appear to have problems.
How do I go about getting more space and finding out what is taking up all this 'other' space?
I've had my iPhone 5s for a couple of months now, but recently it told me I didn't have much storage left (my phone is a 16GB). When I connected it to my phone it said the majority of my storage 7.44GB is taken up by 'other'.
I use iTunes Match to listen to my music via wifi so I don't think my music should be taking up much space. I have updated my iPhone once since I bought it. I had an iPhone 4 before and it took longer than a couple of months for that to be full. My iPad also doesn't appear to have problems.
How do I go about getting more space and finding out what is taking up all this 'other' space?
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Comments
It's not necessarily missing space though. I've known people to have several GBs in stored messages, for example. That shows up as 'other' in iTunes but on the phone itself you can see just how much space it's taking up.
It won't delete texts automatically, but you can delete entire conversations just by swiping from right to left.
As I say, you can keep an eye on how much space apps are taking up in Settigs > General > Usage.
Annoyingly, there's no way to clear the cache of data from apps on iOS. But they can grow in size quite a lot beyond the initial app size. For example, Instagram on my phone is taking up 209MB. The app itself is only 19.7MB, and the rest is 'documents and data'. You can get a lot of space back by deleting and reinstalling the app.
It's quite annoying because you can easily clear he cache on android devices. I think it's an iOS7 thing because I never had this problem with iOS6.
This problem isn't new to iOS 7. Another problematic app is Facebook, it seems to cache a-lot of content and can easily build to 1GB+ of storage space use after a while. Delete the app and re-install to clear their caches is the only solution.
Yeah I know. As usual, Apple like to keep things as simple as possible, and many users won't know anything about what it means to clear the cache or even how to check whether an app is taking up a lot of space (as shown in this thread, really). But that simplicity is a bit of an annoyance for people who know what they're doing.
Deleting and reinstalling the app only takes a minute, but obviously a 'clear cache' button like on Android devices would be preferable.