Free up space on your iPhone

I often have storage issues due to the amount of apps, music, pictures and videos I keep on my iPhone. Lack of storage space can prevent me from taking photos or downloading apps, but it can also lead to apps not working as they should or messages not being received. WhatsApp needs 100MB of storage space to work properly, whereas you can continue to send and receive messages with Vyke with minimal storage space on your device. Here are a few tricks to help you free up space on your iPhone to optimise how your device and apps work, including Vyke.

Check which apps are taking up most memory

Open Settings and click General > Storage & iCloud usage > Manage storage to check how much storage you have available, and also to see which apps are using the most storage. Or have a look at Apple support for other ways to check your device storage.

Move photos and videos from your device

Hopefully you already backup photos and videos to your computer or hard drive regularly. Consider deleting older or less frequently used photos or videos from your device, after ensuring they are backed up.

Delete, delete, delete

Sounds simple but we all have loads of apps, music and photos on our phones that we don’t use. You can view the amount of storage space being used on your device by following the steps above and delete apps directly from Settings, or hold down the app icon and click the delete button that appears. For photos and music open the relevant app and individually or bulk delete.

Delete ‘documents & data’

While I don’t spend too much time on Facebook I find that when I do the app expands rapidly when I look at a few photos or videos. It does clean itself from time to time (which removes unused data and documents stored locally) but not nearly often enough. Facebook is not the only culprit here – Mail, Twitter and Instagram all cache data locally (although Instagram does clean itself frequently). Again, you can manage your storage through your phone Settings, then click on an individual app to see how much documents & data storage is being used. I find that deleting Facebook can free up 300-400MB of storage space. Although, be careful what you delete as you can’t retrieve any media once you’ve deleted the app.

Manage WhatsApp better

If you don’t want to lose all your WhatsApp media by deleting the app, you can try individually deleting photos & videos, not automatically saving photos to your device and even deleting older or unused threads. A little more time managing apps can free up plenty of extra space.

Use iCloud

Apple’s iCloud comes with 5GB of free storage space but you can purchase more space depending on your requirements. Compared to other online storage options it’s quite cheap. You can then move less frequently used items, like older photos or videos, to iCloud but still access them when you need them over data/Wi-Fi.

Rent a movie

This is an excellent ‘trick’ to free up space on your iPhone. Open the iTunes app and search for a large file to download. You must make sure that the file you are downloading far exceeds the amount of available storage space (I normally use one of the Lord of the Rings movies as I know my phone will never have the space required to download it successfully). Click to ‘rent’ your chosen movie and your phone will clear as much space as it can in an unsuccessful attempt to download it. When the error message is returned click ‘Settings’. I do this regularly and can free up anywhere from 100 to 500MB on my device. This basically forces your device to clean unused data & documents but it’s a helpful tip. Apple should really introduce this as a feature not a workaround.