Like any other operating system, iOS gets cluttered over time with junk files and app cache. Now I don’t believe this makes my iPhone slow all the time. But there comes a day when you really want to reclaim that space for productive use. For me, it was to install Call of Duty on my iPhone.
I needed about 2GB of space and I only had 682MB left. But after a few hours, I was able to recover the unwanted space on my iPhone and play the game I wanted. Here is a brief documentation on how I was able to delete up to 3GB of junk files on my iPhone. I’m sure it will help you, whether today or tomorrow.
Let’s start with the beginner stuff
Before you start cleaning, always remember that every byte counts and you cannot expect to delete GBs of files all at once. A little patience is required as we are going to take it one step at a time. So let’s start with the Camera Roll. You may already know some of this, but not everyone does.
Film
After updating to iOS 8, you may have noticed an additional field called the Recently Deleted Album. The album stores images you have deleted from your device for the next 30 days before deleting them permanently. So if you have files in the Recently Deleted album, you might want to delete them all to free up space. Deleting Camera Roll files is useless as long as you still have its traces in the deleted folder.
Cool tip: Users with Jail Break access can install the Delete recently deleted files tweak to recover the old Remove run on their iPhones.
So that was for the photos that you already deleted. But what about useless photos that have been sitting in your album for years without any purpose? You can either use the Moments view and delete photos in bulk from a particular period or you can use a simple app called Slidebox. Slidebox is a pretty neat app that erases unnecessary photos when you have time to spare.
Related : The Biggest Changes Apple Announced at WWDC 2018
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Just like Tinder, it shows you photos from your album and you can swipe right or left to keep or delete them. Remember to permanently delete these files when you’re done.
Apps and app data
Once you’re done with the camera roll, it’s time to head to the apps section. Of course, the first thing I would say is to get rid of apps you don’t need, but that’s still a tough choice. Even for me, I couldn’t uninstall more than a few apps.
But then when I checked the list of installed apps on App Store, I was surprised to see how much storage space was taken up by apps like WhatsApp and Hike. On the date of initial installation, they take up no more than 300MB, but today they were over 1GB due to all the media stored by these apps.
Of course, you can open the app and delete each individual conversation. But I found that uninstalling and reinstalling the app reduced the time from a few hours to just a few minutes. You can also delete and free up space in your music library.
Access to the Pro level
There are plenty of cleaner apps on the app store, but trust me, none of them work on a non-jailbroken iPhone. The journey of iPhone users without jailbreak access ends here. But if you have a jailbroken iPhone, the most interesting part is yet to come.
Use iCleaner
iCleaner is the only app for jailbroken iPhones that has really impressed me when it comes to cleaning junk files. Just install and run the Analyze operation on the app, which will scan your phone. The app gives you a full list of areas it will scan, including messages, attachments, and even app cache.
After scanning, the app will give you a list of all the files and folders it can delete along with the space it would free up. The last time I deleted files using this app, it generated around 1.8 GB of unnecessary files. Even today, just after a week, he was able to delete around 600MB of unnecessary data. The phone regenerates after each cleaning.
Delete documents and data from the application
Remember when I mentioned that you can uninstall and reinstall an app to get rid of app cache and data files? Well, for a phone with jailbreak it is not necessary. Install a tweak called Cache Cleaner from http://rpetri.ch/repo repo and refresh your phone.
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For Android users: You can easily clear your app data; it’s a built-in feature of your phone. Go to Settings > Application Manager then select the app you want to clean and tap Clear data > Okay. No need for this uninstall/reinstall or third party app rigmarole.
You will be able to clear cache or completely reset an app from the iOS settings menu under Using the app.
Conclusion
These are some of the last songs I deleted from my 16GB iPhone and I was able to recover up to 3GB of storage space. On my wife’s 64GB iPhone (yes she can keep things expensive) we were able to free up 6.5GB and you won’t believe 2GB was just from WhatsApp. So go ahead and get some free space on your iPhone.
Also, don’t forget to thank me later when it helps on iOS 9 upgrade day.
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