4 Easy Ways to Free up Space on Your iPhone

It seems every week there is something new and cool for you to try on your iPhone, but that can also be a problem. Particularly for those who own a device with less GB, adding lots of new apps can quickly chew up the amount of storage you have available. So how do you free up space on iPhone?

Before long your device will be packed full and you won’t be able to take pictures or download anything without deleting other things first. Here are a handful of steps to take to help make sure you iPhone’s available space isn’t busting at the seams.

Manage Your Available Space

The first thing you should do is give your storage a quick manual overhaul. From Settings, click General and then Storage & iCloud Usage. From here you can click Manage Storage, which will show you how much memory each app on your phone is using.

Scroll through the list of apps and simply delete those you never use. Don’t worry – any app you’ve previously paid for will still be available to download should you change your mind and want to reinstall it later.

The Manage Storage area is also a good way to gauge how much memory things such as photos and music are taking on your phone.

Pare Down Music and Photos

One tip for music lovers: If you use a streaming music service such as Spotify or Google Play and have songs available to listen to offline, make sure you don’t also have those same songs on your phone in other apps such as Apple Music. If so, you’re essentially using double the memory for the same song.

Also, photos can be a big memory hog, so consider going through the ones you have on your phone and deleting those you don’t want. For others that you want but don’t necessarily need on your phone, consider saving them to your computer or iCloud.

Do Some Housecleaning

Once you go through and delete any unnecessary apps, songs and photos, there are some other things you can do to free up space on iPhone.

Consider it housecleaning for your phone. This includes everything from deleting and reinstalling social media apps, deleting attachments in text messages, deleting any old podcasts or digital magazines you no longer need, or turning iCloud Photo Library off and then on again.

Each of these steps should clear up more space in your device’s storage.

Try the Two Towers Trick

One of the simplest and most effective tricks for clearing space on iPhones came from a clever user on Reddit.

The move is simple. Head to iTunes and attempt to rent a movie that has a file size larger than you have available on your phone. The user suggested The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but you can also use Star Wars: The Force Awakens, at 6.4 GB, which is conveniently right in the main menu under movies (at the time of writing).

Your device will then recognize when you don’t have enough memory and ask if you’d like to go to Settings. Click on Settings and you will suddenly have some of your storage freed up. Repeat the move multiple times and more space will open up. Users have reported going from 800 MB of free space all the way to 4.9 GB.

The move forces the device to get rid of inessential cache files, so it won’t delete anything you use on a regular basis. Follow these simple steps to free up memory on your iPhone, and you’ll be back downloading and installing the latest cool new apps in no time.