I have googled this in a number of different places and come up with steps that are achievable but have little impact, for instance, clearing safari data and cookies, reducing excess iMessages, eliminating unused apps. I do get more memory, but the “other” category appears to remain relatively stable. My wife’s iPhone, which she uses sparingly, has proportionately much more storage allocated to “other” than I, a heavy user, have. We both have 64 gig iPhones. I believe I saw someplace where they recommended backing up, then restoring factory settings, then reloading backup, a rather unattractive strategy that could take the better part of a day. Do you have any alternatives? Can you better explain the vague term, “other?”
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Ed Thorsland
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How Do I Reduce “other” Storage On iPhone?
Comments: One Response to “How Do I Reduce “other” Storage On iPhone?”
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What do you see when you go to Settings, General, iPhone Storage? it should give you a break-down of which apps are using how much storage. For instance, right now my Prime Video app uses a lot because I have a lot of downloaded video from it.
As for what else could be using "Other," it could be cached files and such, which you have already read about. And it sounds like you have already set your Messages to only store the last 30 days and such.
An extreme measure you can do is to back up your iPhone, and then restore it from scratch. But I don't recommend it.
What most people should do is to ignore it. Cached files are using otherwised unused space on your iPhone for things that will speed up your iPhone. Why always re-download music, images and data if it can use unused space on your iPhone to store these? It will save you time, battery, and your mobile data plan, to cache these.
The way caches work, it uses unused space. If you start to run out of space, the cache should shrink. 30 GB of unused space does nothing for you. A lot of people want empty space to be empty. But it is far more useful if that is used for backups, cache, and other things.
Oh, and if you did clear your phone off, restore and load from backup, then it would end up back in the same state with a lot of Other pretty quickly. That's how caches work.