> Even more annoying about the iPhone is the always growing "Other" space on the phone. I was constantly short on disk space with no way of knowing what the cause was or how to clean it up.
Hm? There is a very simple Storage page in the Settings that shows you exactly how much storage each app is taking up (including things the app is storing) and it is ordered by size so you can immediately see what's using up your space and delete it if necessary. I have an old 16GB iPhone that is still chugging along after 7 years and is my daily phone but it is a bit lacking of space and this Storage area is a simple fix.
Yes, that page is very simple, and very wrong. On my mom's iPad and iPhone, the app numbers on the storage page simply don't add up. Many gigabytes of space are unaccounted for, yet unusable. As far as I can tell the only way to recover the space is a factory reset, and it's only a temporary fix.
Tbf, my last phone(Xperia Z5) did the same thing - it would show me that apps were taking ~22GB, but when you displayed them and actually added up the numbers it was about ~12GB. I actually went and uninstalled pretty much everything I could, and "apps" were still showing as using nearly 10GB. I only got it back after a full firmware reset.
On Android, you can install any random file manager and explore & clean the filesystem yourself (many apps litter on the virtual sdcard). There's also a DiskUsage app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...), that will scan the device and tell you, where are the files that take up the space and allows you to delete them.
I find this area the single most useless display of information on an iPhone.
Yes, you can see which app takes how much space. Then what? There is no way to control or clean up that space. You can hope that an app has a setting somewhere that let's you delete old data, and that's it.
The biggest offender? Apple's own Photos app especially with iCloud and Photo Stream: there's exactly zero ways to make it give up space (unless you "want to delete photos from all connected devices")
On the General > Storage there are some options I have on my iOS (v 11.3):
- Offload Unused Apps
- Auto Delete Old Conversations
Or I can manually offload apps one by one.
I think you are referring to the iCloud Storage settings on the iPhone when talking about deleting photos from all connected devices.
Probably the confusion is because they decided to put two storages: General > iPhone Storage (managing local storage) and Accounts > iCloud > iCloud Storage.
The last one (iCloud Storage) manages the iCloud so if you delete something from iCloud it will delete it from all devices.
Old conversations actually used to be the worst offender for some users - it included all media sent or received in those conversations which could be really hard to track down.
What's stopping you deleting photos and videos, or even whole albums in the app? Or syncing photos off and deleting on sync?
Anyway, I'd genuinely be interested in how Android or Android apps solve his problem in better ways.
For a lot of the other issues, it seems like this is a problem with the apps though, not the OS. If Facebook or a podcast app is hogging space, it's up to the app to provide options to manage it's data.
Android has an overview by app where you can a) delete the app entirely, b) delete the app's data entirely or c) delete the app's cache. C solves most issues described here.
Why doesn't it delete / trim the caches automatically? If they are safe to be deleted by the user at any time, the device itself should be clever enough to clear the space.
Apple's Photo app's interactions are so incredibly broken that is nigh impossible to figure out how to properly remove photos from a service without accidentally deleting them across all devices you own.
Heh, I'm a programmer, and I'm scared to touch anything in that app :)
iTunes will show you the space taken by apps, by music, by videos, by documents, and then "other". My other just got slightly bigger all the time. This isn't unique to my phone either.
Unfortunately iOS tends to group everything that's outside an app's container into a big lump that you have no permission to modify or even view to see what's taking up the space. Often the only solution is to perform a full wipe and restore from a backup.
Hm? There is a very simple Storage page in the Settings that shows you exactly how much storage each app is taking up (including things the app is storing) and it is ordered by size so you can immediately see what's using up your space and delete it if necessary. I have an old 16GB iPhone that is still chugging along after 7 years and is my daily phone but it is a bit lacking of space and this Storage area is a simple fix.