The “Other”section of your iPhone’s storage contains a wide variety of items. Its maximum reduction also allows you to restore a certain execution speed on your iPhone.
After using your iPhone for some time, it is normal for it to slow down. Sometimes it’s time to say goodbye to him and buy a new one, but there’s often something you can do to cheer him up. The solution might even be as simple as a little storage tidying up. Or rather, in the “Other”storage.
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to reach your iPhone’s memory limit and had to manually free some of it, you may already be familiar with the “Other”section. Otherwise, let’s first see what we’re talking about.
What is Other iPhone Storage?
The “Other”section is all you need to store your iPhone. This section puts things like system files or Siri voices. But it can be a bottomless memory pit, because of the cache. The cache stores the items needed to make apps or sites load faster the next time you open them. The cache collects data when you browse websites, watch videos, send messages with images or videos. The cache can easily come in and eat up all available storage.
To see how much space this Other section takes up, go to Settings > General > Storage [device]. After the calculation is completed, you will see a graph with different categories. The “Other”section is most often displayed in gray in the far right corner of the graph. If your “Other”section is taking up more space than it should, here’s what you can do to make it smaller.
Download Apps
Not to be confused with deleting an application. Unloading an application means deleting it from the device while preserving the data. In case you come to reinstall it. Use this feature especially if you have apps like Google Maps that take up a lot of space but store little data. To offload an app, go to Settings > General > [Device] Storage, then tap on the app to offload and then tap on “Upload App”.
Advice. In the Storage section, you’ll see a list of apps with a number next to the name indicating how much space each one takes up. This way you can view the apps that are using the most memory. Which can help decide which ones to unload.
Clear Safari cache and close tabs
If you use Safari frequently, your iPhone may be storing history and data that you simply don’t need anymore. To clear the Safari cache, go to Settings > Safari and select Clear History and Site Data. If you’re using a different browser, things are a little different, but the principle is the same.
Closing tabs also frees up memory on your device. You can control how Safari handles closing tabs by going to Settings > Safari > Close Tabs. You can continue to close tabs manually, or let Safari do so if the tab hasn’t been viewed in a day, a week, or a month.
Stop storing messages
By default, your iPhone saves all the text messages you send and receive… forever. This is handy if you need to find something in very old conversations, but annoying if you need storage space on your device. To stop this behavior, go to Settings, then Messages. Scroll down to Message History and click Save Messages. Change for 30 days or 1 year. A window will ask you if you want to delete messages older than this. Click “Delete”to do so.
Reset iPhone
If nothing works, the best way to get rid of the clutter in the Other section is to restart your iPhone. Harsh but effective.