Storage is a big issue for iPhone owners. A 2015 survey revealed that 42% of iPhone users run out of space on their phones once a month or more.
As the Apple mobile device doesn’t have expandable storage options, such as a microSD card slot, you’re pretty much stuck with the storage space that you have.
The best option, other than just buying a new iPhone with bigger storage, is to make more space on your phone by making your apps much smaller. For most people, apps take up more space on their phones than any other type of media, so it’s a good place to start when you want to free up some space.
Which Apps Take Up the Most Room?
With the iPhone XS Max, iPhone XS, and iPhone XR, Apple added new technology called the A12 Bionic chip. This chip allows developers to create better apps and games with better graphics. However, better often means bigger and many of the best and most entertaining apps that you have on your iPhone are those that take up the most storage space.
Some of the apps taking up the most room on your device are games like Fortnite. The Epic Games battle royale title is played by 250 million people, many of them on mobile devices, and it takes up 1.5GB on iOS devices. Racing game Asphalt 8: Airborne also has brilliant graphics but it uses 1.5GB of space, but this can grow to more than 3GB when players download new content for the game.
Social media apps also take up huge amounts of space on your iPhone. Snapchat is one of the largest, as although the app takes up less than 100MB when you first install it, this figure will grow as you send and record photos and videos. That’s also what happens with Twitter, which is just over 100MB but can take up gigabytes of space the more you use it. The Facebook app for iOS is just under 500MB but may grow in size too.
How to Make iOS Apps Smaller?
Game developers know that space is a big issue for iPhone users as you are unable to expand the storage with a microSD card. So, they do try to make their apps smaller and more compact with updates.
This isn’t always possible as gaming apps will add new content and this will make the app take up more space on your iPhone, not less. However, to keep enjoying the game and what it offers, the best way to make it smaller may be to just get the updates as they’re released.
Making social media apps take up less space on your iPhone is much easier. Most social media apps take up that much space because of something called caching. Caching is when an app saves data, such as image or page data, to your device so that it will load quickly later. This is useful if you don’t want to wait minutes for a video to load but it may mean that you run out of iPhone storage space quickly.
To fix the issue, delete the cached files from the app. This article about iPhone storage space explains how to delete cached files in Snapchat. You can do this in the app’s settings and it is easy to do, whether you have much technical knowledge or not. You can also delete the Twitter and Facebook cache by going into the iOS apps and going to settings. Deleting the cache could give you several gigabytes of space on your iPhone.
How to Uninstall Apps You Don’t Need
Another good way to make space on your iPhone is to delete apps that you don’t use or need. The average mobile user has between 60 to 90 apps on their phone, but you may not use them every single day. So, to get more storage space, you could just delete some of them.
To find out how much you use each app, you can go to your iPhone’s battery settings. In the battery usage section, you’ll see a little clock and by clicking it, it will tell you how much time you’ve spent using an app over 24 hours or in the week. If you haven’t used an app for very long or have logged no minutes in the app, you could delete it to get more space.
Until Apple decides to launch a portable iPhone hard drive or make iPhones with more storage space affordable, iPhone users will have to think of smart ways to save space. However, no that you have some ideas, you may have much more room on your phone.
