PHONES can become pretty sluggish when they’re clogged with too much stuff – and the iPhone is no exception.
With so many apps, texts, videos, photos and everything else, it’s easy to eat through your storage pretty quickly.
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You might be surprised how much space is gobbled up by unknown bits and bobs, like small cache files from browsing the internet.
These are tiny stashes of data, like cookies, which are meant to make things load quicker, but overtime they can build up into a huge pile.
Thankfully, Apple has developed useful ways to clear this “other” data from your iPhone.
And getting rid of it can help give your handset a much-needed speed boost.
What is using up my iPhone’s storage?
You can see exactly what’s taking up most of the space on your iPhone within the settings.
Just open the Settings, then go to General and iPhone Storage.
You’ll see everything saved in your Photos app – so videos as well – marked in red.
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Apps are indicated in orange, while iOS system data is yellow.
Green makes up messages and there are some other colours as well.
Pesky grey signals “system data”, aka “other”.
You can also see how much is used overall, and Apple even has some recommendations on how to clear storage.
Offload apps
One way you can claw back space on your iPhone is by offloading apps.
Don’t confuse this with a usual delete job – offloading allows you to remove the app while retaining any data associated with it.
This means you can reinstall the app at a later stage and carry on where you left off.
Within the iPhone storage section, simply select the app you want to offload.
You will see an Offload App button right there.
Be warned though, as Apple explains: “Reinstalling the app will reinstate your data if the app is still available in the App Store.”
In other words, if the app is pulled from the App Store while you’ve got it offloaded you won’t be able to reinstall it again.
Clear your web browser out
Whether you use Apple’s own Safari or another app like Chrome, they all keep hold of quite a bit of data.
Everything from cookies and streams of web history, to open tabs slow things down.
So, if you want to clear things out, head to Settings then find Safari.
Select Clear History and Website Data.
To stop yourself from accumulating loads of tabs, find the Close Tabs option.
From here, change to either After One Day, After One Week or After One Month, and your iPhone will do the work for you.
To clear data from, Chrome you’ll need to open the Chrome app itself.
Tap the three dotted menu in the bottom right, then scroll along to Settings.
Go to Privacy and security, then Clear Browsing Data.
Stop storing text messages
Text messages can also build up over the years – and let’s face it, many of them you’ve long forgotten about.
Thankfully, you can tell your iPhone to clear them out for you automatically every so often.
Within Settings, find Messages.
Scroll down to Keep Messages, then change the option to 30 Days or 1 Year.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
