Some apps are consuming hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes, of storage space on your iPhone or iPad, and the only way to get that back seems to be to delete the app.
I’m a bit of a cheapskate, and I go for the lowest storage option when I buy an iPhone. It’s far from ideal, but Apple charges far too much for what is a few dollars worth of storage.
But with a little curation, along with making use of my massive Dropbox, it’s no problem.
Until apps start eating up space like it’s free.
Check this out: Apple biggest flop? Not at all
Case in point, the Twitter app. Why is this taking up almost 2GB of space? I’m assuming this is a cache for things like profile pics and such, but it seems like a crazy amount.
But even if it isn’t, I’ve still got questions:
- Why is it that the only way for me to delete this is to, well, delete and reinstall the app?
- Why can’t I see what’s in the cache?
- Why can’t I set a limit on it?
This is part of what iOS is. There’s plenty of mystery, and stuff hidden behind firmly locked doors.
I get it that having a cache is important for apps, it allows a way to store data, and to not have to keep downloading the same thing the whole time, but not having limits on that, or at least a way to flush it regularly, seems odd.
Another example is that I have one of those brain-training game. The game is about 350MB, and over the past few weeks I’ve watched the cache exceed 500MB.
And while we are on the subject of storage space, another thing that eats space are the apps themselves.
Apps are huge.
Facebook, Dropbox, Uber, and Google Sheets are all over 200MB.
iMovie is 615MB.
Even a super-basic app like Yahoo! Mail is 200MB.
It’s all eating at your expensive space.
Of course, the biggest space monsters are photos and video (and, in my case, Audible audiobooks). But these I can curate, and either offload onto external storage, or download them when needed.
